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2025
Scaled to 1M+ users
Co-founded BoringRats and scaled infrastructure to 1M+ active users — acquired Nov 2025.
The story
How it was achieved
I co-founded BoringRats and owned the backend and data infrastructure end to end — from the first monolith to a horizontally scaled system serving 1M+ active users.
What I built:
- Event-driven architecture on Kafka with idempotent consumers so no message was ever lost or double-processed
- Real-time analytics pipeline (Airflow + Spark) powering product decisions with sub-minute freshness
- Read-heavy API layer tuned with Redis caching and connection pooling — p99 latency held under 250ms
- Zero-downtime deploy pipeline (CI/CD with canary releases) so shipping never interrupted users
The hard part: the growth curve was a hockey stick. What worked at 10K users broke at 100K. I spent months on capacity planning, backpressure handling, and database read-path optimization — learning to design for ten times the load you have today.
Outcome
Measurable results
Results:
- 1M+ active users served on the platform
- p99 API latency under 250ms at peak
- 99.9%+ uptime through the growth phase
- Infrastructure cost kept flat while traffic grew 10x
- The company was acquired in November 2025