About
Building things, failing at them, and figuring out how not to.
That is the useful part of the work for me, and it is what I want this site to be. Notes from the attempts, not a highlight reel.
I'm Sai Chand Addanki, a Lead Architect. I live in the UK, and I'm from India.
The long way round
I started as a PHP developer. The work sat close to the product: pages, forms, and bugs that only showed up for one person. During my degree I got interested in digital marketing and built WordPress sites. I had to care whether a page loaded, whether someone understood it, and whether it did the job it was put there for.
From there I moved into site reliability, DevOps, and cloud infrastructure. These days I design, build, and maintain cloud-based applications, and I spend most of my time on the Kubernetes platform around them. I also write about what I am learning. Writing is how I check that I actually understand a thing.
The path is the useful part. I can read application code, I have shipped marketing sites, and I now work on clusters, pipelines, and the infrastructure under them. When a team is stuck, those layers are usually tangled together.
How I work
Understand the fundamentals. Build real things. Automate what matters. Learn from failure. Keep improving.
In practice I want to know what happens when a packet, a pod, or a pipeline fails, before I add another tool. I automate a task after it has earned it, usually the third time I do it by hand. I want a small change I can explain. A large change has to earn its size.
I am naturally an overthinker, and I usually have more ideas than time. I have learned to ship by working in small concrete steps, with clear priorities, a deadline, and something I can point at when the week ends. That is part of why I write in public. A paragraph on the page is harder to keep reshuffling in my head.
I used to struggle with my weight and with habits that were not helping. Rebuilding a routine through the gym and diet, and losing about 10 kg, taught me that change comes from repeated small actions, which is also how I try to approach engineering.
This season
The short version of what I am doing now is on the Now page, including a marketplace I am building and the networking labs. The engineering work I take on with other people is on Services, and it is not the front door of this site.