About me

I'm a software engineer based in India.

I graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering in 2014. Since then, I've worked at tech companies like LinkedIn, Rubrik, Google and, most recently, Thoughtspot, which allowed me to gain experience in a wide variety of tech domains - dabbling in everything from big data processing, to machine learning, to building scalable services and also designing and building UI.

This site is meant to serve as a dumping ground for thoughts I have about anything related to the craft of software engineering.

Things I've built and continue to develop:

• open-playground: An open-source chat playground for local LLMs (like OpenAI's dev playground, but for local models).
• casepro.club: An AI-powered case interview prep platform.
• hurdle: A more difficult version of the popular word game Wordle.
• ledgr.money: A privacy-focused expense manager; demo at demo.ledgr.money.

You can reach me via Twitter (aka X) @prvnsmpth or LinkedIn.

Tools of the Trade

I like to try out new programming tools from time to time, but in recent times I've been leaning towards using the following:

• Kotlin for the backend. An unconventional choice for many - but the developer experience (especially with IntelliJ) is just so good. Kotlin is severely underrated for use outside the Android ecosystem.
• Svelte/SvelteKit for the frontend. Wrote a couple apps in React, and the experience with Svelte is much better.
• Postgres for the database.
• Docker for containerization.
• Hetzner for reliable, cost-effective bare metal servers.