In 2005, when I was in 6th grade, my father started an assembly business. As his first hire, I would jump around the house and ping him to understand how he assembled PCs and installed software. Since then, computers have been a constant in my life.
The first breakthrough for me in software development was becoming a senior contributor to the XDA community in 2012. Back then, I helped with patching and releasing ROMs for my Android phone. Over the next few years, I was keen to get involved with open source technologies & understood the importance of community. I have been a GSOC student & mentor on an open-source scientific plotting tool developed by KDE. Furthermore, I have passively contributed to multiple projects, such as Typo3, Firefox, Python, EasyWikiRead, etc.
In addition to open source, I also loved creating products that would solve people's problems. When I was in my first year of college, I launched an app that helped people order food online. The first quarter saw 100+ restaurants onboard and 50+ transactions per day. The lack of business acumen prevented us from scaling it, but it laid the foundation for the startup bug.
As a software engineer, I worked for Zomato and Adobe for about 3 years before trying to build something on my own. Many Indian clients needed help digitizing their processes, so I saw an opportunity in business process automation. My company built modules/apps which could be used as plug-in/plug-out styles to digitise a multitude of processes. DLF, Cigna, Max Bupa and others have created a number of processes using our software. After a successful exit, I went on to build an ed-tech startup to help small business owners upskill.
Almost a year back I started exploring web3, the ethos and strong community brought back the nostalgia from my open-source days. I instantly started digging deeper. My focus has been on studying the underlying tech, learning Solidity, how to interact with smart contracts, wallets etc. As part of a project to help people invest and track their DeFi investments, I started writing scripts to fetch data from multiple protocols on both EVM compatible & non-compatible chains. Today I feel I am at a point where I can again find a mentor in web3 who can help me grow at a faster pace so that I can contribute to building the infrastructure that will help the next generation of web3 Dapps and DAOs.