Hi, I’m Ayush Basak.
I’m a CTO and systems architect in Kolkata. I design backend platforms, database systems, and production AI systems—then stay close to the code until the architecture meets reality.
I’m currently building Saleslyt, AI-assisted sales infrastructure, and the companion software behind Myotrek. I publish the useful parts as engineering essays and honest field notes about products, failures, and decisions.
Writing worth your time
- Distributed systemsHow Do You Move Money Without the Internet?Hostile relays, replay resistance, double-spend boundaries, and eventual settlement.
- AI infrastructureA Bigger Prompt Will Not Make Your Agent SafeProduction agents need identity, authority, budgets, approvals, and an audit trail.
- Platform engineeringObservability Is a Data Contract, Not a DashboardBuild operational evidence around semantics, cardinality budgets, context, and SLOs.
- Database engineeringYour Replication Slot Is Part of the Recovery PlanWhat survives PostgreSQL publisher failover—and how to prove the subscriber can recover.
- PostgreSQLZero Downtime Is Really a Compatibility ProblemExpand, backfill, validate, and contract without gambling on a maintenance window.
- Event-driven systemsThe Outbox Is Not Your Delivery GuaranteeAtomic writes are only the start; reliability also needs idempotency, ordering, and replay.
Build the boundary. Test the failure.
Practical security guides for the systems we ship. Start with multi-tenant isolation: verified identity, database policies, queues, and the tests that catch cross-tenant access.
Patterns you can use today
Small, production-minded answers for retries, idempotency, database safety, observability, and bounded AI agents.
Engineering, explained aloud
Let’s build something useful.
For technical leadership, system architecture, database engineering, or a difficult AI product, write to me.