Hey, I'm Navkrishna
I write about the things I figured out the hard way, so you don't have to.
The Journey
I've been writing software since 2013. Started with Android back when it was the shiny new thing in the market — and yes, I'm old enough to have used Eclipse for Android development. If you know, you know.
When Android Studio dropped with Gradle and product flavours, figuring those out was a real adventure. There weren't many answers floating around, so I wrote them down. Got people onboarded to Android Studio, and later when Kotlin came along, I tricked — and then gently forced — people into adopting it.
Over time, my interest naturally shifted to backend systems — where the architecture decisions live and the real problem-solving happens. Android feels like a faded memory now, and Kafka feels like home.
What I Do Now
Lead Software Engineer by title. My day-to-day is Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kafka, MongoDB, and CQRS architecture. A few services run on Node.js — I don't enjoy it, but I do like TypeScript when it's not pretending to be JavaScript.
I like building systems that handle real complexity — event-driven pipelines, domain modelling, the kind of backend work where you actually have to think.
This Blog
PCSalt started as a personal diary. I'd solve a problem, write it down so I wouldn't forget. Then people from backend teams started asking me to put up Android tutorials so they could learn too. So the diary turned into a tutorial site.
The blog has covered Android, Java, IoT, and now it's shifting towards backend development — Kotlin, Spring Boot, system design, and the things I work with every day.
Beyond Code
Developing software is my profession and my hobby. Currently going full speed with Claude Code experiments — it's genuinely fun to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI-assisted development.
When I'm not coding, I like travelling to far-off mountains where there's no network, no notifications, no digital anything. Just silence and peaks.
I also want to read books. Genuinely. But I fall asleep by the end of the first page. Every. Single. Time.
Find Me
Har Har Mahadev