About me

My story with the web started with earning my first money designing custom MySpace layouts as a kid — and that taste of getting paid for something I loved doing is what turned it into a profession. By 2008, at 16, I was freelancing properly, building sites for a stream of different clients and projects.

Since then I've worked across the stack: backend in PHP, Node and Python, frontend in React (and sometimes Vue), always on a foundation of HTML/CSS and JavaScript/TypeScript.

In 2016 I made a deliberate switch from founder to employee — trading my own business for a seat inside other people's, because I wanted to see how companies actually work from the inside. Since then I've worked inside startups and companies of very different sizes and stages, and picked up something different from each one.

Founder at heart

That detour was never meant to be permanent. My future is as a founder — I love solving problems, I love building things, and, weirdly enough to most people, I love the business side of it too: figuring out how to turn something useful into something sustainable.

Right now, that ambition finds its best expression at Buffer, where I get a taste of both worlds — the autonomy of running my own thing, paired with leaders I'm still learning a huge amount from.

Beyond the code

None of the above is really the point, though. First and foremost I'm a dad and a husband, and a diaspora Tamil — fluent in Tamil alongside English and German. That last part is what I care about most outside of work: preserving and sharing Tamil language and culture through content and technology, helping disconnected Tamils rediscover their roots, and opening our world up to anyone curious enough to understand us. That's the closest thing I have to a personal mission statement.

None of these pieces is unique on its own, but the combination is. Growing up between cultures, thinking and dreaming in a language most of the people around me don't speak, while also being the person who builds things in code, gives me a perspective that's hard to come by in either world alone.

A few things I've come to know are non-negotiable for me:

• Grow by helping others grow.
• Always be free.
• Be mindful of others and yourself.
• Never stop learning.
• (My) people matter.

Outside of all that, staying fit is non-negotiable — it started as an attempt to gain some weight and turned into a lifestyle. The kitchen is where I get creative: I'm slowly working towards a five-course meal that merges Tamil, Japanese and Italian cooking into something that's entirely mine. And I read — and lately, write — fiction, because following a good detective or adventurer around for a few hundred pages is still the fastest way I know to switch my brain off.