About

The forbidden machine

In the early 2000s my family got its first computer: a beige CRT monstrosity with a floppy drive. My older brother claimed it on arrival: "You don't know anything. You'll mess it up. Don't touch it."

That sentence built my career. I became a ghost in my own house, sneaking onto the PC whenever he stepped away, deep in DirectX configs trying to make Need for Speed: Most Wanted run on a Core 2 Duo with no graphics card. The system would freeze and die mid-chase; I still remember a 30-minute Heat-5 pursuit crashing right at the finish. I replayed it until I'd mastered the game. Then friends started asking me to finish it for them. I once beat it on a friend's iMac in exchange for a Netherlands-Aruba coin for my collection.

I made a vow back then: I'd become the person people ask about technology.

The discipline arc

I studied civil engineering (hard subjects, by choice), then spent two years preparing for the GATE exams in Hyderabad on a 3 AM routine: wake, study hall, Fajr, study, Zuhr, study, Asr, Maghrib, Isha, sleep at 8:30, repeat. The rank never came (COVID froze the second phase), but the discipline did. And on those walks between the study hall and the mosque, listening to my teacher's talks, I found the other thread of my life: seeking the deeper meaning behind things. I have zero regrets about those two years.

Two days on a construction site told me the truth: the work wasn't mine, and there were no tech nerds to vibe with. During lockdown, a senior tech leader in our community had me beta-test his app and was stunned by the depth of the interaction bugs I logged. "You studied civil engineering, yet you're this good at software?" On the highway to Chennai to ask him how to become a developer, my best friend sent me a job description with a title I'd never seen: Product Designer. Reading it felt like my whole childhood had been a syllabus for a job I didn't know existed.

I came home, packed away four years of civil engineering, and taught myself product design in a three-month, 3 AM-discipline sprint. I landed my first role as the founding designer at a startup: first employee, wearing every hat (design systems, marketing, video, user journeys).

Why this makes me a better designer

Rooting phones at 18 taught me systems, constraints, and user friction long before Figma did. Refusing default experiences is the whole job: the locked PC, the stock launcher, the dying laptop, and now the way design teams work without AI. I've never accepted a default. I re-flash them.