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CTO, Zerodha
Developer / Tinkerer / Absurdist
I am a hobbyist software developer and a tinkerer.
For a brief period, I was in the academia—at the Middlesex University, London—doing research, from where I obtained a BSc. in Computer Science (2008) and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Computational Linguistics (2011).
In 2013, I founded the tech team at Zerodha, now India's largest stock broker, where I have been the CTO ever since. At Zerodha, we have an unconventional team and we work on interesting financial technology projects. I volunteer at FOSS United, a non-profit foundation that we started in 2020 to promote the creation of Free and Open Source Software in India, and Rainmatter Foundation, an organisation that we setup to fund grassroots projects that focus on ecological preservation and climate change.
I identify strongly as an absurdist, a worldview that drives everything I do. I have a bleak view of the future thanks to human-made climate change, humanity's callous penchant for environmental and ecological destruction, and its irrational hatred for fellow beings.
I discovered the idea of code sometime in 2000 after getting a personal computer. Starting with Perl and VB6, I have been going down the rabbithole ever since. These days, I mostly write programs in Go. I released my first FOSS project in 2002—bMachine[1], a blogging platform. Some of my personal projects can be found here.
This website first went online in 2001 and has since undergone numerous iterations. It has lived on F2S, Angelfire, Geocities, Netfirms, and other free webhosts of the yesteryear, whose names I have long forgotten.
The period brings back intense bittersweet nostalgia—the discovery of code, the excitement of connecting to the world over dialup Internet, the gratification of relentless experimentation by trial and error. The heydey of guest books, web rings, CGI scripts, and Matt's FormMail. I loved every bit of it. I keep this website online as a reminder of that past.
That said, I am fortunate to be in a position where what I do every day is exactly what I have unconditionally enjoyed doing for 20 years now—writing software, tinkering, and experimenting.