year two, and an actual job

year one was mostly about saying yes to everything. year two was about actually finishing things, which turned out to be a completely different skill.

the hackathons

StatusCode2 came first. we built aura, a health vault app with medical image analysis and record storage baked in. the app was okay, nothing crazy. the actual main event was the CTF mini game running on the side. we locked in on that instead and won it, which is still funny to me. the side quest went better than the main quest.

then ETHGlobal new delhi, which is easily the best thing i've built so far. deckzero, a blockchain based ARG inspired by AIB. and we didn't just build it, we filmed an entire trailer for the thing. a whole trailer. T_T. the venue was ridiculous too, the kind of place where you look up mid commit and remember where you are. peak stuff.

somewhere in there was also a PWA for turning city discovery into actual hangouts, pitched at BPlan at Kshitij, IIT Kharagpur and at Hult Prize HITK. that one's in the projects section too.

although if i'm being honest the best part of Kshitij was probably us playing valorant and losing terribly. fun af.

the club stuff

ran valorant and bgmi at Dakshh as coordinator of Spawn, the gaming club at HITK. first time being on the organising side of an event instead of just turning up for it, which is a lot less glamorous than it looks and a lot more fun than it sounds.

was also game dev lead at Google Developer Groups on Campus HITK this tenure. hosted an auditorium session on breaking into game dev. we opened with everyone competitively playing games i'd published myself, went through game jams, shipping on itch.io and actually getting into the indie dev community instead of just watching it, then closed with a hands on unity walkthrough. standing in front of a room talking about the game dev phase years after it happened was a strange full circle.

the job

and then six months at Unencumbered Interactive as an SWE, building yap and iykyk. a lot of react native, a lot of native android, a lot of kotlin.

this is the part that actually changed how i think. everything before it was a hackathon build or a jam entry, things that only had to survive a demo. these were real apps on real stores, and a crash stops being a bug you shrug at when there are thousands of people on the other end of it. you start caring about crash rates and analytics and what happens on the one device you don't own. the full writeup of what i did there is on the projects page.

genuinely insane year. easily the most i've ever built in twelve months, and the first one where some of it shipped to people who have no idea who i am.

there's a shorter, bulletier version of all this on linkedin if you want it:

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