Samarth Jindal, software engineer building reliable distributed systems at scale. Writing on Kafka, Kubernetes, MongoDB, production engineering, and system design.https://www.samarthjindal.com/en-ushttps://www.samarthjindal.com/blog/kafka-consumer-lag-incident/https://www.samarthjindal.com/blog/kafka-consumer-lag-incident/A 3 a.m. page, a steadily climbing lag graph, and the debugging path from symptom to root cause — plus the guardrails we added so it wouldn't happen again.Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMTIncident ManagementKafkaDistributed SystemsProduction EngineeringObservabilityhttps://www.samarthjindal.com/blog/right-sizing-kubernetes/https://www.samarthjindal.com/blog/right-sizing-kubernetes/How to set requests and limits from real usage data instead of vibes — and why getting this wrong quietly burns money and causes 2 a.m. OOMKills.Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTKubernetesKubernetesCloud InfrastructurePerformanceProduction Engineeringhttps://www.samarthjindal.com/blog/mongodb-sharding-strategy/https://www.samarthjindal.com/blog/mongodb-sharding-strategy/The shard key is the one decision you can't easily walk back. A practical guide to choosing one that distributes writes, supports your queries, and won't create hot shards.Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTSystem DesignMongoDBDistributed SystemsSystem DesignPerformancehttps://www.samarthjindal.com/blog/what-the-pager-taught-me/https://www.samarthjindal.com/blog/what-the-pager-taught-me/On-call is the most honest feedback loop in software. Here's what owning production taught me about systems, blame, and what 'senior' actually means.Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTCareer GrowthCareer GrowthProduction EngineeringIncident ManagementLeadership