From the Editor’s Desk

Q. So, what do you do day to day?

A. Full-stack .NET. Three years of it now — .NET Core and C# on the server, Angular on the front, SQL Server underneath. Backend is where I’m happiest: APIs, business logic, and the unglamorous parts that have to keep working when the traffic stops being polite.

Q. Where are you working, and what’s the main project?

A. The Sunflower Lab. I joined as an intern in January 2023, moved to Junior Software Developer that August, and stepped up to Software Developer in June 2024.

The main piece is a full-stack management system — employees, clients, inventory, scheduling and leave — in .NET Core and Angular. Scheduling efficiency is up about 35% since it went in. I built the JWT authentication and role-based access control underneath it, and a real-time chat layer on SignalR.

More recently, a field-service CRM: engineers log site visits, generate PDF reports and raise tickets from wherever they are. That grew into a contract-management module with type-specific forms, configurable annual maintenance schedules and billing integration. There’s embedded Power BI in there too, for live dashboards inside the app rather than in a separate tab nobody opens.

Q. There’s a server memory problem on your CV. What was going on there?

A. The API server was sitting at 100% memory utilisation and restarting itself. From the outside it looked like a capacity problem, which is the expensive conclusion — you scale up, the bill goes up, and it comes back a week later.

The actual cause was unclosed SQL connections exhausting the connection pool. So I refactored the connection-management helpers to enforce proper disposal, upgraded the .NET runtime for better memory handling, and rewrote the Docker Compose configuration so allocation and garbage collection happened at sensible points in the lifecycle. The server stopped falling over, and the AWS bill went down instead of up.

Q. And the support ticket API — fifteen seconds down to milliseconds. What did you find?

A. Query tuning and caching. The endpoint returned perfectly correct data and took ten to fifteen seconds to do it. Nobody had filed a bug, because nobody files a bug that says the page is technically working. They’d just stopped opening it.

That’s the part I’d underline. Slow isn’t a performance problem, it’s a usage problem — people quietly route around it and you never hear about it.

Q. You put a lot of numbers on your CV. Is that on purpose?

A. Completely. Forty per cent off response times. Thirty-five per cent better scheduling. Thirty per cent faster student responses at the university. If I can’t put a number on it, I’m not sure I improved it — I’m just sure I changed it.

It also keeps me honest. It’s very easy to spend a fortnight on a refactor that feels enormous and moves nothing.

Q. What was the Rising Star Award for?

A. The citation says performance, initiative and project impact. The honest version is that I kept volunteering for the parts nobody wanted — the slow endpoint, the server that wouldn’t stay up, the billing edge case.

That work is unfashionable and it is where all the leverage is. You fix the fifteen-second page and a hundred people quietly get their afternoon back.

Q. Where did you study?

A. The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda — B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering, 2019 to 2023, 8.28 GPA. My final semester overlapped with my first internship, which is roughly when the theory started earning its keep.

My first real build was there too: a student-facing web application in Angular against a .NET Core API and SQL Server, which cut student response time by about 30%. Most of that project was conversations with university staff, not code — which turned out to be the actual lesson.

Q. What do you get up to outside work?

A. Games, anime and manga, in whatever order the week allows. I like the ones that trust you to work it out — a mechanic nobody explains, a plot thread planted forty chapters before it pays off.

It’s the same pleasure I get from a codebase where someone left the seams visible on purpose. A good boss fight and a good system are the same object: opaque until you find the pattern, then obvious forever.

Q. So what are you after next?

A. Something with a hard part in it. I’m not precious about the stack — I’m precious about the problem being real. If you’ve got a page nobody opens any more because it takes fifteen seconds, the Classifieds are two pages back.