Illustration of Bala smiling in a red plaid shirt among trees — Banff

Hi, I'm Bala

I'm a senior software engineer at IBM, working on HashiCorp Vault, mostly in Go these days: secrets, access and identity. Before that I spent over a decade building backends in Java and Spring Boot: OAuth 2.0 and JWT platforms, fraud-detection microservices, and more IBM ODM rule engines than I'd like to admit.

I care about software that's secure, boring in production and measurably fast. I like untangling slow queries, designing APIs that don't need a manual, and explaining tricky things simply.

I live in the Greater Toronto Area.

This is where I write things down: long posts and tiny things I learned.

Today I learned

Go maps iterate in random orderNov 1

All TILs →

Recent writing

Understanding the Difference Between Instant.now().toEpochMilli() and System.currentTimeMillis() in JavaDec 11
Quick Cheatsheet: Remove New Lines and Empty Lines in LinuxDec 6
Is Bitwise & Better than Arithmetic to Determine Even or Odd? Let’s Dive In!LeetCodeDec 5
LeetCode 485 - Finding Max Consecutive OnesLeetCodeDec 5
LeetCode 1295: Find Numbers with Even Number of DigitsLeetCodeDec 5
LeetCode 977: Squares of a Sorted Array SolutionLeetCodeDec 5

All 108 posts →

Hi, I'm Bala 👋

Today I learned

Recent writing

Hi, I'm Bala