abhijit@menon-sen.com
http://menon-sen.com
2012–2020–2024
At 2ndQuadrant, I was immersed in consulting, support, and development of Postgres and its wider ecosystem, including important features like logical replication and BDR. I created TPA, a deployment automation tool, to solve the problem of setting up, testing, and managing complex Postgres clusters in a reproducible way with a declarative configuration mechanism.
After the acquisition by EDB in 2020, I oversaw the growth of TPA from a solo project to a widely-used internal tool with its own team, and on to its eventual open source release. I was also in charge of resurrecting Barman development from years of neglect.
2010–2012
I automated the slow, error-prone, manual process that this brokerage firm was using to place bids on the Indian Energy Exchange's day-ahead market. The simple and efficient workflow I introduced enabled them to expand their customer base and consolidate their leading position in the Indian market. This critical system remained in daily use for thirteen years, until 2025.
The system had zero downtime during the years in which I was responsible for it, and continued to operate largely unattended afterwards. In the first month of operation, I fixed two minor bugs that led to incorrect bids being placed; no other such bugs were ever found. I also had the unique opportunity to return to the large Perl codebase after a decade, and I was able to quickly make non-trivial changes for regulatory compliance on a tight deadline.
2003–2010
Arnt Gulbrandsen and I founded a company where we succeeded in writing high-quality open source mail archive software (archiveopteryx.org) based on Postgres, but failed to get anyone to pay for it.
I added support for 802.1x EAP-SoH to PacketFence (Inverse, 2011); was in charge of releases for a mobile payment provider (MPower, 2007-2009); and maintained the Anti-Phishing Working Group's members system (2009–2011).
I developed a Perl interface to Google's URL parser (Topsy, 2010); a bandwidth management system for ISPs (BrainRoots, 2003/2007); the RT 3.0 CLI (Best Practical, 2002/2003); an Apache module to enforce download and login quotas (Choopa, 2002); and an anti-virus system (using Sophos) which was used by Trolltech to scan thousands of messages per day for years (2001).
Between 1999–2001, I bootstrapped the product for some startups; two were still depending on my code when they were acquired a few years later.
I remained actively involved in free software development throughout my career. I contributed on and off to Postgres for twenty years, and I was a committer for Ansible, Mojolicious, and Perl.
I enjoy writing, and have worked hard to become a better writer. I especially enjoy writing about how to investigate and understand complex systems.
Last updated: 2024