Who runs this site

This is the personal site of Rahul Balajee, who decides what is collected here and why (the data controller, in GDPR terms). There is no company behind it. Write to rahulbalajee.97@gmail.com about anything on this page.

What is collected

When you send the contact form

Your name, email address, company if you give one, the kind of enquiry and your message are emailed to me through Amazon SES. The site keeps no copy. To stop abuse, your IP address counts toward a sending limit that is held in memory for at most an hour.

When you subscribe to the newsletter

A subscription starts only when you confirm your address from an email the site sends you. From then on the site keeps:

  • Your email address and the emails you agreed to receive: new posts, and occasional announcements about courses and products only if you agreed to those separately.
  • A record of your consent: when you agreed, the exact wording you agreed to, the page you subscribed from, the network your request came from with the end of the IP address removed (an IPv4 /24 or IPv6 /48 prefix, which identifies no single device), and your country as CloudFront reports it.
  • Delivery events from Amazon SES: whether an email bounced or was reported as spam, and unsubscribes made through its links. Emails carry no tracking pixels and their links are not rewritten, so opens and clicks are never recorded.

The current consent wording (version 2026-10-a) is: “Get my new posts by email: practical platform engineering, no spam. Unsubscribe any time.” Announcements need their own, separate agreement: “Also send me occasional announcements about my courses and products.”

When you visit any page

Every request is logged with your IP address, the page, the time, your browser's user agent, the page that linked you here, and the approximate country and city that CloudFront derives from your IP address.

Pages load their fonts from Google Fonts, so your browser also contacts Google, which receives your IP address.

Why, and on what legal basis

  • Sending the newsletter: your consent (GDPR Article 6(1)(a)). You can withdraw it at any time with the unsubscribe link in every newsletter email, or by writing to me; that does not affect emails already sent.
  • Keeping consent records and records of opt-outs: my legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) in being able to show when and how you agreed, and in making sure an address that left is never emailed again.
  • Answering the contact form: my legitimate interest in replying to you, or steps you asked for before a possible contract (Article 6(1)(f) and (b)).
  • Access logs: my legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) in keeping the site secure and working, and in knowing which pages are read.

Where it is kept, and who processes it

Everything the site stores is kept on Amazon Web Services in its eu-west-1 region (Ireland). AWS processes it on my behalf: Amazon SES sends the emails and keeps its own list of subscribed addresses and their choices, which is what makes its unsubscribe links work. Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with advertisers or analytics companies.

Some of it leaves the European Economic Area:

  • CloudFront, AWS's content delivery network, serves pages from locations worldwide, so your request may be handled, and logged on its way, outside the EEA.
  • Google Fonts is run by Google LLC in the United States.
  • Contact messages arrive in my inbox with my email provider, which may store them outside the EEA.

These companies rely on the safeguards the GDPR provides for such transfers, such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses or, for US companies, the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

How long it is kept

  • A signup that is never confirmed is deleted after 7 days.
  • When you unsubscribe, the site's own list keeps only a tombstone: a hash of your address with the reason and the date. Amazon SES keeps your address on its contact list, marked as unsubscribed, and keeps an address that bounced or was reported as spam on its suppression list. Those records are what make sure the address is never emailed again, so they are kept until you ask for them to be erased.
  • Signups and changes to your preferences reach the part of the site that sends email through Amazon SQS queues, encrypted and readable only by the site's own functions and its administrator. A signup's message holds your address, the emails you asked for, the page you signed up from, your network prefix and your country; a preferences message holds your address. They are normally handled within seconds and then deleted. One that keeps failing is kept for up to 14 days, and then for up to 14 more in a dead-letter queue so it can be repaired, before it is deleted. Delivery events about your address from Amazon SES (bounces, spam reports and unsubscribes) wait in a queue the same way, for up to 14 days in all.
  • Access logs are deleted after 30 days.
  • Contact messages stay in my inbox while the conversation needs them, and are deleted on request.

Your rights

You can ask to see what is held about you and get a copy in a portable format, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict its use, or object to it. Erasure removes your address from the site's list and from Amazon SES's contact and suppression lists. Email rahulbalajee.97@gmail.com, ideally from the address concerned, and you will get an answer within a month. If you are not satisfied with the answer, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live or work.

Cookies and browser storage

The public pages set no cookies. The newsletter signup that slides in beside a blog post on wide screens remembers, in your browser's localStorage, that it was shown, that you closed it or that you signed up, so it appears at most once. That note stays on your device and is never sent to the site; clearing this site's data in your browser removes it. Only the private editing area sets cookies: a five-minute one when its sign-in page opens, and a session cookie for signed-in authors.