// About me
Ketan Aggarwal
Ketan Aggarwal
Full Stack · DevOps · Data Science · India

I build things,
break them,
then understand why.

I am Ketan — a full stack engineer, DevOps practitioner, and data scientist based in India. Before I had a job title, I was a co-founder trying to make something from nothing with very limited resources and even more limited sleep.

That experience shaped everything about how I think about software — every decision has a cost, every abstraction needs a reason, and the best architecture is the one that ships and survives contact with reality.

// how I think

Philosophy

01

Build for the constraint, not the ideal.

A t3.micro with a smart architecture beats a k8s cluster that nobody maintains. I have lived both sides of that equation. The constraint forces clarity — it tells you what actually matters.

02

Own the full stack, respect the depth.

I can write the React component, the Spring Boot endpoint, the Dockerfile, and the Terraform module. But knowing where each layer ends and the next begins is what separates a generalist from someone who just dabbles everywhere.

03

Experiment publicly, fail fast, document honestly.

Most of my best work came from an experiment that half-worked. I write about both — the wins and the wrong turns — because the wrong turns are usually more instructive.

// career journey

The timeline

2018self-taught

Started building

Started with web development as a side interest during college. Built small projects, broke things repeatedly, and got obsessed with understanding how systems actually work under the hood.

2020Early-stage bootstrap startup

Co-founder & CTO

Joined as the founding technical member of a bootstrap startup — effectively a one-person engineering team for the first year. Designed and shipped the entire product: frontend, backend, infrastructure, and CI/CD pipeline. Wore every hat. Learned that the gap between "works on my machine" and "works in production" is where most of the real engineering happens.

2022Same startup

Grew the team, stayed technical

As the product found traction, started hiring. Transitioned into a proper CTO role — architecture decisions, code reviews, technical roadmap, and mentoring junior engineers — while still writing production code every day. The experience of growing a technical team from zero taught me more about software quality than any book.

2023Service-based tech organisation

Software developer

Made a deliberate move into a professional services environment to work with larger clients and more complex systems at scale. Currently building here while running the audit side practice and investing spare cycles into personal infrastructure experiments.

// right now

What I am focused on

A snapshot of where my time and attention actually go — updated when things change.

day job

Software developer at a service-based org

Working on large-scale client projects, deepening expertise in distributed systems and enterprise Java.

side practice

Running cloud audits for Indian startups

Helping early-stage companies identify cost waste and security gaps across AWS, GCP, Azure, and DigitalOcean. Each audit is a fixed-scope, fixed-price engagement.

See audit plans →
building

Investing in a personal GPU setup

The audit income is funding a dedicated inference and training rig. Goal: run experiments locally without cloud GPU costs eating every rupee.

writing

Documenting experiments on the blog

Sharing what works, what does not, and the infrastructure decisions behind both. Mostly DevOps and ML — occasionally CTO war stories.

Read the blog →