About Me

Hi, I'm Jainath, or just Jai. I've been writing JavaScript for fourteen years, starting in Hyderabad and now based in North Carolina. Most of my career has been about how the web feels from the user's side of the screen: fast, responsive, and predictable under load.

Professional Background

I'm currently a frontend engineer at a large e-commerce home-improvement company, working on the kind of high-traffic React applications where a 200 ms regression matters and the fix is often a one-line change to how the data flows. My day-to-day is React, state management, build tooling, and performance. The part I enjoy most is the stuff that doesn't fit neatly in a ticket.

When I figure something out, I usually write it down. You can find long-form articles on my blog (cross-posted to Medium and the In Plain English, AWS in Plain English, and Stackademic publications), covering everything from React hooks deep-dives to setting up site-to-site VPNs on a Raspberry Pi. Sharing what I learn, and getting corrected when I get it wrong, is the part of being a developer I enjoy most.

Side Projects

I build small, fast, privacy-first browser tools on the side. Two live right now: TextBench, a single-page swiss-army-knife for text (extract patterns, dedupe, encode, hash, generate QR codes, all running in your browser. Nothing you paste leaves your device), and WebCam Tester, a quick check that your camera is actually working before you join a meeting.

I also run a small home setup I keep ambitiously calling "infrastructure": a Raspberry Pi acting as an always-on server for uptime monitoring (with Telegram alerts), a WireGuard tunnel between two networks, and CIFS mounts pointing at the NAS. Most of it started as a blog post and grew from there.

Outside Work

I volunteer on the production team at my church, mostly running sound and the stream. I follow space and science closely. SpaceX's Starship is the long-running soap opera of the decade. And when the weather allows, I'm out cycling, hiking, or photographing whatever's in front of the lens. Some of those photos end up on Unsplash and on the Photography page here.