I've spent the last 6+ years building distributed systems that handle real money — payment hubs processing 1M+ API calls a day, event pipelines that stay up when everything around them doesn't, and services designed to fail safely rather than silently.
My home base is the Java / Spring Boot / Kafka stack, and I care a lot about the parts most people never see: observability, test discipline, and clean architecture that a team can actually maintain two years later. I've mentored engineers, written the HLD/LLD docs nobody wants to write, and contributed real payment workflows back to the open source GovStack/Fineract ecosystem.
Right now I'm on a self-directed career break, using the time to build SkillMatcher from scratch, end to end — just to relearn what it feels like to ship something alone.