Assume data is on multiple different sites, PDFs. Let's design a HLD solution to aggregate the data, put it in a vector db, inferencing with light LLM.

Sites could be offical govt. ones, news article. Or data could be gather through people via small webapp.

I spent my weekend building the most unnecessary portfolio feature - a real dark mode 🔦

your cursor is now a flashlight. everything else? complete darkness. move around to read. that's it.

why? please don't ask that question :)

you can try it out on my website - https://www.pankajtanwar.in/ (theme switch on top right - works better in desktop though)

If you liked this, feel free to check out some of my other weird and fun side projects https://www.pankajtanwar.in/side-hustles

would love to connect with you at https://twitter.com/the2ndfloorguy

Someone recently recommended writing my story here. So here it is. (If you know who I am, please don’t reveal my identity. Send a message if you want to clarify)

I recently passed a net worth of 2 million dollars excluding my houses in India and the US. I graduated from a Tier 3 university (2010-14). I am 31.

I am from a lower middle-class family and all my school life was a pretty bad student averaging around 50% to 60% and just enough to pass classes. Many times I remember even failing in 1 subject in the term exams.

I will write my journey here. I am not posting from my real reddit account because that username can be searched quite easily to find me.

1. My class 10th and 12th CBSE results were good enough. In general, I was never a good student and I was not good at anything. Not studies, not sports, nothing. I knew my life was going to be pretty average. On top of that, teachers were pretty biased towards sudents who were good in studies so confidence tanked all my school life. I was convinced I was good for nothing. It was so bad that I had no dreams of my own but everytime I saw something nice on TV, I used to dream about that for my friends who were good in studies.

2. AIEEE was above 1 lakh and (of course) I had nothing in IITJEE. I got admission into a tier 3 college in West Bengal. Before going to college, my dad told me we didn't have much as a family. So, if I want a good life, I am solely responsible to work hard and get it. So, I was determined to work hard finally in my life when I started college. In my college, there was no one to ask or look up to. Mostly there was a lot of ragging, people having fun doing nothing or just drinking or smoking. I was scared about my future.

3. I was curious about the difference between our college and IITs on why they had companies like Google, FB, etc come to hire and we had Wipro, Infosys, etc. I understood about other branches but CS was just mostly programming, so I was curious. I found a school senior who went to IIIT Hyderabad. He told me that I should go to SPOJ and Codechef and solve problems. That is all I need. I asked him if I could ask when in doubt and he said something which was the biggest mantra of all for me. He said, "If you want to do it, you will figure it out after this on the internet. You don't need me or anyone". So, I followed that. I became a search master.

4. In the start of the second semester, I started coding on Codechef and SPOJ. I used python primarily(C was too hard for me to self learn) for my programming and spent all day coding. I couldn't think of anything else and was super addicted to coding. When going to class, I wrote some problems down and solved them on paper and used to run to my hostel to code after class. I had no traditional "fun" in college. I remember I wouldn't even spend Rs 1000 in 3 months because I was not interested in anything. Coding became a worship for me. I was in love. Meanwhile, I spent time learning about the industry on Quora. I learned about ACM ICPC, paid summer internships, coding contests, the importance of those rankings etc. I also used to reach out to everyone I could through Quora messages to know about internship opportunities and also just make my network. Eventually at the end of 5th semeseter, I did my first internship at a small startup in Bangalore. Here I learned about startups, equity, working in a team to solve real problems, all nighters, etc. Also, made some great connections. I got paid at the end too.

5. At the end of 6th semester, I did a 2 month summer internship at a company in Delhi. They told they had interviewed 300 applicants and chose just 2 of us. The other guy was from one of India's top colleges. This one paid 40k which was a lot of money for me and my family. Including this and 2 other remote internships and some coding contests, I had earned enough to pay for a semester fee. I was so happy and proud of myself!

6. One more thing I did in college was, I motivated everyone I could to learn programming. I felt like this can change people's life. Students in my college, specially my friends, came from families of small farmers, low paying jobs etc that had very less in life. I could feel that programing could change all that. I opened a Codechef club and did small workshops for juniors. All my friends I motivated, eventually went on to do great in the tech industry in different parts of the world. Needless to say, that also make a lot of money. One of them was my ICPC partner too. We went to the regionals and we used to go to colleges take part in contests. It was so much fun!

7. By the end of college, I had taken part in multiple contests on Hackerearth, Hackerrank etc and got some offers. They ranged from 6 lakh to 8 lakh. That was at least 2 times the best offer in our college placement. I ended up taking the 6 lakh offer. My reason was the person that interviewed me was very nice. I like nice people and spending time with them. Most of my life hours are spent working, I wanted to spend those with nice(and smart) people. I moved to Bangalore as soon as college finished. It was a startup in a small house and it was a remote India office of a US HQ startup. Since I loved coding so much, I worked a lot. I had nothing to do. Of course I had fun on friday night etc but in general I spent a lot of time working and developing anything and everything needed by the company. I didn't really care about money at that time. Never even asked for a raise or anything. The company doubled my salary in the next 2 years while I was there. They were very impressed. I got an opportunity to go to the US office for a visit for 2 months.

