About Me
Hello!
Thank you for landing on my website and bothering to check out the about me page.
I live in a beautiful beach town in India. It’s a tourist destination that is mostly crowded on the weekends but pleasant and less crowded during the weekdays.
I am a self taught software engineer, devops engineer and cloud engineer bundled into one.
I have 15+ years of experience in building web applications, launching products, leading engineering teams and launching products.
I am well versed in Php, Python, Dart, Mysql, Javascript and Vuejs. You can find a detailed list of my skills in the skills page.
Fascination towards computers
I saw a computer for the first time in 1994 when I was in fifth grade. Our school had a computer lab and the computer teacher would play computer games on it and we would all watch him play.
Later in the seventh grade I moved to a different school where computer science was a subject being taught like any other subject.
I did not understand a word that my computer science teacher was saying as this whole subject was new to me at the time.
We also had computer lab time when we were to write code on the computer using BASIC. A friend of mine guided me to write a code to add two numbers and display the result.
I was fascinated by how a machine responded to my commands. I mean the calculator does the same thing but you do not give commands to the calculator. Here I was writing a few things on the keyboard and the computer did the work for me.
I came home and told my dad that I worked with computers today and how much I liked these machines. I asked him who builds computers and he told me computer engineers build computers.
That was it. I wanted to become a computer engineer. Since then it has been my life goal to become a computer engineer.
The idea of being an entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship was foreign to our family. We are a bunch of people that work 9 to 5 for the entire life. I was the first one to start a business.
I got my first job in Hyderabad, India as a software engineer. One of my roommates was from Bangalore. We used to often discuss life and our long term plans. During one such discussion he brought up the subject of entrepreneurship.
Though it was a brief exchange of ideas, nevertheless an eye opener for me. For the first time my middle class brain opened up to the possibility of starting my own business.
Fun fact: The roommate who brought up the subject of entrepreneurship has a comfortable corporate job in the US.
Becoming an entrepreneur
Sowing the seeds
My first job was not too much fun. I was working as a support engineer for General Motors. It was not what I had dreamed of as a kid. The work made me question why I did my degree in the first place because for the kind of work I was doing as an engineer, a high school diploma was more than enough.
I spent my free time on personal projects that brought me a lot of joy.
I purchased a second hand desktop and used them as servers to host my own website. This small project taught me a lot about setting up servers, installing and configuring linux operating systems, and configuring databases.
Gradually I made changes to the website to host photos so that my sister living in Europe can view the photos (I did not want to upload the photos to flickr).
After I had a good command over setting up the infrastructure I setarted teaching myself how to write code and learnt Php, Laravel, Python, Flask, Django, Mysql, Postgres, Vuejs etc.
Setting up a business
This is when I decided to launch an online restaurant that delivers food to customers after they place an order on our website. It was long before Uber Eats was even a thing.
It was fun running the business and we also got a lot of press coverage as it was a unique idea.
Include press coverage screenshot here.
It was not a financial success nevertheless it taught me a lot of setting up and scaling a business which today I feel was a useful lesson for my career.
About This Website
I love writing and sharing my knowledge and learnings with the whole wide world.
So I started this website and blog to write about topics I love and to showcase my work. I love writing for this blog and have lots of fun doing it.
I do not restrict myself to write seo friendly or optimised articles.
I go freestyle and publish all kinds of blog posts. Sometimes my blog post can be a simple embedded video that I enjoyed watching on Youtube.
If you are interested to read my writings then the Start Here page can be a good starting point.
My current work
I am currently the co-founder and CTO of Geedesk Technologies and KekranMekran Technologies.