About

I started out programming around late 2019, when I was in 7th grade. Back then I just stumbled across a Python tutorial by freeCodeCamp, and I can distinctly remember how COOL it felt to be able to program a computer.

Around 2020, when COVID was in full swing, I was addicted to watching "Reddit story" videos: a robotic voice narrating a Reddit post over some ambient background. Out of the blue, one of the channels I really liked shut down, so the 14 year old me decided to just build one myself. That became reddit-tts-gui , a Python program that would automatically fetch a Reddit post, run it through TTS, and lay it over ambient imagery. Side note: I guess I foresaw the rise of the automated YouTube content farms of 2026 all the way back then, haha.

I shared it with the world, and this was when I discovered the open-source community. Immediately after posting my project I received some 11 stars on it, and to a 14 year old, it felt incredibly validating for other developers to approve of my work. I received a couple of suggestions and issues as well.

By 2021, online classes had become normal, something I absolutely hated; I wanted to play Minecraft with my friends instead. So I reverse engineered my school's website to automatically mark attendance and sync the schedule of the classes with my personal calendar, so I would never forget them (schoolOS-api-wrapper ). This was the moment when I knew I wanted to do this long term.

Eventually, schools opened back up in 10th, and I realised I absolutely HATED sitting in the classroom. I knew then that I wanted to go ALL IN on programming. Some of my essays from then (on the importance of college) point to my disillusionment with the schooling system, and with the idea that I had to spend the next 6-7 years of my life in a classroom, studying for the next assignment due Monday. I hated that.

I realised that to build products, or heck, even to land a job, I needed to teach myself web dev. All throughout 2022, I spent my time learning web dev through a community known as Frontend Mentor. Here is a repo containing all of my projects from that period: frontend-projects .

Around 2023, I decided that web dev alone wasn't quite feeding my curiosity, and I wanted to go deeper. Coincidentally, during this period I discovered one of George Hotz's streams, where he built twitchslam, an OpenCV-based 3D environment mapper, IN FRONT of my eyes. I got to see how great engineers think and operate, and realised that I too wanted to go deeper. That is when I went deep into C, writing my own compilers, languages, computer vision libraries etc.

This same urge to solve problems and go deeper is what eventually got me to build Varta in 2024, an app for my own school in 12th. Today, I am a software engineer, working on my company's internal knowledge base that can answer product questions better than a PM can.