Building systems that work beyond the happy path.
I work primarily around backend engineering, designing APIs, services, integrations and systems that need to remain reliable as complexity grows.
ABOUT ME
I build software, break things, understand why they broke, and write about it.
I'm Vishal Mishra, a Software Development Engineer working at United Airlines.
What I Do
Understanding what happens underneath the framework.
Java and Spring are a major part of my engineering toolkit. I enjoy going beyond surface level concepts and understanding what the framework is actually doing behind the scenes.
Thinking about failures, scale and consistency.
I explore messaging, Kafka, transactions, caching, retries, idempotency, consistency and failure handling.
Turning software into production systems.
I work with cloud technologies and AWS while thinking about scalability, deployment, observability, reliability and the tradeoffs involved in running software in production.
Exploring how AI changes software engineering.
I'm exploring AI from an engineering perspective: models, agents and AI powered systems integrated into real applications.
At United Airlines
I'm a Software Development Engineer at United Airlines, working on software systems where reliability, maintainability and engineering discipline matter.
Working in a large engineering organization exposes me to problems that don't usually appear in tutorials: service integrations, production failures, system behavior, scalability and maintaining software as it evolves.
That experience strongly influences what I write here. I prefer practical engineering over textbook definitions.
Why Vishal After Hours?
Most interesting engineering questions don't end when the workday ends.
Vishal After Hours is where I document those questions, experiments, lessons and rabbit holes.
The goal isn't to create another collection of copy pasted tutorials. It's about understanding concepts deeply, connecting them to real engineering problems and explaining them in a way that is useful to people building software.
What You'll Find Here
Deep dives into Java and Spring
APIs, architecture and production problems
Kafka, transactions, caching and consistency
Cloud architecture and engineering
AI, agents and practical experimentation
KEEP BUILDING
Learn something. Build something. Break something. Understand why.
Then write about it.