§ About

Prasun Kumar

Backend engineer · Java, Spring Boot, Kafka

§ 01

Background

Hi, I'm Prasun

Everything on this page is editable from /admin/profile — no code changes needed.

I'm a backend engineer. Since March 2024 I've been at TCS, working across Oracle ATG, Java, Spring Boot, Kafka and Braze. Most of what I do sits in the unglamorous middle of a system: commerce flows, event pipelines, and the messaging that has to land correctly whether it's ten users or ten thousand.

What that work actually involves

  • ATG — commerce backend: order pipelines, catalogue, the parts that break loudly when they break
  • Java + Spring Boot — services, APIs, the day-to-day
  • Kafka — event streaming, and the ordering and delivery questions that come with it
  • Braze — customer messaging, and getting the right event to the right person at the right time

Education

  • B.Tech, Computer Science & Engineering — Haldia Institute of Technology
  • Class XII — Central Academy, Kota
  • Class X — Delhi Public School, Bokaro

Away from the keyboard

I make music. I write songs, record them, and put videos on YouTube about the process. It's the same instinct as the engineering, honestly — you build a thing in layers, you get it wrong a lot, and eventually it either works or it doesn't, and you can tell immediately.

Writing a song and debugging a consumer group have more in common than they should.

§ 02

Toolkit

  • Java
  • Maven
  • Kafka
  • Spring Boot
  • MapStruct
  • Braze
  • JPA / Hibernate
  • SQL
  • Git
  • Docker
  • JUnit
  • Oracle ATG
  • Spring Security
  • REST APIs

In current use.

§ 03

Currently

  • Building this site, and writing up what I learn along the way
  • Going deeper on Kafka: consumer groups, rebalancing, and what exactly-once actually costs you
  • Working through system design problems, one written case study a week
  • Writing and recording — a song at a time, videos when they're ready
§ 04

Next

Next 6 months

  • Move to a role with harder backend problems and more ownership
  • Ship three projects here I'd be happy to walk an interviewer through
  • Get comfortable enough with distributed systems to reason about them out loud, under questioning

Further out

  • Contribute something real to an open source Java project
  • Keep the writing and the music going — both get worse the moment they become something I only do when there's time
§ 05

Contact