How I got here.
A short story, a few values, and the things on my desk right now.
I build software for people, not stacks.
I’ve been writing code since school took the form of half-broken adapters in my hands. Now I do it for a living — full-stack web apps, mostly. The kind clients can use, not just look at in a slide deck.
It started, I think, with a screwdriver. I was seven and convinced our broken kitchen radio was fixable if I could just see inside it. I was wrong about the radio. I was right about wanting to see inside things.
I picked up programming late by hometown standards — somewhere around fifteen, in a Python book my older cousin had abandoned mid-chapter. The first thing I built that worked was a script to organise my chaotic Downloads folder. Then a calculator. Then a small web app for a friend’s school project. Each one was bigger than the last; each one taught me what I’d been doing wrong on the one before.
College at LDRP cleaned up the gaps — proper data structures, proper databases, proper opinions about what a normalized schema should look like. But the real learning happened in the freelance work I started taking on in my third year. Clients don’t grade you— they either come back, or they don’t.
These days, I split my time between Tech Ahir (where I get to ship real things to real users) and freelance work for NGOs and small businesses that need software more thoughtful than a template. I take photographs on the weekends. I read more than I write.
A few things I try to hold onto, in roughly the order I learned them.
Boring is good.
Postgres, Node, REST. Most projects don't need a new framework — they need someone willing to think about the schema for an hour.
Ship the ugly version.
Then ship a better one. Code that's running is worth more than code that's perfect on a branch nobody's merged.
Read the error.
Most bugs are explaining themselves clearly. The problem is usually that I was too eager to start guessing before reading the stack trace.
Users over users.
The real ones — not the ones in our heads. Talk to them, sit with them, watch them use the thing. Then change the thing.
What’s on my desk this week — the work, the words, the sound.
Lines that have changed how I write code, or how I think about it.
The condensed version.