Hey, I am Faizan.
I am a software engineer at Atlan. I work on developer infrastructure for building and running data applications. Most of my work at Atlan is public through my work account, @fyzanshaik-atlan.
I work primarily on building connector applications and contributing to the Atlan Application SDK. Connector applications connect to external data sources, extract their metadata, and bring that context into Atlan.
The Application SDK is a Python toolkit for building and running these applications on the Atlan platform. It handles application configuration, credentials, workflow orchestration, metadata extraction, storage, observability, and the path from local development to production.
My SDK work includes the native application contract system, pre-run source and configuration validation, runtime reliability, Dapr and Temporal integration, object storage, security, conformance testing, and developer tooling. I am one of the project's primary contributors and a code owner for the contract toolkit.
Outside work, I build developer tools and smaller implementations of systems I want to understand. I am currently interested in AI agents, distributed systems, low-level programming, programming language runtimes, and machine learning.
Open source has been a major part of how I learned software engineering.
I have worked on Hermes Agent, an extensible personal AI agent built by Nous Research. My work has involved understanding and improving a large agent system across its conversation loop, tools, sessions, providers, desktop experience, and supporting infrastructure.
I have also made smaller contributions to projects including:
These were mostly focused contributions rather than long-term maintainer roles. They helped me learn how to enter unfamiliar codebases, understand existing design decisions, communicate changes, and work within established engineering practices.
I have built a lot of things while figuring out which parts of software engineering I care about most.
Some of them are:
- cachewatch, a native macOS menu bar monitor for Claude Code sessions.
- dirgo, a CLI and MCP server for generating structured, token-aware project context for developers and AI agents.
- BookMyEvent, a concurrent event-booking platform built with Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Elasticsearch.
- mini-git, a small Git implementation written to understand repositories, staging, commits, and object storage.
- Garbage Collection Simulator, a mark-and-sweep tracing garbage collector written in C.
- Gork, an experimental coding-agent CLI built around model function calling.
- LinkLens, a Chrome extension for previewing links without leaving the current page.
- LeetFetch, an interactive explorer for LeetCode's GraphQL API.
- Pluto, a static-site generator written in Python.
- Gator, a command-line RSS aggregator backed by PostgreSQL.
There are many earlier applications, browser extensions, command-line tools, and experiments on this account. They do not all represent how I build today, but they document how I learned.
I am currently going deeper into:
- AI-agent architecture and infrastructure
- Distributed systems and failure handling
- Operating systems, networking, and memory
- Low-level programming
- Machine learning systems
- Reliable SDK and developer-tool design
I like learning by reading real implementations, forming a mental model, and building a smaller version myself.
I write about software, systems, and things I learn at fyzanshaik.in.