About

Saksham Saxena

Over a decade in backend engineering, most of it at Zomato and BookMyShow — high-scale consumer platforms in India.

Nexus AI is the consulting practice behind this site — based in Dubai, working with teams across the UAE, India and East Africa.

Because the useful thing is rarely the exciting one

Early in my career a batch of applications needed a compliance scan — dozens of them, three of us, and a deadline that had already started. The tool we had been given would not run, because it wanted a command prompt and nobody in the office had bothered to learn one.

I had, for no better reason than that I liked it. It was running in five minutes.

Nothing about that was clever. But it set a pattern I have followed since: the useful thing is almost never the exciting thing. It is the tool nobody wanted to learn. The codebase nobody volunteers for. The system everyone has quietly written off.

Because I learned it where rewriting was never an option

At Zomato and BookMyShow, traffic fluctuated in spikes and outages were measured in thousands of dollars lost. On systems carrying that much live traffic even at 3AM, “let’s just rewrite it” was never on the table. You fix the plane mid-flight or you do not fix it.

A decade of that leaves you with one instinct ahead of the others: before arguing about what to replace, make the system tell you what it is doing. Most of the rewrites I have seen proposed were argued from memory. Nobody had asked the system.

Because I see systems in things that are not software

A related habit, and I gave up trying to switch it off some time ago. A guard holding people back from a packed lift is a circuit breaker. Panic buying is a thundering herd with no backoff. An orchestra is what orchestration was supposed to mean, and it is a little embarrassing for the software industry that we borrowed the word and then built almost nothing that behaves like one.

This is not a party trick. It is the same habit that makes an unfamiliar codebase legible: look for what is holding back load, what retries without limit, what coordinates and what merely runs alongside everything else.

The practice

Nexus AI is the trading name of AI Nexus Consulting FZ-LLC, registered in the United Arab Emirates. It also publishes a small number of Android apps — Sleeves Up and Talk To Me — which are built on the same principle as the consulting: on-device where possible, and honest about what they do with your data.