I work where messaging meets developer experience
I'm José David Baena, a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub. I work on the messaging and background-job platform: the primitives, operational boundaries, and developer experience around moving work reliably.
My day-to-day languages are Go, Ruby, and Java. Personal projects tend to use Go and TypeScript. I live in the Bay Area.
The site separates three kinds of evidence
- Systems I help operate. Production lessons from messaging, background execution, platform ownership, and failure recovery.
- Tools I build. Small, independent projects such as the Async Failure Lab, with assumptions and source kept public.
- Projects I study. Source-guided reviews of systems such as Redpanda, with claims tied to code and versioned documentation.
That distinction matters. Production experience, a personal prototype, and a source study can all teach useful lessons, but they are not the same kind of evidence.
Start with the systems work
- Kafka protocol debugging examines batch allocation and stale
baseOffsetheaders in a personal Kafka-compatible server, while separating the reported symptom from what the runnable arithmetic example proves. - Kafka Engineering organizes protocol, platform, and migration decisions into a structured course.
- Redpanda architecture and operations follows one Kafka-compatible system from request handling through storage, durability, and cluster control.
- Projects collects the public tools and experiments behind the writing.
- Background Jobs Field Guide starts with concrete recovery, capacity, and deployment questions.
The archive also covers model infrastructure, systems internals, and personal experiments. Those topics stay part of the site; the systems work is simply easier to find.
How this site is built
The site uses Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, MDX, and Contentlayer. The source is public at github.com/josedab/personal-website. Articles remain available through the chronological archive, guided series, open-source studies, and RSS.