About Me

Hello! This is me. I have no clue what to write here.

I like writing (to myself, to people, for people), reading (scifi, thrillers, space operas, mystery), and playing guitar (acoustic). I also really enjoy travelling and meeting new people.

At the Sensoji Shrine, Japan (March 2024)

Mission Statement

Still figuring it out. Aren't we all?

I believe that my biggest advantage is that I'm someone who is a jack of all trades with strong competency in technology and leadership. I also have informal experience with sales and door-to-door campaigning, giving me an edge with regard to networking and outreach.

Backstory

I started life as a child who was very interested in two things: 1) building and 2) talking. My earliest memories of a computer are me messing around on a really old PC that my dad brought home.

I've been tinkering with electronics, taking things apart and putting them back together, from a very young age. This translated quite well to a budding passion for robotics and working with Arduino when I was younger; I built plenty of small things which I was really proud of.

As I started to get older, I started becoming the guy who took initiative. I learnt how to code in school, and my friend Shreyas and I built a lot of websites for the school and for various projects. At the same time, I started to become extremely interested in Debate, Public Speaking, and Model UN, and I took a break from tech to pursue the same more seriously, and had a somewhat successful career there.

Why Tech?

This all changed sometime around the 11th grade, where, if not for my choosing the science stream, I'd be studying to be a lawyer. Shreyas, Abhay, and I were given the opportunity to attempt to automate our school's cabinet elections, and us being us, volunteered to do it. In a herculean 1-month effort, we all learnt Django, built out the system, deployed it with auth and multiple levels of security, and managed to conduct the school's election with it, taking a 3-week paper-intensive process to a 3-hour paperless one.

We do things not because they are easy but because we don't know how hard they are

In the process of building the Electronic Election System, I had to figure out how to use the database schema design to let multiple students vote concurrently and have multiple "polling booths" run voting in parallel. This was one of my first, and arguably my most memorable, A-ha moment: staring at the Entity-Relationship Diagram on the blackboard, I had my first taste of how awesome the database was.

Ever since then, I've known that I want to be someone who solves problems with technology, to make a positive impact on people's lives. It also happens to be extremely fun :)

When I joined college, I realized that I find the idea of large-scale systems very interesting. The sheer number of moving parts, how well they work together, how well the abstractions mesh with each other, and how you can decompose a large system into multiple smaller subsystems, all of these things fascinated me.

I was also bitten by the bug of distributed systems after watching this talk, and since then, Distributed Systems / Dataflow Systems / Databases have held my interest in a chokehold. Reading the MapReduce Paper was also a big tipping point that convinced me that these are the types of problems that I find really cool, and the types of solutions that I find really cool too.

On Leadership

A huge part of taking initiative is getting it done; initiative has to be put to use once it is taken. Throughout my life, I've been in leadership positions for various things - House Captain and member of the School Cabinet, Head Delegate and Trainer for the school's Competitive Model UN Delegation, and then in college - Founding Club Head for HSP PESUECC, Co-Head of MUNSoc PESUECC, Vice-Chair of ACM PESUECC, Tech Head for the college's cultural fest, and most recently, a Lab Head (1 of 5) of the hallowed PES Innovation Lab.

Each one of these experiences has taught me lessons that I will remain eternally grateful for -

  1. Conflict Resolution
  2. Working in a team and setting ambitious goals
  3. Building accountability and responsibility towards said goals
  4. Understanding the effect of processes on how the work happens
  5. Planning out and executing large-scale initiatives
  6. Understanding and optimizing the division of work for maximum effect and quality

About Me

I'm currently almost done studying Computer Science and Engineering at PES University, with a strong interest in Databases and Distributed Systems. I build projects to understand the same. You can check out my tech side here, and also look at my proof of work or my github.

For an insight into what i'm currently up to and what sort of content I usually consume, check out the gateway.

About this Website

Fair warning - you will find incomplete posts on this website. That's by design.

Here's a map of this website. There's no search, so feel free to use Crtl+F to do so - but in case you want a more curated exploration, here's the rough structure of this site -

The website you're reading right now is built with and generated by Saaru - A Bespoke Static Site Generator written in Rust.

Proof of Work

click here

Uses


Anirudh Rowjee 2023 | Generated with <3 by Saaru