About Me

I am Amritpal Singh Nagra, a software engineer based in Punjab, India. An aspiring IT professional with a determined focus on mastering the realm of software engineering. Having traversed the IT landscape, I emerge as an experienced Software Engineer, adorned with a diverse skill set encompassing full-stack development, cloud platforms, and DevOps methodologies. Currently serving as a Solutions Architect at Sifars, leading technical teams in the development of web applications for numerous clients from Europe and around the world.

Professional Journey

I started my journey with computers as a hacker, hacking Android games using rooted Android devices during my Electrical diploma. I became interested in web development while customizing Android ROMs and learned about boot animation creation through web applications. I started learning to build web applications using scripts found online without thoroughly understanding programming basics. However, I soon realized my lack of knowledge and started searching for programming languages.

I started my software engineering journey with a personal project, where I taught myself Laravel, Bootstrap, and MySQL. Due to limited resources in my machine at that time, I developed an appreciation for vim, i3wm, SQLite, and PHP. During my B.Tech. in Computer Science, I lost faith in the value of a degree after a few lectures. Nevertheless, I continued to work on my project, adding new technologies like React and migrated from MySQL to PostgreSQL, and gained valuable experience working with AWS. In addition, I realized the importance of testing and started practising test-driven development. The only positive aspects of college for me were the exposure to C++ and Stoicism, both of which helped me during tough times.

Despite my experience and knowledge, I struggled to find job opportunities locally due to my failed B.Tech., which in fact I never even tried. However, Munish(my current manager) at Sifars, saw my potential and allowed me to showcase my skills and knowledge. Initially, at Sifars, I was assigned to the front-end side of projects, but as the front-end team grew, I also started contributing to the back end. I attempted to share my knowledge with my colleagues by conducting internal training sessions, although they were not as successful as I had hoped. Being the only developer and owner of a project that I worked on for about five years, I developed certain characteristics like keenness to learn and flexibility to settle into different roles. But as I strived for perfection with the urge to fix everything and intolerance for certain types of mistakes resulted in sleep deprivation, so I ended up with Epilepsy and a few other things, or we can say I kind of faced burnout.

While I am proud to be right about making decisions for myself and predictions to friends most of the time, but there are a few times when I am proud about accepting that I was wrong fast enough to catch up and even lead. While I loved PostgreSQL, ECMAScript, and React from the very first day that I learned about, but things presented to me which I didn’t like initially include Docker and TypeScript. Despite not having a fondness for Microsoft products, I was able to design effective patterns for handling complex problems using React and TypeScript. I also got to practice TDD with Jest and libraries like React Testing Library and mock service worker there. I also used Cypress for the first time, leveraging my experience with Selenium and Laravel.

After Munish introduced me to Docker, I started exploring DevOps tools, such as Ansible and Terraform, in my free time. As time progressed, Sifars decided to explore CI/CD, for which we tried out Jenkins. I was later asked to interview candidates for a DevOps role, and after being unable to find a reliable candidate, I was added to that team as a DevOps engineer. There, I helped set up the observability stack with Prometheus, Fluentd, and ElasticSearch, introduced practices like GitOps using ArgoCD, and an internal developer platform using Backstage. Here, I got good hands on experience with about Kubernetes, Argo Workflow, Prometheus, Fluentd, and ElasticStack. The practices we learned from this project are now being applied to Sifars to continue improving developer productivity.

Although, I have gained a wealth of knowledge and experience throughout my journey and always strive to improve and advance as a software engineer. But one thing for sure is that so far it has been a great journey.

If you would like to learn more about my work and connect, or if you have any questions, please feel free to email me at amritpalnagrame@gmail.com.