If you build enterprise software, you know the pain: you spend months solving complex architectural challenges, navigating network partitions, and building highly resilient systems, and you can never show it to anyone because it is locked behind corporate NDAs.
At my day job, I worked heavily with a distributed job scheduler backed by Cassandra. Navigating those massive asynchronous workflows, database bottlenecks, and unpredictable worker crashes taught me invaluable lessons about distributed systems. I was incredibly proud of the architectural patterns I had mastered, but when I went to update my portfolio, I realized I had zero public proof of my backend engineering depth.
So, I decided to build a brand new, open-source project to demonstrate those concepts.
The result is TaskForge. This isn’t a clone of my previous work. It is a fresh implementation inspired by the failure modes I had learned to handle. It gave me something rare: a completely free playground. Instead of navigating rigid legacy architectures and corporate red tape, I had a blank canvas. I took the opportunity to experiment with different DevOps constraints, build out a strict monorepo, and completely change the database engine.
