The record
Timeline
Milestones in the order they happened. The main quest is the through-line; the others are niches.
1996
Birth
Pune. The opening move, filed here so the rest of the board has somewhere to start from.
2001
2007
Badminton era
Courts after school, smashes that arrived a half-second late, and the discovery that footwork is just chess with sweat.
2010
Rubik's cube era
Sub-30 seconds personal best. A summer spent learning that algorithms are just choreography you can hold in your hands.
2011
Maths era
Geometry, trigonometry, complex numbers, linear algebra — the year the symbols stopped being homework and started being a language worth being fluent in.
2015
Joined the robotics club
Walked into the VIIT robotics club with no idea how to solder and left four years later having rebuilt the same motor driver a dozen times.
2016
Robocon: beat IIT Delhi
The motor driver held for a full match. That single fact is the whole story of the season.
2018
Electronics & Telecommunications degree
BE in ENTC. Four years of circuits, signals, and the growing suspicion that the interesting problems lived one layer below the syllabus.
2019
To Charlotte, North Carolina
First landing in the US. Humidity that argued with Pune’s, and a new city that had to be learned from the ground up.
2020
Wrote a shell that handles signals
Fork, exec, and the awkward honesty of Ctrl-C. A small program that made Unix feel less like folklore.
2020
A year spent inside systems
A shell, a cache simulator, and a GPU benchmarking study, all in the same twelve months. The year the abstractions stopped being abstract.
2020
GPU architecture comparison
Benchmarking generations of GPUs until the marketing slides and the silicon disagreed in public.
2021
Rewrote memory management in xv6
Took the page allocator apart in MIT’s teaching kernel and put it back together differently, which is the fastest way to understand one.
2021
ECE master’s degree
Graduate work in electrical and computer engineering — the formal half of what the robotics benches had already been teaching informally.
2021
To Los Angeles, California
West coast light, longer freeways, and a city that treats engineering as one industry among many rather than the whole story.
July 2021
Romeo Power
Software engineer on battery management for electric commercial vehicles. The first job where a bug could set something on fire.
2022
Long walks as debugging
The unofficial method: leave the desk, walk until the bug explains itself, come back and type what the pavement said.
2023
Shipped thermal-runaway prediction
A model that reads a pack’s telemetry and says something is about to go wrong, early enough for that to matter.
2023
Kande pohe, filed properly
A slow-morning recipe written down so it would stop living only as muscle memory.
2023
Test cricket is the correct format
Five days, no shortcuts, and the rare sport that rewards boredom tolerance as a skill.
2024
Nikola Corporation
Next-generation battery management systems — the same class of problem as Romeo, at the scale of a manufacturer still inventing its vehicle.
2024
Blade Runner 2049
A film about memory and manufacture that earned a full review rather than a shrug at the credits.
2024
Triple schezwan, from the notebook
Rice, noodles, and fried chicken under one gravy — three preparations that only meet at the plate.
2024
Vegetable manchurian, from Notes
Double-fried cabbage balls and a dense sauce — squeeze the mix, work fast, do not linger.
2024
Pav bhaji, draft 2
Homemade masala, three pastes, and a second-pan temper — the notebook version that halved the party and kept the butter.
2024
The Pragmatic Programmer, revisited
A reread that landed differently after a decade of shipping firmware into things that can catch fire.
2025
Back to Pune
Same problems, different timezone. Closer to the people the work is meant to be for, and to the city the story started in.
2025
On hypothetical questions
An essay about the questions that are useful precisely because they cannot be answered cleanly.
2025
Stealth robotics startup
Building in quiet. Robotics again, this time without a club room or a competition brief — just the product and the constraints.
2026
The Dark Side of the Moon
Forty-three minutes with no slack in them, filed under Music as a review rather than nostalgia.
2026
Started this paper
Somewhere to put the things that were only ever explained once, in a conversation, and then lost.
Nothing filed on this quest yet. The main quest is still the through-line; this niche is waiting on a milestone worth marking.