2025 was a year of reset. At the start of the year, I felt stuck in a time loop, personally and professionally stagnant. After months of brooding and honest conversations with my spouse, Sneha, and a few close friends, I realised my mind was craving a more challenging environment. It’s a feeling that has been brewing for years, and this was the year I finally addressed it.
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Socialisation and Seeking Mentorship
For the last 15 years, I focused so intensely on work that I neglected my social life. While my colleagues are great friends, my “heads down, sleeves rolled up” approach meant my social circle rarely expanded beyond a small group in Bangalore and that too thanks to Sathya.
I started my career because of that one famous TED talk (the one linked above) on multi-touch user interfaces by Jeff Han. The way he presented his experiments and solutions, the sheer awesomeness of simultaneous multiple inputs in user interfaces, it had such a profound effect on my young brain that it kickstarted a latent need to build things from scratch. I went deeper and found a group called NUIGroup, a forum with people from all over the world experimenting and finding ways to build multitouch hardware on their own. Learning from that group, I built a multitouch screen using a projector, camera, and infrared lasers. Simultaneously, I joined a group of people developing SDKs for building apps with multitouch UX. I was one of the core contributors to the PyMT project, which later evolved into Kivy.org. I learned so much being part of that group, thanks to some amazing people and mentors.
It’s been close to 4 weeks since I last wrote about Yantra. Within a week I wanted to wrap up the project, clean it up and then make the repo public. In a classic case of chasing the next interesting project to do, I got distracted with electronics and began 3 separate projects (Will write about it in the future). I was also apprehensive about sharing the code as I kept finding edge cases that I wanted to fix before release. It was an endless cycle of fixing and testing. So I finally had to take a call and release it in whatever state it is in.
