I’m Shraddha, a backend engineer working with databases and distrbuted systems. At my day job, I currently work on Ceph, an open source, distributed storage system, at IBM. I also write and speak occasionally about the work I am doing.

At Ceph, I am part of the core team, responsible for maintaining and enhancing RADOS, the distributed object store powering Ceph. You can learn more about RADOS in this paper. I contribute both upstream and downstream.

Before this I worked at Hasura. I designed, built and maintained the APIs that power Hasura Cloud since its inception back in 2020. It has been a unique journey, from supporting our first few customers to scaling the platform as usage increased manyfold. As is with small teams, I contributed to almost every aspect of the product including improving internal tooling, documentation and observability. I also maintained graphqurl, curl for graphql APIs.

I owe my career to Open Source Software and am an advocate for the same. Previously, I have interned at Ceph, under Google Summer of Code. I worked on Teuthology, an automation framework which serves Ceph’s unique testing requirements to improve the scheduling fairness and priority of execution of test jobs. Before that I also have interned at Fedora.

These days I am focused on writing software that isn’t a pain in the ass for the next person who works with it or rather less crudely put, is well tested, documented and observable. I believe user empathy is an important consideration while designing APIs. I try to stay away from premature optimisation. I am bullish about documentation and only consider a task complete once it has both internal and external documentation.

When it comes to products, I naturally gravitate towards developer tools as can be seen from my work history. Some products I fangirl about: Vercel for their seamless preview apps experience, Stripe for many things including it’s documentation, both its API docs and their API responses and Arc, my default browser built on top of Chromium which really did solve the tab management problem completely.

My idea of winding down after a long day is with a good book. I enjoy watching movies which try to capture the human condition. Recently I have been enjoying this Spotify playlist. I also like photography, cooking, watercolour painting and semi-successfully take care of my houseplants.

I’m best reachable through mail, feel free to reach out about any opportunities or to simply say hi! I’m also somewhat active on Twitter.