What's next?

I joined Kitt close to two years ago as a founding engineer, fresh out of college.

A few weeks ago, the decision was made to wind the company down. It has been a bittersweet experience.

I got to watch something go from a blank figma canvas to a complete corporate travel management platform that handled AED 1.8M+ in confirmed bookings across more than 500 flights and hotels, and then eventually watch that journey come to an end.

We were a team of four, with two engineers, and I led frontend across the product.

Being part of a small team meant my work rarely stopped at implementing tickets.

I was involved in product decisions, spoke with users, questioned flows, worked closely with the founders, and spent more time than I'd like to admit stalking users on PostHog. (For research purposes, obviously.)

We would notice where people hesitated, what they repeatedly struggled with, where our assumptions didn't match reality, and iterate on those observations. Some of those changes led to meaningful improvements in how people used the product.

I really enjoyed that part of the job. I like being close enough to the product, engineering, design, product thinking, and user behaviour don't feel like completely separate disciplines.

One thing I do feel I missed during this period was engineering mentorship.

Joining such a small company immediately after college gave me a huge amount of ownership very early, which I'm grateful for. But there are also things you learn faster when you're surrounded by experienced engineers who challenge your assumptions, review how you think about systems, and expose you to ways of building that you might not discover on your own.

That's something I would value in whatever I do next.

Outside work, I spend a lot of time tinkering.

Sometimes its building an actual product. Sometimes it's an open-source package, a UI experiment, a weird interaction i saw somewhere, a tiny developer tool, an animation, a shader, or something I build over a weekend simply because I want to understand how it works.

I've built quite a few things over the years that I don't maintain anymore. I still like keeping some mention of them around because they represent different stages of what I was interested in and how I learned.

I've also been participating in hackathons since my freshman year of college and have won a few along the way, including ETHIndia 2022, Bajaj Finserv HackRx 2023, and other smaller hackathons.

I've believed in open source for a while.

My relationship with it feels a little more complicated today.

To put your work out there and allow someone else to learn from it,improve it, or build something entirely new on top, the transparency of open source is still one of my favourite things about software.

But lately, parts of the culture around it feel increasingly careless.

People copy someone else's work and publish it without attribution. Projects get poorly reimplemented with AI and presented as original work.

One can spend months thinking deeply about a problem, designing an API, refining an interaction, writing documentation, and building a community around something and another person can reproduce the visible surface of it in an afternoon.

AI didn't create this behaviour, but it certainly made it easier. And I find that a little sad.

The barrier to producing software has fallen dramatically, which is exciting. I just hope the barrier to being thoughtful about somebody else's work doesn't fall with it. And we preserve the culture of curiosity, attribution, craftsmanship, and generosity that made it special in the first place.

I primarily work with TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Node. I'd be happy continuing to work in that ecosystem.

It has great tools, an enormous community, and sits very naturally around the kind of product work I enjoy doing.

Tho, I'm not particularly attached to technologies for the the sake of technologies.

Tools change. If something else is the right tool for a problem, I'm happy to learn it. I've generally been quite good at picking up unfamiliar things when i've needed them.

What matters more to me is the problem, the people, and the quality of what we're trying to build.

I enjoy having a good amount of ownership.

Give me a problem rather than a perfectly specified implementation and I'm generally happier.

I like having room to make decisions, question assumptions, and figure out what the right solution should be.

I also tend to ask a lot of questions.

Questions help me understand why something exists, what constraints actually matter, what assumptions we're making, and whether we're solving the correct problem in the first place.

I'd describe myself as grounded, driven, curious, and reliable.

I care about doing good work. I care about being someone my teammates can depend on. And I care quite a lot about the details that affect what using the product actually feels like.

One thing I think about quite a bit in the AI era is the relationship between speed and quality.

I completely agree that speed matters, especially at an early stage company.

Being able to move quickly, test assumptions, learn from users, and discard things that don't work is incredibly important.

But I don't think speed should come at the cost of quality.

Building quality takes time. Enough time to care. Enough time to make something reliable.

There is also something much harder to measure than shipping velocity: trust.

Trust takes a long & immense amount of effort to build. Once people trust your product, maintaining that trust becomes a daily responsibility. And once it is lost, rebuilding it is incredibly difficult.

Moving faster and shipping more does not automatically mean the product is getting better.

AI makes producing software significantly easier. It makes prototyping faster. It makes experimentation cheaper. It allows tiny teams to build things that would have required much larger teams a few years ago.

But AI doesn't automatically give a team judgment. It doesn't create taste. It doesn't understand when something feels slightly wrong. It doesn't care whether a user trusts the product tomorrow.

Those things still require people who genuinely care about what they're building.

Just to be clear: I'm not a designer. Yet.

I'm learning, but I don't think I currently have the vocabulary, process, or depth to call myself one.

What I do think I have is an eye for good work, for interaction, quality, little details, and perhaps some form of taste that I'm still learning how to articulate.

It's constantly evolving.

I take inspiration from a lot of places. Other software, obviously, but also movies, dreams, architecture, old interfaces, objects around me, signs, packaging, games, machines, and the everyday physical world.

Sometimes an interaction idea begins with something completely unrelated to software.

Even with AI in the picture, I believe building great software and building a successful company around it is still hard.

A lot of implementation is becoming easier.

But figuring out what should exist is still hard. Understanding people is hard. Making good trade-offs is hard. Creating distribution is hard. Building trust is hard. Knowing when to ship and when something isn't good enough yet is hard.

And building a team of people who genuinely care is hard.

Especially for early hires, I think caring disproportionately matters.

I want to work with people who care about what they're building. People with opinions. I want to learn from them and enjoy being around them.

People who move fast without becoming careless. People who care about users rather than only metrics. People who want to build something genuinely good.

I enjoy small teams where engineers are close to users and product decisions aren't somebody else's job.

I want ownership. I want room to experiment. I want to contribute beyond whatever happens to be inside my engineering lane.

At the same time, after spending my first couple of years in an extremely small founding team, I'd love to work around engineers and designers who are better than me at things I want to get better at.

People I can learn from. People who challenge how I think. People whose work raises my own bar.