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About

Hi, I'm Alen Joy — a Software Architect based in Bengaluru, India, with 13+ years of experience building software that ships and scales.

I started The Pragmatic Stack to share what I've learned along the way. No hype cycles. No surface-level tutorials. Just engineering insights from the trenches.

What I write about

I focus on the intersection of modern AI and solid software engineering:

  • 🤖 AI, LLMs & Agentic AI — designing, building, and shipping AI-powered systems that actually work in production
  • 🟣 .NET & App Development — patterns, performance, and pragmatic architecture
  • 🏛️ Design Principles — clean code, SOLID, domain modeling, and the trade-offs nobody talks about
  • 🧱 System Design — scalability, reliability, and the decisions that shape real systems

Every post is rooted in practice: what worked, what broke, and what I'd do differently next time.

A bit about me

Over the last 13+ years, I've designed and built scalable backend systems, distributed architectures, and AI-integrated applications across .NET, cloud platforms, and LLM-based products. I've led teams, broken production (and fixed it), mentored engineers, and made enough architectural mistakes to have strong opinions — loosely held.

This blog is where I distill those lessons into something useful for the next engineer who has to make the same call I once did.

Why this blog exists

I believe the best engineers think clearly, write clearly, and ship consistently. Writing forces clarity. So this blog is part learning journal, part knowledge archive, and part conversation starter with the wider engineering community.

If a post helps you debug something, design something better, or simply think differently — it's done its job.

Let's connect

I'm always open to conversations about engineering, AI, system design, and interesting opportunities.

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