“I code becuase I love to, not because I have to”
Hi I am Ankit Kulkarni.
At core I am an Engineer (who inherently loves automation and linux - you’ll find me on a Linux {not Mac} laptop at work), loves open source and above all I strongly believe in the philosophy - “get your code shipped” (more at coding horror).
I love building reliable systems and teams alike. I have a strong passion to build customer focused product while keeping the core engineering aligned with business needs.
I am currently Devops Manager, working at Flock/Titan/Neo Mail/(Directi) at Bangalore, India, since November 2018. I joined here since the start of Titan Mail and my earlier roles here included IC/Sr. Devops Engineer and and Lead Devops Engineer(IC + Manager). Along the way I’ve worked deep in the mail stack (Postfix, Dovecot) and all sort of devops tools and tech we can imagine including but not limited to aws, k8s, prometheus stack, elk, redis, mysql, teraform, salt stack etc etc. As an IC, I often spent my time writing integrations/milter backends/apis/dashboards/tcp tables/policy agents and many more softwares using golang/python. There’s just no end to the stories of debugging which has been done here, right from simple to the hardest to most complex ones, so many of them. I am also actively leading the abuse mititagation initiatives which is one of the hardest problems from the industry.
Apart from the above technical expertise, I am also leading reliablity, driving SlO improvements, Alert noise reduction, improving alerting, incident management process and pipelines. I’m proudest of the team we have built over here and mentored at Titan. I have lead multiple team growth and hiring initiatives and have been playing key part to hire the right talent in our team. I am known within my team for the knowledge, openness and easiness to work with, learning, enthusiasm and ethics and the endless mentoring which has helped everyone level up in their carrer.
As years have passed by, I have become really good at spotting gaps within systems, tools, tech, process and align engineering efforts with business.
Before Titan, I have tried freelancing and early to that I have worked with Zaya learning labs (ed tech startup) for 3 years in Mumbai and Tinyowl (food tech startup) in the year 2015 (where I started my career) as a DevOps Engineer.
I kind of have a love-hate relationship with softwares; while the love keeps motivation to build one, the hate ensures to build for high usablity, utter simplicity and brainesless designs (put less cognitive load on the universe and everyone). Head out to know more on what I think on how to build produts as engineers
I also enjoy reading books, scripting/building simple tools for solving some real simple problems, explore new tools and technologies, wite pocs of how things work, attend confrences/meetups, networking with people. I have read many books out of which my favorites are power of habbit, the Effective Engineer, Rework, Checklist Manifesto and Don’t make me think (steve krug) and few more.
When not playing with systems, I can be found playing TT, reading or near my bed (sleeping :p)
What I don’t like is to mess/code with frontend (HTML/CSS/JS — eww so scary, still I end up messing with it everytime )
I have been a great fan of blogging but honestly too lazy to maintain my own blog. I hope I could make it active sooner on medium @ankit.kulkarni. I also have a recommeded reading list (not regularly updated here though) which can be found here - and books @goodread.
PS: BTW here’s a an interesting take away since you landed here - BOFH reading list (if you are into love with systems you will enjoy reading it)
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