https://maheepk.net/Crafting distributed systems that behave. And robots that try. 2026-10-03T08:27:25+05:30 Maheep Kumar https://maheepk.net/ Jekyll © 2026 Maheep Kumar /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2026-09-27T00:00:00+05:30 2026-09-27T16:11:02+05:30 https://maheepk.net/posts/accessibility/ Maheep Kumar

I’ve been building FynPDF, a PDF reader and editor for macOS, with its own PDF engine written from scratch. I’m primarily a backend engineer who occasionally gets the urge to make things on the side, so naturally I decided to build a PDF application for a platform I have comparatively little experience with. Sensible decisions were clearly made. The code started out entirely handwritten becau...

2026-02-01T00:00:00+05:30 2026-02-07T14:54:08+05:30 https://maheepk.net/posts/latency-numbers/ Maheep Kumar

Introduction While preparing for system design interviews a few months ago, I realized something that caught me off guard: even as an experienced software engineer, my intuition about performance wasn’t as strong as I thought. I know the usual rules of thumb - Cache is fast, Disk is slow, Network calls are expensive. I can recite the latency numbers every programmer is supposed to know, and I’...

2024-07-07T00:00:00+05:30 2024-07-07T23:26:52+05:30 https://maheepk.net/posts/optimizing-a-go-service-at-work/ Maheep Kumar

My recent adventure at work was an open-ended endeavour to optimize a memory guzzling Go service. The service is a cron job that is scheduled to run on an hourly basis. When it runs, it queries our Postgres DB, fetching a huge amount of data, applies some transformations on each row retrieved and writes the results to a CSV file. The CSV file is then compressed and uploaded to a SFTP server, fr...

2023-07-08T00:00:00+05:30 2026-02-01T13:34:47+05:30 https://maheepk.net/posts/fizzbuzz-on-elixir/ Maheep Kumar

This post is inspired by the following StackExchange CodeGolf thread. For the uninitiated, Fizz Buzz is the programming equivalent of a “Hello World” - a simple task used in job interviews to filter out people who can’t code their way out of a paper bag. The challenge: Write a program that prints numbers from 1 to a very high number. For multiples of 3, print “Fizz” instead. For multiples ...

2022-10-27T00:00:00+05:30 2023-06-03T21:52:27+05:30 https://maheepk.net/posts/converting-sf-symbols-to-shapes/ Maheep Kumar

Introduction This Diwali, I came across a festive-themed Apple icon on Apple India’s website, and set out to recreate it. Here’s the original look for reference: Enter SF Symbols SF symbols is a comprehensive library of vector-based symbols that you can incorporate into your app to simplify the layout of user interface elements through automatic alignment with surrounding text, and support f...