About Ironside
Ironside is an independent studio of one, where I build and ship my own software products, end to end.
I’m Abdolah Keshtkar, a senior software engineer based in Munich. I work across the whole stack: TypeScript and React on the front, NestJS and GraphQL on the back, with production Python and Django behind me. I build Ironside’s products the same way I’ve shipped features for the last several years, end to end, by the person closest to the problem.
Along the way I’ve cared as much about the parts most people skip as the features themselves. At Predium I re-architected the frontend into a shared component library, automated the deploy pipeline from weekly to daily releases, and cut backend test-environment setup from five minutes to ten seconds. Earlier, I halved a 4.5 MB JavaScript bundle and roughly doubled first-load speed for users on slow connections. That’s the instinct behind everything here: software should be fast, and it should keep working for years.
Ironside is a solo studio, and I like it that way for now. It means the person who understands the problem is the one writing the code, and every decision, from a database index to a button’s hover state, is made by someone who has to live with it. I take on a small number of things at a time so each one gets real attention.
- Based in
- Munich, Germany
- Frontend
- TypeScript, React, Next.js
- Backend
- NestJS, Node, GraphQL, Django
- Platform
- Docker, CI/CD, Linux
How I work
A short list of things I hold every product to.
Own the whole thing
One person scopes it, designs it, builds it, and gets paged when it breaks. Nothing gets lost in a handoff because there is no handoff.
Performance is a feature
Slow software is broken software. I treat load time and responsiveness as product requirements, the same instinct that halved a 4.5 MB bundle and took deploys from weekly to daily.
Ship, then sharpen
Get a real version in front of real usage early, then spend the following weeks cutting away everything that doesn’t earn its place.
Built to last
I write code I expect to still be running, unmodified, in five years, and pick the tools, structure, and processes that make that possible.
Want to talk?
Whether it’s about one of my products or something you’re building, I’m easy to reach.