About

Andrew Joel | Professional Software Developer

🤖⚙️ ➡️ 🗒️🏗️🚢 ➡️ 🖥️😊❤️

Greetings! I’m Andrew Joel, a professional software developer residing in the remarkable Indian city of Chennai. Over 5 years of backend software engineering, product management and delivery under the hood, I feel enthralled to share my experiences with you!

Skills and Expertise

Engineering. Its a magnificent word. Its at the heart of what I am, and what I do.

I am primarily a Java ☕ nerd! Its an incredible and powerful language that has shaped my career. I possess vast expertise in backend Java frameworks like Micronaut and Spring Boot. I have built a lot of Java based microservices that perform database CRUD operations, message queue processing, batch processing and workflow orchestration. Since the release of Java 21, I am fascinated in the direction which the JDK team has been progressing! (Can’t wait for Valhalla 🥳).

Secondly, I am a parseltongue expert (Python 🐍). Built many microservices with FastAPI, uvicorn to perform CRUD, message broking and the likes.

Last but not the least, I am proficient in web development. I know my way around HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript and web frameworks based out of React.js family (Next.js, Astro).

From Jira Ticket to Grafana Dashboard

I possess the required technical skills and the people skills to engineer a requirement right from its origin as a story / ticket, to the task refinement, development, testing, deployment, validation and to monitoring the solution. Seeing a solution live in the product, being used by end users, and monitoring it from Grafana gives me immense sense of satisfaction and happiness.

Every Design has a Trade-off

I deeply understand that every technical solution and architecture has trade-offs. We can never build a perfect solution everytime. This is why I possess deep knowledge on finding the right balance to achieve the desired outcome. There’s always a new design or a solution in the future, but what matters is achieving the solution in the present constraints.

Cloud-native Engineering

All of my feature deliveries are microservice based. Built on Docker images, running on Kubernetes cluster. Deployed using Helm charts. Powered by Knative Serving. Secured by HashiCorp Vault. Instrumented by OpenTelemetry. Monitored by Datadog. Observed by Grafana LGTM stack.

Regulated AI User

I understand the technicals behind how a LLM works, so my development workflow is tailored to leverage the most usage out of least token consumption. I strongly advocate to run LLMs locally in a sandbox. Most LLM tasks are just workflow automation in hindsight, so why not use your own hardware?

Collaboration and Communication

Keeping stakeholders informed and aligned is more important than shipping a feature faster without alignment. A well engineered feature can be archived / shelved if the stakeholders are not inline. Keep them in loop! I have lots of experience in ensuring alignment with stakeholders across teams to ensure the feature meets the eyeballs of the end user.

Get in Touch

Are you looking to build your next software product? I’d love to hear your ideas and work with you! Feel free to reach me for collaboration, consultation, or just a banter on the state of software engineering in the 21st century.

Let’s build something amazing together!