About Me

Hey, I’m Jordan — a backend engineer who really likes the plumbing nobody sees. I recently graduated in Computer Engineering (Informatics) from PENS in Surabaya, and most of my time these days goes into building systems that move data reliably: APIs, real-time messaging, and lately, vehicle telemetry pipelines that connect edge devices to the cloud.

I work primarily in Go and Node.js, and I’m comfortable across the stack when needed — from database schema design to WebSocket event flows to deploying infrastructure on bare-metal servers. What I enjoy most is the “systems” side of engineering: figuring out how different pieces (protocols, services, devices) talk to each other cleanly, especially when they weren’t designed to.

If you’re looking for someone who can own a backend feature end-to-end — design the data model, build the API, and think about what happens when things go wrong at 2am — that’s roughly my thing. But don’t get me wrong, I’m an advocate of work-life balance because there is always more in life. As Dan McKinley said, always choose the boring technology.

My Life

I didn’t start out wanting to be a backend engineer — I actually started closer to the frontend, doing UI/UX work and full-stack projects as a student. Somewhere along the way, building an accessibility-focused messaging app for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, I realized what I actually cared about was what happened behind the interface: how data was modeled, how messages got delivered reliably, how systems held up under load. That shift stuck.

That curiosity eventually pulled me toward something more niche — vehicle networking. My final year project was on building a modular vehicle abstraction layer that could standardize telemetry from completely different protocols (OBD-II, J1939, and a proprietary ECU protocol) into one coherent system for EV fleet management. It’s a weird intersection — half distributed systems, half embedded/automotive — but it’s the kind of problem I find genuinely fun: heterogeneous, messy inputs that need a clean abstraction on top

I also spent a stint in Singapore on a student exchange program, which was less about code and more about learning to work with people from very different backgrounds — something that’s turned out to be just as useful as any technical skill. And along the way, I’ve done a fair bit of mentoring and organizing through my university’s student association, which taught me a lot about coordinating people, not just systems.

Current Work

Right now I’m wrapping up a research project called Edge-to-Cloud EV Fleet Management System, where I’m the student researcher responsible for the core architecture. In practice, that means:

  1. Building a modular vehicle abstraction layer in Go that normalizes telemetry across different vehicle protocols
  2. Running prototypes on both x86-64 and ARM64, sharing a common core runtime with swappable protocol decoders
  3. Validating everything against real (and simulated) CAN traffic — OBD-II, J1939, and a custom ECU protocol — using microcontrollers and single-board computers
  4. Standing up the supporting infrastructure myself: a 3-node Kafka cluster, TimescaleDB, MongoDB, all self-hosted on a private Proxmox server
  5. Writing supporting tooling most people never see: a custom MongoDB Prometheus exporter, a telemetry-ingestion pipeline, and a CAN-frame generator for testing

Before this, I spent time building the backend for a real-time chat platform (Fastify, WebSockets, MySQL, Redis) and a multi-node greenhouse automation system using PostgreSQL’s LISTEN/NOTIFY for remote hardware control — so my backend interests skew toward real-time, event-driven systems more than typical CRUD APIs. I’m currently open to backend engineering roles, especially ones touching real-time systems, distributed infrastructure, or embedded/IoT-adjacent backend work.

Interests

Outside of work, I’m usually deep in a personal development book, arguing (respectfully) about politics with anyone willing to engage, or running on more coffee than is probably advisable. A few things I genuinely enjoy:

  • Personal development books: always chasing the next one that reframes how I think, not just what I do.
  • Political discussions: I like debating ideas, hearing the other side out, and occasionally changing my mind.
  • Self-hosting infra: okay, one tech thing snuck back in; I run Proxmox setup in my campus lab mostly as an excuse to break things safely before I do it professionally.
  • Casual tech talks: I like discussing with junior devs/students and fellow engineers; talking something out loud is usually how I understand it myself.
  • Coffee: high dose no apologies; pure black, sometimes with dairy milk.

“The illusion is half of the disease, peace of mind is half of the medicine, and patience is the first step of recovery. -Avicenna”