Pradeep Krishna Govindaraju

Who I am#

I’m a software engineer, born in Chennai and living in Berlin. Nineteen years, spent across consulting, SaaS, startups and eCommerce: four kinds of company, each with its own idea of what finished looks like.

The repetition is the part I’d point at. I’ve built customer SSO and identity providers from the ground up at least three times in the past decade, in different organisations, under different pressures. Building a thing once teaches you how to build it. Building it three times teaches you which of your decisions were principles and which were only the conditions you happened to be working under.

Before and around that I worked on digital transformations, legacy migrations, white labelling, a rules engine, and moving systems onto microservices, both as an individual contributor and leading teams.

Away from work I’m a father of two, and the time I enjoy most is with them, in the garden or halfway through a DIY project. I’m passionate about photography.

What this is#

Reflection leads to better outcomes.

Reflection on the past lets us move forward with conviction and clarity. Looking back at my critical decisions, each one either came out of reflecting on what happened before, or became the thing I reflected on next. It’s a loop, not a look backwards.

This blog opens that loop: my past reflections written down, and the seedlings of my future ones.

Why now? Because the scarce thing has changed. Skills are cheap to come by. Judgement is not, and judgement is what I’ve been accumulating. Making my judgement calls transparent is how I share them, and how I find out from peers where they do not hold.

These essays are written for peers.