About

I'm a 20 year-old product designer and front-end engineer studying computer science at Vellore Institute of Technology, India. Born and brought up in Delhi, my high school and undergrad have been a cultural roller coaster.

As a child I loved tinkering with computers. As I progressed through high school, I realized I really liked beautifully designed things. My occasional hobby, when I sat in the backseat of my father's car, was to either spot new cars (well designed) and tell my parents about them excitedly, or notice billboards and comment on the design intricacies. I felt really proud when I started making PowerPoint presentations look really neat and minimalistic, and sometimes they turned out to better than the content of the PowerPoint. That time, I wanted to prove myself to my friends so one thing led to another, and armed with a pirated copy of Adobe Creative Suite, I started learning design.

At VIT, I realized that design is my calling and this is something I want to take up as a career.
Questions were raised by family and friends such as:

• "We wasted so much money for your computer science education, and you want to do design?"
• "Does Indian market even have jobs in design?"
• "Design is for girls!"

Saddened by this mentality coming from my closest, I decided to pursue design independently under the confines of my computer science major. I realized that my background in computer science made designing for Internet much more interesting and practical. After that I went onto do a couple of internships: all at the intersection of design and technology, spoke at various events and conferences and became much more confident in my abilities as a designer. Though I lack formal design education, I try to compensate them with dev skills.

If you'd like to take a look, here's my résumé. I write about design, entrepreneurship and hacking your undergrad education on Quora. I'd love to hear from you, so please do get in touch!

Theme

I am building my portfolio on top of Hexo's implementation of Phantom by @klugjo, though I have tailored it to suit my needs. I am using Proxima Nova as the primary typeface for headings and content. Fontawesome is being used for icons.

I moved to this combination because it was more robust and automated, and I was much more comfortable writing posts in Markdown (rather than writing it in clunky HTML). Heavy inspiration is drawn from my old portfolio design.

Quotes that I believe in

I have a thumb rule in my life and that is to play the biggest game possible. Rate of learning is the highest in that case.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.