Now

At work

At Privy, I'm working on the digital signature verification pipeline — scaling the throughput for high-volume document signing while keeping audit trail integrity intact. The main challenge right now is handling bursty traffic from enterprise integrations without sacrificing the guarantees we make on signature validity. I'm also doing a quiet migration of one internal service from a synchronous REST call chain to an event-driven model using Kafka. Less urgent for users, but critical for the system's resilience under load.

Learning

I've been working through Martin Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive Applications — not for the first time, but it reads differently when you're actually running the systems he's describing. The chapters on replication and consistency are landing differently now. Alongside that, I've been picking up more Go. Not switching away from anything — just wanting to understand a second systems language deeply enough to know when it's the right tool.

Side work

This portfolio site (iamucil.me) — built with Nuxt 3, Nuxt Content v3, and deployed on Cloudflare Pages. It's been a useful excuse to stay hands-on with the frontend stack and to actually finish something personal for once. I also occasionally contribute to Go-related tooling on GitHub (github.com/iamucil) when something I'm using has a gap I can close.

Quarterly priorities

• Ship this portfolio site (Phase 5 done and live by end of May)
• Finish Designing Data-Intensive Applications cover to cover
• Contribute at least one meaningful PR to an OSS project I actually use