Nandigam Vijay Sai

Writing

Notes from the build.

Leadership lessons, architecture decisions, the FinMoon AI journey, and experiments from my home lab — written down so the next person (often me) doesn’t have to relearn them.

Leadership

  1. Leadership3 min read

    From developer to founder: how the blast radius of my decisions grew

    Developer, senior developer, lead DevOps engineer, principal engineer, co-founder. What actually changed at each step, and what I wish I had learned sooner.

  2. Leadership3 min read

    Architecture before AI: a CTO’s checklist for putting LLMs into production

    Most teams choose a model first and discover their constraints later. Here is the order I work in instead — and the patterns that make GenAI systems production-grade.

Startup

  1. Startup4 min read

    Building FinMoon AI: automate the expert process, not the answer

    Why we built a personal finance decision assistant for Indian professionals, what generic AI chat gets wrong, and what getting into Google for Startups India Hub taught us.

Architecture

  1. Architecture3 min read

    Migrating legacy systems to Google Cloud — and cutting the bill by 40%

    A cloud migration is a business project wearing an infrastructure costume. The playbook I use to move legacy systems to GCP without a big-bang cutover, and where the savings actually come from.

  2. Architecture2 min read

    Shipping an enterprise MVP without painting yourself into a corner

    How to build the smallest thing that proves value to an enterprise client, with the seams in the right places so success doesn’t force a rewrite.

  3. Architecture2 min read

    What 99.9% uptime really costs: lessons from a microservices platform at scale

    Three nines sounds modest until you design for it. Error budgets, failure isolation, caching and team boundaries from a platform serving millions of users.

Home Lab

  1. Home Lab2 min read

    Building a home NAS on OpenMediaVault and ZFS RAID-Z1

    Why I chose ZFS, what RAID-Z1 does and doesn’t protect you from, and the habits that keep a home NAS trustworthy.

  2. Home Lab2 min read

    I let an AI agent flip my circuit breakers (carefully)

    An n8n agentic workflow that reads email notifications and switches smart MCBs over MQTT — and the guardrails you need when an LLM can touch the physical world.

  3. Home Lab2 min read

    Kubernetes on a stack of Raspberry Pis

    Building a three-node bare-metal Kubernetes cluster at home — and why the constraints of cheap hardware make you a better platform engineer.

  4. Home Lab2 min read

    Replacing Google Photos with a self-hosted Immich server

    Running Immich for family photo backup with face recognition and smart search — what the architecture looks like, and what owning your data really costs.