Ahyana Rizky Pratama ahyanarizky

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1. The Accidental Tech Lead Story

   I never thought I would enjoy being a tech lead. As a natural introvert, my comfort zone was always in the code. But one day, a senior colleague I’d worked with on a freelance project “hijacked” me, pulling me into a new venture while I was still at my old company. He was handling the backend, and I was on the frontend. He gave me the freedom to choose our stack.

   Leadership Tech Lead Career Growth Software Engineering Team Culture

2. From Palm Oil to Pixels: My Journey into Software Engineering

   I consider myself one of the lucky ones when it comes to my experience with coding bootcamps. In 2016, I decided to join the first Full-Stack Engineering Bootcamp in Jakarta, a significant leap from my previous career as an employee at a palm oil processing plant in Kalimantan.

   As someone who grew up in the city, I’ll admit I couldn’t part with the entertainment and comforts of urban life. Working at the palm oil factory was a good opportunity that aligned with my university degree in mechanical engineering, but I’ve had a deep interest in computers since I was young. I loved tinkering with games and even tried to hack Friendster—a popular social media platform back in the day. Despite my lack of formal knowledge, I was driven by a strong curiosity and the ability to read documentation, which led to some surprising successes.

   Career Change Bootcamp Junior Developer React Ruby on Rails

3. Scaling Story: How We Solved a Critical Bottleneck in Our Rails Monolith

   Every successful SaaS platform eventually faces the same “good problem to have”: your application is so popular that its own growth becomes the biggest threat to its stability. This is the story of how our team at Jurnal (Mekari) tackled a major performance bottleneck in our core Ruby on Rails monolith, and how we evolved our architecture iteratively to support our rapidly growing user base.

   The Scene: A Successful Monolith

   When I was at Jurnal, our core product was a feature-rich accounting platform built on a classic, robust stack: a Ruby on Rails monolith backed by a MySQL database on AWS RDS, with Redis and Sidekiq for caching and background job processing. All traffic came through an AWS Load Balancer and an API Gateway (Kong) to manage our growing third-party ecosystem.

   Architecture Ruby on Rails Microservices Kafka Scalability