career history

2026, I decided to dive deep into ML research and explored some fascinating ideas like fractional quantization, reinforcement learning for Balatro, and finetuning Llama. Over the summer, I joined Confluent to contribute to Apache Kafka (more on that here).
2025, I joined Fortinet. Working on Postgres replication for FortiPhish was my real introduction to database internals and distributed systems. Over the summer, I met some amazing people through hsrhackerhouse, and shipped outpilot.ai as a freelancer. Late 2025, I got into Duke :)
2024, Continuing my involvement in open source, got me into Google Summer of Code with Rocket.Chat, where I built a custom Domain Specific Language and a compiler to generate Next.js websites. I also got the opportunity to collaborate with the amazing people at PayloadCMS (acq. by Figma now).
2023, I landed my first internship at Zscaler. I got the chance to work on ZCoder, an early dev tooling AI initiative at Zscaler. I built and shipped its VS Code extension, heavily inspired by the popular tools at the time like Tabnine and Codeium (devin now). This was also the year I fell down the open source rabbit hole. I started contributing heavily to Formbricks, which was my ultimate breakthrough in navigating massive codebases. One of the features I shipped ended up being loved and used by Debian for one of their conferences shortly after :)
2021 to 2022, I read Pyjama Profit, which inspired me to learn web development. My dual interest in coding and entrepreneurship pushed me to join the tech team at the E Cell VIT student club. I'm honestly glad these early years were pre LLM, I got a taste of doing things the hard way. I still remember thinking that creating a 2D RPG for a game theory segment of an event was insanely challenging, but pulling it off and watching 500+ people play it was one of the most rewarding feelings ever.