About the Engineer
Li Hong — Software Engineer building production systems with documented architecture.
Engineering philosophy
I treat software as long-lived infrastructure. The goal is not a demo that impresses in a five-minute walkthrough — it is a system an engineering team could inherit, extend, and operate. NovaDesk exists to make that claim verifiable: open the repo, read the ADRs, run the stack locally, and inspect live services.
Clarity over cleverness
Readable code, explicit boundaries, and documentation that survives team turnover. I optimize for the next engineer who reads the system.
Deployable increments
Every milestone leaves the system in a runnable state. Architecture decisions are validated by what ships, not by diagrams alone.
Contracts at boundaries
APIs, shared packages, and database schemas are versioned contracts. Internal refactors stay internal; external surfaces stay stable.
Operational awareness
Logging, metrics, health checks, and runbooks are part of the feature — not a post-launch afterthought.
How I solve problems
- Understand the constraint. Business rules, compliance, scale, and team size determine architecture more than framework trends.
- Model the domain. Bounded contexts, clear ownership, and data boundaries before choosing deployment topology.
- Build the thinnest vertical slice. Prove integration points early — auth, persistence, deployment — then expand modules.
- Document decisions. ADRs capture why, not just what. Future maintainers need context, not archaeology.
Architecture vision
I favor modular monoliths that can split over premature microservices. Services emerge when deployment, scaling, or team boundaries demand isolation — not because the diagram looks impressive. Cross-cutting concerns live in shared packages with strict dependency rules. The API gateway is the security and routing perimeter; identity is centralized; each service owns its data.
View NovaDesk architecture →Trajectory
Production systems
Delivered multi-tenant SaaS platforms in production — AI customer service (Spell), white-label ride-hailing (Broom), and behavioral assessment tooling (Teste de Perfil).
NovaDesk portfolio
Designed and implemented a full engineering ecosystem: six microservices, five applications, eight shared packages, CI/CD, and live deployment.
Engineering focus
Backend architecture, API design, multi-tenancy, authentication, async processing, and frontend integration with shared design systems.
How I structure projects
Monorepo with pnpm workspaces. Shared packages for auth, config, logging, UI, and API contracts. Backend modules follow Clean Architecture layers. Frontends use Feature-Sliced Design. Infrastructure is container-first with documented runbooks.
Monorepo structure →