Process & experience
Short write-ups on what I built, what went wrong, and what I'd do differently. These mirror the projects on my portfolio—not polished tutorials, just honest notes from the build.
Cloud · 2025
Shipping Watch Party on Azure
The idea started simple: friends watch the same video at the same time. The hard part was playback sync when everyone's network and device behaved differently.
I leaned on Socket.IO for room state and events, Azure Blob for assets, and Metered for voice/video. The biggest lesson was designing reconnect flows—users drop Wi‑Fi mid-movie more often than you'd expect. Deploying to Azure Web Apps taught me to treat environment config and logging as part of the feature, not an afterthought.
AI / Open Source · 2025
Building the Hand Gesture Engine
MediaPipe gave me landmarks quickly, but turning raw points into reliable gestures across lighting and hand sizes took iteration. I focused on configurable thresholds so others could tune behavior without forking the whole library.
Packaging for PyPI was its own project—README clarity, version bumps, and making the API feel predictable mattered as much as the CV logic. Publishing open source pushed me to write code I'd be comfortable maintaining, not just demo scripts.
Android · 2024
Slide Puzzle — touch, state, and polish
Game logic was straightforward; UX wasn't. Invalid moves had to feel impossible without lag, and the board needed to stay readable on smaller screens. Kotlin plus ConstraintLayout kept layout predictable while I experimented with touch handling.
Finishing a small app end-to-end—logic, UI, and edge cases—gave me more confidence than reading another chapter on Android theory alone.
Learning · 2023-2025
Six Microsoft certs alongside a CS degree
The IEP track at Parul lined up with Azure fundamentals, then AI and data certs. Studying for exams while building real projects (Watch Party, gesture engine) meant concepts stuck—Blob Storage wasn't abstract after I'd debugged uploads at 2 a.m.
The experience wasn't about collecting badges. It was learning to read docs, fail practice exams, and connect certification topics to code I was already writing. That rhythm—study, build, ship—is how I want to keep growing.