About
I’m a mechanical engineer who drifted, on purpose, into the place where complicated systems meet the people who have to use them.
These days that means three jobs. As a product engineer I build features whole, from the schema and the access rules to the screen. As a game designer I’m making serverBound, where the puzzle is understanding a system well enough to predict it. As a technical storyteller I write explanations of the systems people live inside: payments, packets, data.
They turn out to be one habit. A good data model, a fair puzzle and a clear paragraph all ask the same thing: can someone hold this in their head and act on it?
The path
| 2013 – 2017 | B.Tech, Mechanical Engineering, NIT Rourkela Where I learned to think in systems, constraints and tolerances. |
| 2016 | Design intern, Two by Three Layout, brand identity and print. |
| 2019 | UX auditor and visual designer, MOCQTest Redesigned flows for a competitive-exam platform. |
| 2020 – 2023 | Content engineer, Tetrate Joined at 30 people, left past 100. Docs, courses, videos and small games for Istio and Envoy. |
| 2024 – now | serverBound My detective game. Shown at IGDC 2024 and Indie Games Utsav 2025. |
| 2025 – now | DataFolks A book about data and privacy for Indian readers. |
| 2026 | BestBuds UX and UI consulting for a friendship app. |
| May 2026 – now | Product engineer, SaveSync Web, extension, mobile and the Postgres under all three. |
How I work
- Measure the slow thing. Start from a production trace or a counter, not a hunch, and put the before and after in the commit.
- Write it down while it’s happening. Commit messages are short reports. Case studies keep the wrong turns in.
- Prefer the boring answer when the clever one has a race in it. And say why, so the next person doesn’t rediscover it.
- A wrong suggestion costs more than a missing one. In product, in hints, in autocomplete.
Recognition
- Top 25 globally, OpenIDEO Cybersecurity Visual Design Challenge (the serverBound concept)
- 1st runner-up, BYJU’S × Unity game development hackathon
- Top 22 prize, Spin Your Science at India Science Festival 2026 (Fossilized Algorithms)
- Spoke at GameMaker India Conference 2024, New Delhi
Things I believe but can’t prove
Every infrastructure diagram is secretly a map of an organisation’s communication problems.
The best technical documentation reads like a mystery where the reader is the detective. The worst reads like a microwave manual translated through three languages.
Interests are creatures. I feed them, and occasionally one drags me underground for a season. The ones I’ve fallen into are in rabbit holes.
Colophon
Odia was written for centuries on palm leaf, tala patra. A scribe cut each letter with an iron stylus, then rubbed lamp soot into the cut so it would show. This site borrows that: a leaf-coloured ground, soot-dark ink, and one red, the cinnabar of Pattachitra painting, for anything that needs your attention.
Headings arrive in the Odia letters that carry their sounds and turn over into English. Words with a true Odia equivalent, underlined with dots, show it when you hover. The stone in the background is Odisha sculpture, from Konark and open-access collections: the photograph holds where the stone is thickest and dissolves into typed characters at its edges. Move your pointer near one and more of it turns to text.
The pages have two sides, like the palm leaf and the soot that filled its cuts: the explanation sits on leaf, the work on soot.
Set in Newsreader, Source Serif 4, IBM Plex Mono and Noto Serif Oriya, all served from this domain. The game in the footer is drawn in DUNGEON.mode, datagoblin’s CC0 8×8 textmode font, through a CRT. Built with Astro on Cloudflare Pages. No analytics, no trackers. The layout owes a debt to MEK.txt’s site.
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