- ICPC: Within a year, I went from the new kid in college to becoming one of the best at competitive programming, teaming up with best people in school, grinding hard and becoming one of the best teams in the world. We went to the ICPC world finals twice (Beijing and Porto). I could have gotten much better but had diminishing returns and at some point the fun of the game went away. It did open a lot of doors and unintentionally became a great resume filter. Taught me early on the importance of speed and being with the right people.
- Haskell: After getting good at algorithms and sport programming, I got interested in haskell, primarily because of math and beauty. That also eventually got me interested in compilers and programming language theory (I love meta things!). I did it out of pure curiosity (how many people have actually heard of haskell jobs?) and it led to a super fun part time job at a haskell shop (Juspay, big fintech in India) where I worked a purescript → haskell transpiler among other things. I also taught Haskell to roughly 200 people for a crypto edtech a few years later.
- Relicx.ai: I worked as a founding engineer with a very high talent density team on a ridiculously tough mission (automate frontend testing in the pre-GPT era). We would sometimes end up working 14 hours a day and had a minimum of 10 weekly commit mandate.
- Built the best (no data loss, minimal impact on customer app performance) browser recording SDK in the world (much better than logrocket/fullstory what have you).
- Built a low-latency DOM-streaming interactive browser. This was used in the relicx app to create tests while interacting with a browser running the cloud.
- All of this was while teaching Haskell part time at 5 AM in the morning and juggling a very tough personal life. Handling stress is like a muscle, once you’ve survived a situation like that for ~2 years, everything seems so easy coming out of that. This is of course not to glorify taking up herculean impossible tasks— just what the life demanded from me and I stepped up.
- Changing core personality: I was mostly a shy kid who would only talk to a few people. Talking to and influencing people, especially strangers, was really not my strong suit. Within a few weeks of being in SF and intentionally putting myself in uncomfortable situations, I became insanely good with people and dealing with strangers— not just tech bros but a truly diverse set of people. I’m so grateful that I was able to let myself be the real me and become an extrovert. I also pushed myself and became good at dancing. I learnt how to style myself. This was the most life changing period for me.
In retrospect, these things seem very trivial to me and I want to work much harder on much more challenging things. What I would like to do next:
- Scale a company from 0/1 to a world class generational company
- Become one of the best engineers in the world.
- Read 100 AI research papers and understand AI enough to be able to contribute.
- Read a lot.
- Write words that influence people.
- Build muscle body connection, get fit, become a great swimmer.
- I’m a good dancer, I would like to train and become a great one.