My name is Rahul Rajaram and I am a Senior Software Engineer with 12 years of experience in the industry. Currently, I work at AWS on the Elastic Beanstalk team. I worked previously at Uber and AppFolio. My range of expertise stretches across building large-scale distributed systems, developing high-volume APIs, building command-line tools and maintaining their open-source repositories, building infrastructure tooling to trace and diagnose multi-regional operational issues across the full-stack stack. I have a solid understanding of databases, caches, containers and containerization solutions, Kubernetes! I am strongest in Python, but am good with Java, C, Ruby, JavaScript and TypeScript.

I'm a Linux guy -- specifically Debian. Debian is what's worked the best for me all these years. After living the XFCE life many years, I switched to KDE in 2024 (and I don't remember why 😅). I have always tended to be curious and enjoy exploring tech. I was a distro-nomad in my younger days. Operating Slackware was what probably taught me the most about Linux.

Needless to say, I love playing with LLMs. I like asking a ton of questions. Information is more accessible now than ever before (even though it's become harder to tell plausibly correct answers from the wrong ones; therein lies a challenge), and I believe the differentiator going forward will your ability to wear the hat of the astute, hawk-eyed, perceptive newspaper editor -- get better at reading, writing, speaking, questioning, hypothesizing, drawing... communicating!

Outside work, I like taking pictures. I have a Canon R5 and the RF35mm, RF28-70mm, and RF100-500mm lenses. You can check them out at Emerald Caress (backend built in Rust, BTW, LOL 😆)! I love playing, and thinking about music. I am a keyboard player and own a Korg Kronos 88. Some 12 or so years since it was first released, it's still top-of-the-line. Prior to graduating, I was considering becoming a musician pretty seriously. I played with bands in Mumbai, India. I love exploring chord progressions, chord inversions, time signatures, and polymeters and polyrhythms. My favourite band is Meshuggah because they are catchy as hell, and inventors of a unique music style. They are also an inspiration to me because they do their own thing and are not try-hards.

I like nature, but only occasionally go out on hikes. I took the self-portrait on this page at the Height Of Land, located some 10 miles south of Rangeley, Maine in the fall of 2024.