Atharv Dange - Full Stack Engineer & Cinephile
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Full Stack Engineer, currently freelancing. I ship client software for a living and rebuild web tools from scratch to learn how they work.
$cat about.md
I'm a Full Stack Engineer based in Pune, India. I build production systems end-to-end, from auth protocols and API design to the interfaces people actually use. Right now I'm freelancing, most recently on a booking and payments platform for MentorAID (opens in new tab), a UPSC-prep startup in Delhi.
When I want to understand how something works, I rebuild it from first principles. I've built HTTP frameworks, client-side routers, CSS engines, OIDC providers, and web rendering pipelines. Not to replace existing tools, but to understand the problems they solve at the protocol level.
Outside of code I write about what I find at blogs and watch way too many films.
$cat experience.md
- ▸Built MentorAIDConnect with a 3-person team for MentorAID, a Delhi-based UPSC-prep startup: students book one-on-one mentor sessions and buy answer-copy evaluation packages
- ▸Designed slot booking with 20-minute payment holds that expire on read, plus Razorpay payments that snapshot price and time onto each order
- ▸Built and shipped production products end-to-end across the full stack
- ▸Took ownership of the IT department: architecture decisions, client-facing project scoping, quotations, and on-time delivery
- ▸Mentored interns and junior developers
- ▸Conducted technical interviews for new hires
- ▸Entered a profit-share agreement reflecting expanded ownership and responsibility over the firm's technical direction
$ls projects/ --featured
Built a production-grade OpenID Connect identity provider from scratch - implemented the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Flow with PKCE, RS256 asymmetric JWT signing, automatic refresh token rotation with theft detection, and shipped a plug-and-play Next.js SDK for client apps.
A beautifully crafted, read-only GitHub dashboard for Android. Browse repos, explore code, track your contribution streak, and share your profile - without the pressure of taking action.
A group trip planner that pulls the plan, the money, and the people out of the group chat and into one place. Shared itinerary with list, calendar, and map views, expense splitting with settle-up, and role-based access checked on every request. My friends and I plan our trips on it.
Built a zero-dependency HTTP server framework from Node.js core modules - designed a compile-time type-safe router with parameter inference, an async onion-model middleware pipeline, and built-in rate limiting, CORS, CSRF protection, and Brotli compression. Published to npm.
A production-grade web crawler and sitemap discovery engine with background job processing, real-time progress streaming, and intelligent CSR/SSR detection for creating SEO-compliant XML sitemaps.
$cat stack.md
$ls blogs/ --recent
A from-first-principles case study on five web rendering strategies (Static Site Generation, Server-Side Rendering, Client-Side Rendering, Incremental Static Regeneration, and Partial Pre-Rendering), built with zero frameworks using Node.js's built-in http module.
What I learned building Mekiki, my first AI agent: an npm package advisor that kept giving wrong answers. Each time, the traces showed the model doing its best with bad input, a missing date, or a rule I had written badly.
A concept by concept walkthrough of what happens inside a modern LLM: tokenization, embeddings, RoPE, attention, induction heads, multi-head attention with GQA, the feed-forward network, residual streams, and next-token prediction. Written up after working through the mechanics until every piece made sense.
Two slices that teach the rest of the system to read the route tree slice 8 turned into the single source of truth. Slice 9 makes the type system check every path and param at compile time. Slice 10 replaces order-dependent first-match matching with a specificity score, so the right route wins no matter how the tree is written.