William Nayar

About

William Nayar

Final-year Computer Science at NUS. I build backend systems, and I like the problems that only show up once more than one machine is involved.

Right now

Three things at once

  • Teaching CS3219 at NUS as a tutor, August to December 2026. It's the microservices module, so students spend the term making real calls about service boundaries and deployment.
  • Building DeepCS, where two people solve the same question together in real time.
  • Building Recall next, a search engine in Go, to learn indexing by writing it.

Path

How I got here

Aug to Dec 2026

Tutor, CS3219 · NUS School of Computing

Teaching the microservices module: service boundaries, choosing a data store, getting it deployed and keeping it up.

Jul 2026

1st place, Daytona HackSprint

Built Airlock with Basil in a five-hour window: a safety gate that runs every package an AI agent installs inside a throwaway sandbox first.

2026

Merged pull requests into mongoose and node-redis

Gaps I found by reading the source, not by picking off issue labels.

2026 to now

Sole engineer, Aqua Vitae

My own fragrance brand. I own the storefront, the backend and the infrastructure.

Aug to Nov 2025

Question Service owner, PeerPrep

One service, owned end to end, inside a six-service system. 15 endpoints and 35 tests.

May to Jul 2024

NUS Orbital, Apollo 11

A study-group platform matched on live NUSMods course data.

2023

Harvard CS50

Where it started. The first version of this site was my final project for it.


Toolbox

What I've worked with

None of this is a loyalty list. I pick whatever suits the problem, and I'm always happy to pick up something new.

Languages

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Go
  • Python
  • Java
  • C
  • C++
  • SQL
  • Bash

Backend

  • Node.js
  • Fastify
  • Express
  • Flask
  • REST
  • WebSockets

Data

  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • MongoDB
  • Supabase
  • SQLite
  • Firebase

Infra & cloud

  • Docker
  • Google Cloud
  • Cloud Run
  • AWS
  • Cloudflare
  • Vercel
  • GitHub Actions
  • Nginx
  • Linux

Frontend

  • React
  • Next.js
  • Vite
  • Tailwind CSS

Testing & tooling

  • Jest
  • Supertest
  • k6
  • Git
  • Postman
  • VS Code

Education

National University of Singapore

  • Bachelor of Computing in Computer Science, final year, specialising in Software Engineering.
  • Certificate of Distinction in the Software Engineering focus area, awarded July 2026.
  • Started with Harvard CS50 in 2023, which is the reason this site exists at all.
NUS School of Computing Certificate of Distinction in the Software Engineering Focus Area, awarded to William Nayar, 3 July 2026.

Contact

Looking for a 6-month internship from early 2027

Backend, distributed systems, infrastructure. Based in Singapore.