Grew up in Jaipur, spent a year obsessing over a JEE rank number, and landed at IIT Bombay to study Civil Engineering. That is not really the part that stuck.
What stuck: a Photoshop habit picked up during COVID, a design instinct that followed, and the realisation that the creative impulse and the problem-solving impulse are the same thing in different materials.
Before the titles
Photoshop, almost every day. Sometimes twice. Photo manipulations posted on Instagram. No promotion. People noticed anyway.
Code was there from school: HTML, JavaScript, PHP. I chose design instead. Reasoning: code translates ideas into machine language. Natural language models would eventually automate that translation. Design required a way of seeing that would take much longer to replicate.
What I'm drawn to
When what ships is exactly what you saw before you started, and it does what it was made for.
When design disappears into the product and the task is all that's left.
Problems that look different on the surface but are the same underneath.
The moment a product stops announcing itself.
To build something from India that the world finds worth using. Not a localisation. Not a layer on top of someone else's product. The original thing.
What doesn't interest me
Products that describe what they are before they show what they do.
Handoffs where the context evaporates somewhere between the meeting and the Jira ticket.
Features that exist because someone asked in a stakeholder meeting, not because anyone needs them.
When I'm not building
Up next
Background covered. Philosophy covered. The work is where it all comes together.