Bio

[the author being blown away by a battery while valiantly clutching on to a lens cap; Chitradurga, Karnataka; C 2012]

p6 - p: - interweb alter-ego of Pavan Keshavamurthy. Typically enjoy random walks & pseudorandom talks involving tech, distributed systems and Indian classical music.

grahaNa - n: seize/consume, meta: eclipse - is a weblog of the p6’s ephemeral & sustained musings.

Work + Startups

• Platformatory: Consulting collective focusing on modernization, platform architecture & large scale distributed systems engineering. We mostly solve problems intersecting infrastructure, data & applications; We also run tech focused practices centred aroud Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Kong, Envoy and Kubernetes.

• Srijan: Medium sized digital boutique servicing everything Digital experience (particularly Enterprise Content Management Systems, but also API Management amongst other things); Apart from tech, I also tried a hand at management, sales (which is an NP-hard problem), marketing and while at it, gained the unique distinction of creating sales decks with LaTeX. I’ve since learned a thing or two about what it takes to build services organizations that can (or not) be creative, thoughtful partners in engineering.

• Mukti - an incubator with a portfolio of homegrown & invested digital businesses, some of which could count as good exits. Mukti specialized in building ecosystem businesses. My title was CTO/CPO, but in reality, I ended up as a resident handyman and wrote more code than was necessary (in retrospect);

• Content Media = {Radioweb Carnatic, Radioweb Bhakti, Radioweb Bhakti}. Wrote the original streaming platform from scratch in what was pre-cloud era: Lots of media processing, transcoding for the web and content distribution; Once upon a time, Radioweb attempted to compete with MIO, Gaana & Spotify. Ever since, we have reconciled to run as a lightweight online radio that caters to an ageing, but loyal audience of traditional music aficionados.

• Less noteworthy / distant past:

  • a medium-scale PaaS for node.js (acquired in 2015)
  • yet another web/mobile dev shop (bootstrapped twice to revenues, 20+ headcount)
  • an OSS CRM product loosely based on SugarCRM / vtiger, targeting contact centers (not dead yet)
  • an adventure tourism company (in the Himalayas) that also did ecommerce before it was cool (still alive and thriving)
  • coder for hire: freelance tech consulting (wrote device drivers, web software, administered servers, what nots for people)

Tech / OSS

• Past work (2005 - 2012): Mostly web applications & mobile - (Android, Cordova) & even a bit of systems programming.

• Recent (2012 - 2016): node.js / v8 runtime - “at the intersection of C++ & JavaScript” (sic). JavaScript has been a reluctant love story.

• More Revent (2016 - 2022) - Envoy, Apache Kafka ecosystem, Apache Flink, Kong

• ArchLinux, Vim, Drupal & Node.js. I’ve contributed / maintained code on several projects.

• Special Interests: Domain Driven Design, Distributed Systems, Functional Programming (mostly Lua these days)

Other Esoteric Interests

• Astronomy: Observing, Photography, DIY; Founder but lapsed member of The Bangalore Astronomical Society

• India: Classical literature, Early and Medieval History, Epigraphy, Linguistics, Population Genomics.

• Travel: Himalayas, Western Ghats

• Music: Karnataka Classical, Hindustani, Hindi/Kannada film music of the yore. Can dabble with instruments: Vīna (badly, despite formal training), Flute (worse, but no formal training), Violin (hazardous autodidactism), Bathroom and other singing (mass destruction capabilities);

• Misc: Propensity for spicy vegetarian food (“Andhra grade”), beverages (Mostly non-alcoholic), random walking, BMTC buses and cute furry animals.

Web presence

• IRC/SO/HN: confoocious;

• twitter/github: @p6

• my first name at grahana dot net