The long way around.
Mechanical Engineering degree. Self-taught developer. A startup that took three years and everything I had. A job that didn't fit. Then the one that did.
Gaming — before I knew what I was learning
I grew up on mobile and console adventure games. The kind where you notice the level design before the story. I'd finish a game and immediately start thinking about what I'd change — the pacing, the layout, the rules. I didn't know that was design thinking. I just thought it was being annoying.
First PC, first builds
First year of engineering. First real machine: HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop. I installed everything I'd heard people use — Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects — not for any project, just to see what they did. Picked up Monkeytype, got past 100 WPM. Then installed Unity, taught myself C#, built an arcade-style game with hand-drawn Photoshop assets. No course, no bootcamp. The game shipped. I learned that I could pick up whatever I needed if I were willing to be confused for a while.
A startup, accidentally
A friend saw my Photoshop work and saw a market. We started selling custom bike wraps — I handled design, he handled business. When that got repetitive, I wrote JSX automation scripts to generate mockups. Then the business needed a website. Hired a developer — didn't work out. So I spent a few weeks learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, then Next.js. Built the site myself. Debugging production issues alone at 2 AM with nobody to ask was an education in architecture, error handling, and reading documentation properly.
Building a real platform
Window pillar wraps broke through. The team grew to ten. I became the sole engineer behind the entire platform. The vision shifted constantly — 3D garage configurator, marketplace, custom offer engine, B2B — so the system had to be flexible enough to support whatever came next. The admin panel ended up handling inventory management, multi-domain management, offer engines, customer journey analysis, A/B testing, review moderation, personalised fulfilment flows, and multi-store shipping. It had most of what Shopify offers a single store — but built around our specific workflows and designed to feel simple.
Infra at scale, on a budget
60,000+ monthly users. AWS bill under $2 (S3 + CloudFront). MongoDB under $9/month. Vercel at $20/month. Getting there wasn't straightforward — I spent weeks finding the right config for MongoDB connection pooling on Vercel's serverless architecture. Payment failures from Razorpay's upstream bank downtimes led me to build multi-orchestration with PayU as a fallback. Then Vercel raised their pricing — our bill jumped to $116, optimized down to $75, but the team decided to migrate to Shopify. Grow faster, spend less, fewer payment incidents. It was the right business call.
Voltas — the wrong fit
After graduating, I joined Voltas as a billing engineer. It was the kind of role where you hold your head with a headache every day at a desk doing work that has nothing to do with what you're good at. I'd code during lunch breaks. After hours, I'd work on MaddyCustom. I was actively looking for a software engineering role, but a Mechanical Engineering degree and a weak public portfolio made it harder than it should have been.
Blitzit — the right one
Blitzit gave me a take-home assignment. I solved it. Did the interview. Got the offer. Now I work as a full-stack software developer — the kind of work I'd been doing for years, except now it's the job title too. I integrated Asana's two-way sync from scratch, built a map server, implemented a notification system with BullMQ and Redis queues, debugged and improved the Notion and Google Calendar integrations, and continue to ship complex features every week.
The exit
I wasn't interested in managing a Shopify store. What I cared about was building — the systems, the logic, the architecture decisions. So I stepped away from MaddyCustom. It was three years of shipping under real constraints — real users, real money, real outages. Nights of two hours of sleep. Trade-offs between grades and uptime. I leaned in harder than was probably healthy. But it made me the engineer I am now, and I don't regret the exchange.