Posts

2026: The Year Your Job Becomes a Startup

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Introduction: Recently, during the more than a week-long year-end break (thanks to my employer), I finally cut off the daily work—spent quality time with family, travelled a bit, and, importantly, sat with my own thoughts (yes, intentionally). Next month, I'll mark ten years (decade) of working in tech, and that milestone has pushed me to question what the next decade should look like. This post is a part of my self-reflection and an open note to my network about what is changing and how that’s reshaping my plans. In 2025, a  fundamental  shift occurred in the tech job market. The traditional narrative of keeping your head down, climbing the corporate ladder, and retiring quietly began to break down as layoffs reached into the hundreds of thousands globally. This transformation reshaped the very meaning of "stability" within the industry. While many positions vanished, new opportunities surged for those who were easy to find, easy to trust, and visibly skilled at the...

Redis Optimization: How Local Caching Unlocked 10x Scalability

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While working on a   backend system supporting millions of users , Redis was chosen as the go-to solution for real-time data—sessions, counters, recommendations, you name it. The Redis setup ran on   Google Cloud Memorystore’s lowest configuration , with best-practice TTLs, eviction, and well-designed keys baked in. However, as user traffic increased, a subtle bottleneck emerged. Surprisingly, it was  not the memory or dataset size  that held us back—our  entire  hot data set was under 5GB and always fresh. Instead, the challenge was the enormous number of direct requests: every microservice and API call was reaching out to Redis in real time, leading to network congestion, latency, and a stretched-thin Redis instance. Problem: More Calls, Not More Data We looked at options. Scaling hardware felt excessive since memory and CPU were already sufficient for the modest data set. It wasn’t the amount of information, but the  pattern of access —thousands of ...

My Journey: From Village Schools to Engineering Leadership

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Introduction Hello! My name is Baidyanath Prasad, and I'm an Engineering Manager based in India. I'm passionate about solving problems using technologies that make a meaningful difference in people's lives. With 10 years of experience in the IT industry, I have worked on several products across various tech stacks and successfully delivered them to market. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities for learning, which is what makes this industry truly exciting. Early Life and Education I come from a lower-middle-class family in Madhubani, Bihar, India. I completed my primary education through the seventh standard in my village. In 2009, I completed my matriculation from Rama Prasad Dutt Janta High School, Jitwarpur (Bihar School Examination Board, Patna). With a strong aptitude for Mathematics, I chose the Science stream and moved to Patna, Bihar, where I studied Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. After completing my intermediate studies at Thakur Prasad Singh Col...