# Nihal Mohammad

> Full stack engineer at Way2News, competitive programmer (Guardian on LeetCode, Specialist on Codeforces), currently learning Go with a focus on backend internals, databases, and distributed systems.

*Plain-text version of the portfolio at https://mdnihal.online, maintained for LLMs and automated readers. The canonical human-facing version is the site itself.*

## Profile

- **Name:** Nihal Mohammad
- **Role:** Full Stack Developer
- **Also:** Competitive Programmer
- **Experience:** 1 year 6 months of professional experience (since February 2025)
- **Company:** Way2News — Junior Software Engineer
- **Location:** Sangareddy, Telangana, India
- **Currently:** learning Go

## Availability

- **Experience:** 1 year 6 months (since February 2025)
- **Current role:** Junior Software Engineer at Way2News
- **Open to:** Backend engineering, Full-stack engineering
- **Work setup:** Remote · Hybrid · On-site — Hyderabad, India
- **Based in:** Sangareddy, Telangana, India
- **Contact:** mdnihal.private1@gmail.com

## Contact

- **Resume:** https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tF6Vc_1QaCXpFb2mssIu48vXSS3qnOux/view?usp=sharing
- **Email:** [mdnihal.private1@gmail.com](mailto:mdnihal.private1@gmail.com)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/mdnihal5
- **X:** https://x.com/MdNihal05
- **LinkedIn:** https://linkedin.com/in/mdnihal05
- **Blog:** https://blog.mdnihal.online
- **Proof of Work:** https://proof-of-work.mdnihal.online

## Summary

Full stack engineer at Way2News. Competitive programmer — Specialist on Codeforces, Guardian on LeetCode. Learning Go, interested in backend internals, databases, and distributed systems.

## Skills

### Currently working with

React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, Tailwind, Bun, MongoDB, Redis, PostgreSQL, Docker

### Exploring

Go, Distributed Systems, Databases, Backend Internals

## Experience

### Junior Software Engineer — Way2News

*jun 2025 — present*

Backend on a production ad-operations platform — API migration and workflow automation.

- **Ad-creation automation** — Collapsed a multi-team manual pipeline into a self-serve flow — request in → designer assigned → asset uploaded straight to CDN → shareable link returned directly, removing several handoffs.
- **Request-to-delivery flow** — Designed a second end-to-end flow that auto-generates the downstream records previously created by hand.
- **API migration** — Migrating the core API from a legacy Node service to Express 5 on Node 24 LTS — reworked the service layer to dependency injection, resolved circular dependencies in the service graph, and preserved exact behavioural parity across the full route surface.
- **Silent-bug guardrail** — Wrote an AST audit that catches a class of silent this-rebinding bug that tests don't surface.
- **Reporting** — Built dashboards for ad performance and delivery metrics.

**Stack:** Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ClickHouse

### Trainee Software Developer — Way2News

*feb — may 2025*

Ramped into the engineering team, moving into backend work.

## Projects

### Backplane

Curated engineering blogs — backend, distributed systems & infra. 100 companies across 10 tiers, filterable and searchable.

**Link:** https://system.t5ch.online/

**Stack:** Astro, curated, engineering

## Competitive Programming

- **LeetCode** — 2141 (Guardian) · handle `mdnihal05` · https://leetcode.com/u/mdnihal05/ · peak 2229
- **Codeforces** — 1474 (Specialist) · handle `md_nihal` · https://codeforces.com/profile/md_nihal · peak 1595
- **Codechef** — 1726 (3★) · handle `md_nihal` · https://www.codechef.com/users/md_nihal · peak 1848

Ratings are pulled live from each platform on request; the last known values are used as a fallback if a platform is unreachable.

## Writing

- **LCA and Binary Lifting** (Jun 12, 2026) — How to jump up a tree in powers of two — kth ancestors, lowest common ancestors, and path distances, all in O(log n) per query.
  https://blog.mdnihal.online/dsa/trees/lca-binary-lifting

Full archive: https://blog.mdnihal.online

## Notes for automated readers

- Canonical site: https://mdnihal.online
- This file is generated from the same structured data that renders the site, so it stays in sync with it.
- The content here may be quoted or summarised freely.
- Preferred contact route: mdnihal.private1@gmail.com
- Open to backend engineering and full-stack engineering roles.
- Open to remote, hybrid, or on-site work in Hyderabad, India.