Architecture on Kuldeep Pisda

One Escape Hatch, Not a Rewrite: Extracting a Node SFTP Service

Thu, 28 May 2026 10:00:00 +0530

The deploy that wouldn’t deploy

I spent about fifteen months embedded on a venture-backed AI voice platform for home-services contractors — the kind of product that answers a plumber’s phone at 2am and books the job before the caller hangs up. Most of it ran serverless: Next.js on a serverless host, a couple thousand API routes, durable background jobs for the campaigns and CRM syncs. That model had carried the product for years, and I had zero interest in relitigating it.

The Anatomy of a Low-Maintenance Django Monolith

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0530

Here’s the metric I’m proudest of on a codebase I wrote early in my career: for the whole of 2024, I made zero commits to it. Not a hotfix, not a dependency bump, not a config tweak. It sat in production — a veterinary clinic platform serving real clinics, OTP logins, billing, reminder SMS going out on a schedule — and it asked nothing of me. When the next change finally landed, in October 2025, it wasn’t a bug fix. It was a vendor migration I chose to do, and it shipped as a config change.

One Django Backend, Twenty-Plus Frontends: The Hub-and-Spoke Bet

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0530

With python-pay-ccavenue extracted and payments finally living in a package I trusted (chapter 5), the Django platform had stopped being a rescue operation and started being a foundation. Which was exactly when the shape of the real problem came into focus — and it wasn’t a backend problem at all.

Happy Thoughts was never going to be one app. The foundation wanted a public site to browse courses, a separate learner app to actually watch them, a Hindi-first experience distinct from the English one, a landing site per major course launch, a donations site, a react-admin panel for the content team, an events microsite, and — because most of India consumes video on a phone — a native Android app. Off to the side, the same organisation ran Ambarsthan (a bookable facility) and an internal ERP for departments and staff. By the time I counted honestly, we were looking at roughly twenty Next.js web apps plus an admin panel plus Android, all of which needed the same three things: the same content, the same user identity, and the same payments.

Architecture on Kuldeep Pisda

One Escape Hatch, Not a Rewrite: Extracting a Node SFTP Service

The deploy that wouldn’t deploy#

The Anatomy of a Low-Maintenance Django Monolith

One Django Backend, Twenty-Plus Frontends: The Hub-and-Spoke Bet

The deploy that wouldn’t deploy