I build the things I wish existed.

It started with a problem I'd carried around for years. I had written JEE Main and JEE Advanced, and I knew the real learning happens after the paper: in the analysis of where the marks went. I wanted every CAT previous-year paper in the exact exam interface, with that analysis built in. I didn't have the knowledge or the resources. In April 2025 I started anyway.

I built it alongside my job, so it was slow. At first I wasn't sure I could build it at all. Day after day, month after month, the confidence came, and Catalyst became a faster, more useful and better-looking product.

Then I hit the real wall. The papers only existed as PDFs, and Catalyst needs them as structured data. I'm one person; copying thousands of questions by hand was never an option. And there was a second gap I hadn't planned for. Catalyst was meant to be a test-and-score platform, but a paper without solutions isn't enough.

So I built an internal pipeline. OCR reads each page. A language model cleans up what OCR gets wrong. I started with Gemini and moved to DeepSeek, which does the whole job better. Papers before 2021 were longer than today's exam, so DeepSeek picks the 68 most relevant questions out of roughly 100 to match the current pattern; papers from 2021 on already match it. Once the papers were in, I extended the same pipeline to write a solution for every question.

Getting the papers right took two to three months of evenings and many rounds of iteration. It's the part of Catalyst I'm proudest of, because no one sees it. Today there are 40 official CAT papers from 1991 to 2025, each with solutions. Now the work is growth: I've shared it in every WhatsApp group I know, and I'm building its Instagram with short videos.

While I was building Catalyst, an opportunity came from family. My cousin brother — my jiju — runs Purple Mango Media, a marketing agency. They needed an internal tool to run the agency's day-to-day work, and he asked me to build it. That became Nebula.

Nebula now carries an entire influencer campaign from start to finish: finding creators, shortlisting them, getting the client's approval, running the campaign, paying creators and generating the final report.

It's been a long build and it isn't finished. I talked with the people who use it every day, watched where it slowed them down, and improved it over many rounds of changes. Adoption was its own lesson: when people didn't use the tool fully, the gaps showed me how they actually work. Each round makes Nebula fit that work a little better.

A side note: I also built the agency's current website, purplemangomedia.in.

My friends and I decided to start working out, and to hold each other to it: every Sunday, everyone shares a progress photo. Those are personal photos, so a group chat didn't feel right. I built squad. — a private app where only our group sees the check-ins.

Once we were training, I wanted a plan that was personal to me. Amadora builds each day's workout around the time I have, shows an animated figure to follow for every move, and asks how each set felt to decide tomorrow.

For years I tracked money in an ad-supported expense app. It worked, but it didn't think about money the way I do. I wanted to see how much goes to needs, to wants and to investments. Now that I knew how to build, I built my own: Assess, an Android app shaped around my own philosophy.

My biggest fear was losing the history I'd logged since 2022. So Assess imports it: every old record came across, and the insights now run on years of my own data.

Most of my payments go through Google Pay, so I recently added the shortcut I wanted most. On any payment, tap Share screenshot and pick Assess. The amount, date and payee are filled in for me; I adjust the category or note if needed and save.

I build with Claude Code, and I wanted to keep going away from my desk. Aceious opens a real terminal on my laptop from my phone: pick a project, start Claude, and hand the session to the Claude app on my phone through Remote Control. It also holds the notes I jot down for each project, ready to share with Claude.

To make it private, I used Tailscale to put my laptop and phone on their own network. It works like a personal VPN, so nothing is exposed to the internet.

Someone close to me relied on a popular period tracker that came with ads and a premium paywall. Instead of depending on it, I built Ryuo. It predicts from your own dates, explains the research behind every number, keeps everything on the phone, and can import data from the old app.