About me

Let's rewind to a bedroom in India, a kid squinting at a glowing monitor, and what can only be described as the worst movie-download website ever built by human hands.

No, seriously. The design was catastrophic. The layout sat somewhere between "fever dream" and "ransom note." But here's the thing, it worked. People could click buttons and stuff would happen. To a teenage me, that was basically sorcery. That rickety, embarrassing little site is long gone (thankfully, no code survives to haunt me), but the spark it lit? Still very much burning.

How it actually started

From there, things escalated quickly, as they tend to when you're the kind of person who opens documentation for fun. I started with C, then Python snuck in, then C++ showed up uninvited. I spent more evenings than I'd like to admit watching tutorials, breaking things, fixing them, breaking them again in a new and creative way, and slowly realizing that what I actually loved wasn't just writing code. It was building things people could see, touch, and use. The visual, the interactive, the moment a UI clicks into place and just feels right. That's the thing that got me.

React came into my life and genuinely changed how I thought about building interfaces. Then Next.js showed up and I haven't really looked back since. Pair that with TailwindCSS for styling and Firebase for data, and you've got the stack I'd reach for at 2 AM on a personal project, which if you know developers, is the real test of what you actually believe in. I've worked with MySQL, Supabase, Django, and a handful of other tools along the way, but there's something about that combination that just clicks for me.

Where things are now

The career has been its own kind of adventure. Going from shipping my first professional lines of code to now leading an engineering team, reviewing architecture, running sprint planning, and somehow becoming the person who leaves the comments on pull requests instead of nervously receiving them. That shift from "me versus the bug" to "us versus the problem" is a genuine change in how you think, and nobody really warns you it's coming. Turns out leading people is a completely different skill set from writing code. I love it though, because there's something uniquely satisfying about watching a team ship something great and knowing you played a part in making that happen, not just the feature.

Outside the terminal

When I'm not in a codebase, I'm probably writing about one. I run a blog and post on DEV whenever I've figured something out the hard way and want to spare someone else the pain. Outside of that, I'm a sci-fi person through and through, movies, series, the kind of stuff that makes you stare at the ceiling afterward thinking about time and consciousness and whether any of this is real. Important questions. I've largely traded video games for documentation at this point, which I'm told says something about me as a person.

The honest version of all this is simple: I genuinely love the work. Not in a "it pays the bills" way, but in a "I will hyperfocus on this until 1 AM and not notice" way. Good design matters. Performance matters. Writing code that the next person, or future me, can actually understand matters. I care about building things that work and feel like they were made by someone who gave a damn.

If any of that resonates, or you just want to argue about tech stacks, I'm on Twitter or reachable at me@j471n.in. You can also browse everything I've built at j471n.in or dig through the code on GitHub.

And yes, I'm still a little proud of that terrible movie-download website. We all start somewhere.