Distributed systems, shipped from Surabaya

I'm Michael Buntarman, MicBun online. I started in Surabaya as the founding engineer of a company's first software division, hiring the intern teams and shipping the first products. From there I went to SIRCLO, where our integration layer connected 4,000+ merchants to Lazada, Shopee, and Tokopedia, then to Dealls (YC W22), building Go and Python services for one of Indonesia's biggest career platforms.

Since 2024 I've worked on TRUF.NETWORK, first as one of its early backend engineers, now its sole backend engineer and lead maintainer of kwil-db, the open-source distributed database that powers it. The work I'm proudest of is unglamorous: a network that grew from 100K to 500K+ transactions a day on the same commodity hardware, releases that ship on schedule, and pull requests reviewed for 30+ external contributors. Systems that hold up in production, mentoring through code review, open source by default. That's the job as I understand it.

AI is a tool I ship with, not a personality. The CV Analyzer on this site is a working example (Claude with structured outputs behind a PDF-and-DOCX pipeline) and most of my side projects use an LLM somewhere in the stack. It sits in the toolbox next to Go and PostgreSQL, and it earns its place the same way: by working in production.