About Me

I’m Raghav from New Delhi, India 🇮🇳.

I’m a product-focused full stack engineer with over a decade of experience in building products and fiddling with software. I believe in the artistry of programming, valuing both craftsmanship and attention to detail in building beautiful products. My time at early-stage startups has refined my ability to balance code quality with the necessity of shipping fast. I’m tech agnostic and I learn quickly. Lately, I have been particularly interested in programming language theory, compilers, Clojure, Rust, and Elixir.

I love working on side projects and engaging in the yak shaving that often comes with them. All these projects can be found on my Github. My most recent one is an advanced metronome app for musicians called Accelonome.

When I’m not coding - I’m either dusting off my guitar, playing chess, or worrying about my plants dying 🪴. I’m always up to chat about music, cricket 🏏, squat form 🏋️‍♂️, and cold brew.

The journey

RuneScape

My journey in programming began in high school when I started running my own RuneScape¹ private server. For four years, I was part of various private servers, some my own, some where I was part of a team, and others where I offered my coding services. I started by self-hosting the server on my home PC, lying to my parents that the computer isn’t on by just switching off the monitor. I even got into trouble with my ISP due to meaningless DDoS attacks by 13 year old script kiddies. I built websites from scratch, managed community forums, integrated Google ads, and earned money via in-game donations. This is when I realized code is what I want to do in life.

Volunteer work

After writing Java for 4 years (which is 4 years more than how long one should be coding in Java), I taught myself Python and got into web development. I volunteered for Aam Aadmi Party² when it was in its nascent stage and did a bunch of open source work for them for over a year. I closely worked with Anand and primarily worked on Cleansweep, the voter management system that was used for multiple elections. Apart from that, I was involved in doing data extraction from PDFs and building forms for impromptu door-to-door campaigns with offline support.

RedCarpetUp (YC S15)

Following this, I began my first “job” job at RedCarpet, a lending fintech, where I was one of the earliest tech hires. I went on to do Everything Everywhere All At Once (you know how it is at early stage startups) for close to 6 years. In an agile tech team of less than 20 members, I contributed via coding, hiring, mentoring, and dealing with compliance auditors for the NBFC license. I made the majority of architectural decisions in the backend and evaluated security in a holistic way in a monolith with over 400K LOC, querying a 6TB Postgres database. I worked on quite a few interesting projects. Notable among them were a robust double-entry ledger system, temporal database solution for time-traveling³, architecting card infrastructure with real-time authorization, and crafting a comprehensive risk policy framework for analysts to manage experiments in underwriting.

TeamOhana

Leaving RedCarpet was bittersweet but I was looking for a change. After a short break where I visited the hills and the seas, I joined TeamOhana, A US based headcount management service, as a senior software engineer. The shift from a consumer startup to B2B SaaS unveiled a whole new world for me. I joined a team of 6 in engineering, when it was less than six months old. I was responsible for rolling out some of the core product features while witnessing a rapid growth in the number of clients. I built comprehensive dashboards for entire hiring cycle, enhanced the HRIS and ATS integration, and optimized the bi-temporal database queries. Learning Clojure at the job and transitioning from imperative to functional programming was a paradigm shift that opened up new horizons and transformed the way I approach problem-solving.

Sabbatical

Having worked in the industry for a while, I thought I should take a sabbatical and do some professional soul searching instead. The Recurse Center couldn’t have happened to me at a better time. I got into programming language theory, built an interpreter in Clojure, embraced Emacs, learnt a bit of Rust, did a bunch of creative coding, and pair-programmed a ton.