Akash Kumar

During my internship as a Software Developer Intern at Hummingbird Web Solutions, I worked on a production-grade headless e-commerce platform built with Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, GraphQL, and Server Actions. My primary responsibility was developing and maintaining backend-heavy features related to authentication, customer accounts, checkout, payments, and platform architecture while ensuring production reliability and security. One of my key contributions was implementing the complete customer registration flow. I integrated GraphQL mutations exposed by the backend to create customer accounts, handled JWT-based authentication, and securely managed user sessions using Iron Session with encrypted HTTP-only cookies. I also implemented the guest checkout flow by securely storing guest cart identifiers in encrypted sessions, allowing anonymous users to maintain persistent carts before seamlessly merging them with authenticated customer carts after login. I later led the migration of authentication and checkout modules from Next.js API Routes to Next.js Server Actions, moving business logic and GraphQL communication entirely to the server. This eliminated client-side GraphQL exposure, centralized request validation using Zod, simplified session management, and significantly improved the overall security architecture of the application. I integrated and maintained three payment gateways including Stripe, Atome, and HitPay, implementing complete checkout flows with server-side validation, callback handling, secure redirect management, and payment verification. I also contributed to improving order processing by implementing support for both guest and authenticated users on the order success page, ensuring secure order retrieval and verification using appropriate backend validation. Another major responsibility involved designing a multi-store static generation architecture for two regional storefronts. I implemented middleware-based route rewriting to support localized routing while enabling static generation for each store independently. This required removing request-dependent APIs such as cookies() and headers() from shared server components, restructuring metadata generation, and ensuring store-specific canonical URLs and SEO behavior without sacrificing static rendering performance. I also designed and implemented a centralized SEO framework that dynamically generated metadata, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, Twitter cards, structured JSON-LD schemas including Product, Organization, Breadcrumb, FAQ, and Blog, XML sitemaps, and robots.txt directly from backend GraphQL data. This standardized SEO across Product, Category, CMS, and Blog pages while improving maintainability and search engine optimization. Beyond feature development, I collaborated with senior engineers during code reviews, investigated production issues, implemented secure validation practices, optimized application architecture, and participated in delivering production-ready features for multiple storefronts. This experience strengthened my understanding of scalable backend systems, secure authentication, distributed application architecture, and production software development practices.

Coursework: Data Structures & Algorithms, Object-Oriented Programming, Database Management Systems, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Software Engineering, and Distributed Systems fundamentals. Achievements: Solved 700+ problems across LeetCode and Codeforces, achieved LeetCode Knight (1850+ rating, Top 6%), earned ServiceNow CSA and CAD certifications, and was selected for the Smart India Hackathon in both 2024 and 2025. Activities: Built multiple production-grade full-stack and backend projects, actively participated in hackathons, maintained a consistent competitive programming practice, and explored scalable backend systems, distributed architectures, and modern web technologies through personal projects and internships.