ENGINEERING · May 28, 2026 · 2 min read
The Architecture of Failure
Systems do not fail at their weakest point. They fail at the point nobody thought to make weak on purpose.
About
Aniket Pal
Backend Engineer · Systems Thinker · Builder
I design backend systems and AI pipelines that hold up when things get messy — APIs under load, RAG that retrieves the right thing, agents that don't spiral. Self-taught, project-driven, and more interested in what breaks than what looks good in a demo. Everything here — the builds, the writing, the failures — is the real working record, not a highlight reel.
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Selected Work
2025 · Selected Work
DevProxy
A high-performance HTTP proxy written in modern C++ — connection pooling, an epoll event loop, and a config language small enough to memorize.
C++17 epoll Sockets CMake
DevProxy is an HTTP/1.1 forward and reverse proxy built from raw sockets up. It runs a single-threaded epoll-based event loop per core, keeps upstream connections alive in a slab-allocated pool, and reloads configuration on SIGHUP without dropping in-flight requests. Structured access logs ship as newline-delimited JSON. Built to understand exactly what nginx does for me — and what it costs.
Related article → The Architecture of Failure2025 · Selected Work
BNS RAG
A biomedical retrieval-augmented generation pipeline that answers clinical questions with citations, not confidence.
Python Ollama ChromaDB FastAPI
BNS RAG ingests biomedical literature, chunks it with section-aware splitting, embeds passages into ChromaDB, and serves grounded answers through a locally hosted Ollama model. A reranking stage filters retrieved passages before generation, and an evaluation harness scores every answer for citation faithfulness. The reranker cut hallucinated references by roughly 60% in testing.
Related article → Flow StateFrom the repository
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