I currently lead engineering at WorkHack. I’ve always found coding magical in that you can create things out of thin air and share with the world - and I’m grateful I get to do this for a living.

Before this, I worked at Eightfold AI, Optmyzr (where I built the initial version of HatQuest) and Tioha (as the founding engineer).

People / events / things that impacted me the most (in almost reverse chronological order):

• Lenny’s Podcast - Great curation of hosts to learn frameworks to think about product / culture / engineering.
• Meeting Akshat, joining WorkHack - I first heard about Akshat and his hustle from my roommate in collage - he was tinkering with GPT during it’s early days and exploring use-cases. Little did I know I’d eventually go on to lead engineering at his startup.
• Working with Prasad @ Eightfold - Prasad was the greatest manager I’ve had and constantly pushed me to grow and do greater things. Now at WorkHack, I strive to do the same for my team.
• Working with Manas @ Optmyzr - From Manas I learnt to take quick pragmatic decisions, ship fast and iterate on feedback.
• Working with Felix Johnrose @ Tioha - When I joined as their first engineer, I expected a broad direction and pitch before getting started. Instead, the founders had an extremly detailed product doc, a system design doc describing an event-driven architecture with multiple decoupled services and databaases, and even sequence diagrams for complex transactions. Looking back, thought I don’t believe this was the fastest way to prototype and iterate on feedback, I learnt a ton about documenting technical docs, solving problems at scale and thinking about systems.
• Sean Carol’s Mindscape Podcast - Even without the physics, this is a masterclass in building mental models about the world, and how to think about thinking.
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications - I read this earlier than I should have, and the first time around I didn’t absorb much. But it got me facinated about cloud, distributed systems and databases. It also gave me an early mental model to think about trade-offs in systems and taking pragmatic design decisions.
• MIT App Inventor - I built a school bus tracking app at 12 and eventually founded LateraLogics. Won MIT / Google competetions. Sold the product to schools in Chennai, Bangalore and USA.
• Lego Mindstorm / Arduino / Rasperry Pis: Video 1 | Video 2 | Video 3
• [Q Basic / Visual Basic] - This was my first exposure to programming. Beyond scripts, with VB I learnt to think about program lifecycle and packaging software.
• Playlist of all Steve Jobs keynotes - I binged this after reading Job’s biography, and I remeber often playing scinarions in my head about giving a keynote :p
• Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isacson - The first “build something out of garage that will change the world” story I read.
• Hobby electronics kits from ritchie street.
• Dad’s childhood stories of tinkering with hardware components, building batteries / radios etc.
• Widget Workshop - A computerized “science kit” from the 90s. I still remeber playing around with logic gates, osilators, switches etc., and in a way this was my first glimps into “creating something from thin air”.
• Alice Greenfingers - A game I played as a kid, where you run a farm. 101 on business, risk/reward, and the joy of building something.
• Having access to a computer super early in my life (~3 years).