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© 2026 Karanveer Singh Shaktawat

Last updated: May 15, 2026

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Got a question about engineering, career, self-hosting, Rust, or anything else? Ask it here — I answer publicly so everyone benefits.

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Answered7

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What's your take on the degree vs. skills debate, coming from someone who left college?

Asked by cs_dropout_2 · 13 days ago

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I left in the 4th year, not by choice — the environment became untenable (teachers demanding money for passing grades, which I refused). So I'm not some 'degrees don't matter' evangelist — I left because continuing meant compromising on integrity. The practical reality: degrees filter resumes at companies that haven't figured out better signal. That's a real cost. My answer has been to make the portfolio undeniable enough that it becomes its own credential. 57 shipped projects, open source work, this site. Some companies won't interview me regardless. That's fine — I don't want to work at companies where a CS degree matters more than a production Kubernetes cluster I built from scratch.

Answered 13 days ago

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How do you manage working solo on projects that teams of 10 would normally staff?

Asked by solo_builder · 15 days ago

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Aggressively narrow scope, ruthlessly reuse infrastructure, and batch context switches. For scope: I ship the smallest version that proves the concept, then expand. For infrastructure: that shared Docker mesh exists specifically so I don't reconfigure Postgres every project. For context: I block 4-hour deep work sessions and avoid switching projects mid-session — the mental overhead of re-loading context is real and underestimated. The honest answer is I also just work a lot. The OTT platform was 8 platforms because the client needed 8 platforms, not because I enjoy building tvOS apps.

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Answered 15 days ago

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213 WPM — is that real? What keyboard layout?

Asked by speedtyper · 21 days ago

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Real, verified on MonkeyType. I designed a custom layout called X-Type after spending a week analyzing English character frequency, bigram frequency, and finger travel distance. I took Colemak-DH as the starting point and made about 15 key swaps. The core insight is that most typing speed gains past ~120 WPM come from reducing same-finger bigrams and maximizing home row usage — not just raw practice. The awkward part: I can't type on a standard QWERTY keyboard above ~90 WPM anymore, so every pair-programming session requires me to switch layout on the other person's machine.

Answered 21 days ago

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Why Rust? You already know TypeScript deeply — what made you invest in it?

Asked by ts_enjoyer · 28 days ago

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Two things pushed me. First, I was building Docsee (a Docker GUI) and Go felt too opinionated, Python too slow for a native desktop app. Rust gave me the Tauri ecosystem and sub-50ms cold starts without an Electron runtime. Second: I kept running into problems where I wanted to reason about memory and performance at a level TypeScript simply can't express. The borrow checker is brutal for the first few months but after that it becomes genuinely addictive — the compiler catches whole categories of bugs at compile time that I used to find at 2am in production. Now I write Rust for anything perf-sensitive or long-running: CLI tools, TUI apps, parsers.

Answered 28 days ago

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What's the hardest architectural decision you've had to make in production?

Asked by senior_eng · about 1 month ago

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Moving the Prachyam mail infrastructure off a managed SMTP provider to self-hosted Mailcow mid-flight, with active users. We were at ~200K emails/month and the provider costs were becoming unsustainable. The hard part wasn't the technical migration — it was the IP reputation bootstrapping period. You can't just spin up a new mail server and expect 18M emails a year to deliver. I spent two weeks on DNS configuration (SPF, DKIM, DMARC across 12 domains), another week on gradual warm-up, and had to build a priority queue system after hitting a race condition that caused duplicate sends. Outcome: deliverability improved and costs dropped significantly. But that two-week risk window is not something I'd do again without more staging runway.

Answered about 1 month ago

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How are you running 116 containers on a single MacBook without it melting?

Asked by homelab_nerd · about 1 month ago

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The 116 number is the total count across 19 Docker Compose profiles — on any given working session only 30-40 are actually running. The key insight was treating services as shared infrastructure instead of per-project: one Postgres, one Redis-compatible (Dragonfly), one MinIO, shared across every project. I also use named profiles aggressively — docker compose --profile core --profile ai up -d, and everything else stays down. The M1 Max with 64GB is genuinely overspecced for this. The thermal situation is fine unless I'm running Ollama + full monitoring stack + video transcoding simultaneously.

Answered about 1 month ago

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You started coding at 9. What was the actual first thing you built?

Asked by curious_dev · 2 months ago

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A 3D car racing game in Game Maker Studio. No tutorial — I just reverse-engineered free assets and figured out collision detection by breaking it repeatedly. That game never worked right but I didn't care. The feeling of making something move on screen at 9 years old is something I still chase.

Answered 2 months ago