About

I’m Himanshu Kumar most people know me as nycanshu online. Backend engineer by choice, full-stack by necessity, and deeply suspicious of any system that doesn’t have proper observability.

I work as a Software Engineer at Tower, where I spend most of my time building backend systems that are supposed to be scalable, maintainable, and definitely not on fire at 2am.

What I actually do

I design and build enterprise-grade backend systems and microservice architectures, the kind that handle real load, real data, and real consequences when something breaks.

My primary stack is Java (Spring Boot), Python (Django, Django Tenants), and Node.js (Express.js). I’ve shipped systems ranging from multi-tenant SaaS platforms to distributed storage integrations like CEPH, and I’ve learned the hard way that “it works on my machine” is not a deployment strategy.

When the job calls for it, I go deep on infrastructure too:

  • Linux — comfortable in the terminal, not just ls and cd
  • Kubernetes — orchestrating containers, writing manifests, debugging why a pod decided today was a good day to CrashLoopBackOff
  • Ceph Object Storage — RADOS Gateway, bucket policies, the whole distributed storage rabbit hole. Built an npm SDK for it because the existing one was from 2017 and JavaScript has changed slightly since then

I’m also an active open source contributor — earned the Hacktoberfest Super Contributor badge for meaningful contributions to real projects. And yes, “meaningful” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. No renaming a variable from data to myData and calling it a PR. No fixing a typo in a README that wasn’t actually wrong. The kind of contributions where the maintainer actually replies with something other than “please read CONTRIBUTING.md.” That kind.

Things I’ve shipped

  • radosgw-admin — Zero-dependency TypeScript SDK for the Ceph RGW Admin API. AWS Sig V4 auth, full ESM/CJS dual build. (Read the dev.to post)
  • componentverse — Power Platform Components Library for Canvas app developers
  • Four freelance full-stack apps — healthcare management, loan systems, data processing tools, and a reading bookstore because apparently that’s a thing

Outside work

Before my current role, I completed multiple internships building web and Java applications, each one teaching me that requirements are always incomplete and timelines are always optimistic.

I’ve also mentored 70+ students in Java Full Stack and Web Development (Next.js, Express.js), helping them survive their academic projects. Teaching forces you to understand things properly, which is why I recommend it to anyone who thinks they know a topic well.

This blog

Personal space for writing about what I’m building, debugging, learning, or just have opinions about. No fixed topic, whatever I find interesting enough to write down.

The blog is built with Astro and my own theme called “The Void.” It’s available as a template if you want it.