I build the software small shops run on.

I joined MyDukan as an intern.

MyDukan was a different product then. I knew Spring Boot and MySQL, and not much else.

The first line of code I wrote there went straight to production. Nobody reviewed it, because there was nobody to review it.

The servers broke every day, and there was nobody to ask.

There was no other developer. No senior. No one to turn to and say, is this right?

This was before AI could answer anything. When something broke, it was me, the logs, and whatever I could find to read.

Everything in front of me was something I had never done.

The system was many separate microservices, and I had never worked on a microservice architecture. Parts of it were in Python, which I did not know.

I did not get to practise first. My first real bugs were production bugs, on production servers, with real shops depending on them.

A customer was waiting on the other side.

We stayed up night after night just to bring the servers back. And it was never quiet while we did.

Somewhere a shop owner stood at the counter with a customer waiting. The customer shouted at the shop owner. The shop owner shouted at us. And I was the one with my hands on the production box while they waited.

I took the support calls too. I heard every one of them.

Shipping a single release meant chasing ten people.

The people who had built the old system only joined a call now and then to keep it alive. To get one deployment out, I had to track each of them down.

So I learned every part of it myself.

I read what I didn't understand until I did, and fixed things one at a time: the code, the services, the servers.

Our monthly server bill was ₹50,000. I brought it down to ₹6,000.

There was no team, so I built one.

Some people stayed. Some left. Some came, and went, and came again, and went again. That is how it goes, and it still hurt every time.

The work never paused for any of it. I was holding many things at once, and I could not put any of them down.

Through all of it, one person never stopped believing in me.

RK sir stood by me every single time, even when I did not believe in myself. He would say:

“Whether anyone else can do it or not, you will. I have worked with hundreds of developers, and you are not like them. You have the mind for it. You just underestimate yourself. You can do it.”

Then we started building new things.

It was a long road, and we struggled through it together. Along the way we built more products for retailers, Schemes Book and EMI Book among them.

Now it is MyDukan 2.0, for one shop or a whole chain.

We came back to MyDukan and rebuilt it. MyDukan 2.0 serves the single shop owner, and we are taking it to enterprise retail: companies with large stores and multiple chains.

I lead its engineering as co-founder and CTO. The intern who was afraid to touch production now answers for all of it.