Born in London, UK.

Moved to Hyderabad, India.

I've always been driven by curiosity. As a child, I immersed myself in everything from writing stories and poems to singing, acting, debating, painting, practicing taekwondo, and playing a variety of sports. I also spent countless hours reading, a habit I've carried into adulthood that continues to shape my perspective today.

I started playing around with computers. I locked myself out of my laptop after following a misleading YouTube guide on how to change passwords through CMD and had to hack into it with my Dad's help to get it working again. Looking back, this was THE event that got me interested in computing. I eventually went on to buy a course on cybersecurity and penetration testing from Udemy. While the course didn't really give me enough knowledge to design any novel exploits (essentially acting as a script kiddie guide for the most part), it introduced me to the world of Linux, networking and operating systems, which I explored further on my own after finishing the course. I finally had an idea of how computers worked but it wouldn't be until about 6 years later that I would learn how to actually build those systems on my own (for example, this was the stage where I knew that data was sent over the network in packets but I had no idea what EAPOL or PMKID meant).

I had a few novel website ideas that I wanted to bring to life. I began learning web development from Dr. Angela Yu's famous course on Udemy. It took time (there was no AI back then!), and after exploring different tech stacks I finally settled on XAMPP as my tool of choice.

Alongside web development, I began exploring how I could build tools that would run on my laptop instead of on a webpage. Using Python, Perl, Batch and Bash I was able to build a lot (hundreds!) of basic utilities that could perform useful tasks. While most people learning programming build dummy applications like tic-tac-toe or number guessing games, I only ever focused on building programs I would find useful (because that's why I learnt programming in the first place!). This approach gave me exposure to different technologies and systems ranging from macros to cryptography to file systems and helped me find purpose in what I built.

Revisited web dev with the intention of making websites that would provide services to users around the globe and hopefully prove to be a successful business model. I experimented with multiple different ideas. In the end, two of them went live.

• I built a website called NCCBooks that residents of my apartment complex could use to order books from the home library my brother and I started. The website was a great success and operated for about a year before we closed the business.
• ToastMail is an email reminder app I built back when I didn't have my own phone yet and wanted a way to remind myself of things via email. At the time I wanted to grow it into a popular service, but I realised towards the end that the visual quality wasn't really up to par (it was my first major XAMPP project, after all) and being rather burnt out by the end of it, I never really attempted to have it gain traction.

Decided I needed to learn more about business, marketing and UX as well as focus on health, so I took a break from development as a whole to dedicate time to self-improvement.

Enrolled in university at IIIT Hyderabad for a degree in B.Tech Computer Science + MS in Computational Linguistics. In my first year at college, I experimented with a few ideas and built a few tools (most unpublished) but was primarily focused on getting settled into college and my studies there.

I wanted to try working on web development projects for real-world clients, so I set up a freelance profile over the summer and managed to secure my first gig within a week. I was tasked with building a website for an upcoming restaurant in my neighbourhood and successfully delivered the product ahead of schedule. The value of everything I had learned during my time off became evident as I noticed that compared to the websites I'd built previously, these were

1. Much more aesthetic in terms of design and user experience
2. Far more efficient in terms of development process and optimization
3. Thoughtfully made to maximize user conversion and satisfaction

While developing the website for a client was a good experience, the ROI on time invested freelancing wasn't satisfactory, so I didn't take any gigs after that.

My second year at college was incredibly intense, so unfortunately, while I was able to do some work on various projects, I couldn't dedicate the time to see them through.

Building and innovating for fun and fulfillment 😵

1. Exploring software systems and cybersecurity but with a slower, more methodical approach where I craft tools from scratch by delving deep into the underlying principles and mechanisms.
2. Developing applications and services with the goal of building useful systems that provide value to both users and myself.
3. Research revolving around GNNs and NLP.