Balagopal Kanattil Shaji

Hi, I'm a self-taught developer with a formal education in Physics from IIT Bombay. Currently, I work as a Software Engineer at Amazon, focusing on Databases and Distributed Systems. I grew up in Kerala, a small state on India's southwest coast known for its food, monsoons, and backwaters.

When not coding, I'm either sleeping, cooking, or reading manga and sci-fi literature. I'm a big fan of horror, particularly the works of Junji Ito and H.P. Lovecraft. I've also recently gotten into bouldering — hopefully more posts on that soon.

• Building a Database: B-Tree Implementation

  May 5, 2026

  Implementing a B-Tree index for efficient lookups and range scans.

• Building a Database: Storage Engine Basics

  May 1, 2026

  Starting with the fundamentals — how data gets written to and read from disk.

• Building a Database from Scratch (2 posts)