8. In US, I was suprised with everything. Drinking water from tap, super nice roads, everyone following traffic rules, electricity all the time. None of that was true for the city I come from in India. I went to see LA, Hollywood, Vegas, SF etc. All the "fun" I sacrificed on in college, I was having all the fun I could now. While in the US, I made friends with the CEO of the company. With all that, I was back to India.

9. The CEO ended up leaving the company and started his own company. Since I really liked working for him. I left and joined him. I moved back home to stay with my parents and started working on the most epic thing of my life. There were 3 people in US and I was the only one in India. I used to work for 18 hours every day. It was a lot of work at the early stages of the company. But because I was with my parents, it was also very nice. I didn't have to worry about food or anything and I could have all my intellectual discussions with my dad to clear my mind.

10. In 2 years, the company showed signs of growing. We were now around 20 people in the company. They applied for my H1B visa and I moved to the US in 2018. My salary was pretty low but I didn't care. I made new friends and started having a lot of fun. Work was not as much anymore. Sometimes, for some project we had all nighters but mostly nothing crazy. Slowly, it became 9 to 5 job. My salary grew, we moved to bigger offices.

Recently, in 2023, the company IPOd on Nasdaq. With my long time in the company, I have acquired a lot of shares which suddenly made my net worth pretty high(and its growing). I was even invited to the Nasdaq building to stand with the founders. My picture was on the Nasdaq building on Time Square. I married my girlfriend from India after doing long distance dating for years. We have a baby and we live in our own house here in the US. We are able to fly business class everytime we go home to India now. I do angel invest from time to time now.

A boy from a small town who was a pretty mediocre in everything with super low self confidence, decided to take a step to change his life and motivate people around him to do the same. I hope my story motivates you to take a step.

(I don't want to say all startups succeed and you will become a millionaire if you work hard. Most startups fail. But, I just want to say that you can work extremely hard and change your life for good. The degree of success will depend on a lot of factors but it will be an upward trajectory for sure.)

Many days ago, when I has just started coding, my dad had said something that had a profound effect on me. He said, "Most people (95%) just go with the flow and follow traditional routes. If you put even a small amount of extra work when compared to them, you will automatically be ahead of 95% of them. The rest of the 5% are the best. You don't need to be better than those 5%. You just need to be better than 95% and that will make sure you have a pretty good job.".

Of course I am ready to be verified by an admin if required.

i have documented everything here - https://0xn1nja.dev/homelab

feel free to give thoughts

One candidate impressed me with his skills. Not completely by technical but interpersonal and communication skills.

Usually when I take interview, I find people on call in casual/funky dress. This candidate today joined the call 5 min prior and was waiting for me in perfect formals. He stayed calm and answered with confidence throughout the interview for any question I asked. He had eyes towards the camera the whole time instead of looking at his surroundings.

Sometimes I ask wrong question just to confuse the candidates. He listened to my wrong question, answered it correctly and decided not to go in depth by saying he will learn more about this after the interview instead of going further and ruin the interview experience.

After the interview, he sent a mail to DL mentioning he enjoyed the discussion and willing to contribute more by showing a desire to join the organization and asked for his feedback.

Not everyone cares about these small things but sometimes they matter and can make the decision in your favor even if you are not that technically sound.

Biggest Data Breach

Unknown hackers have leaked the personal data of over 800 million Indians Of COVID 19.

The leaked data includes:

• Name

• Father's name

• Phone number

• Other number

• Passport number

• Aadhaar number

• Age

• Gender

• Address

• District

• Pincode

• State

• Town

The data breach is believed to have occurred at a third-party company that was storing the data on behalf of the Indian government.

The Indian government is investigating the breach.

I personally reported lot of bugs to Indian government VDP, but they dont tend to even acknowledge.

The bugs I reported are still unfixed.

Previous post got removed by reddit filters

I am posting this so other students and developers know what kind of company Nomora actually is before accepting their “internship”.

Timeline & what actually happened

• Joined as a full-stack developer intern

• For almost four full weeks (~28 days) I was on-call literally 24×7

• Personally sat with the founder (Suraj Agrawal) until 1-2 AM multiple nights before their launch

• Caught and fixed critical production bugs introduced by developers of "higher status colleges" and unchecked AI-generated code that would have taken their entire platform down

• Cleaned up broken deployments, added proper validation, removed security vulnerabilities, and kept production stable during their launch crunch, (they didn't know how to use github environments)

• Zero written complaints, zero negative feedback during the entire period; in fact, the founder was thanking me in chats at 1-2 AM

What they did on Day 28
Sent this email (posting exact text, no edits):

“Compensation is provided for the value added to the company, not for time spent. During your internship at Nomora, you have not shipped any meaningful code to production… It wasn’t a productive use of the company’s time and resources spent on hiring and working with you. Since your internship termination was a decision based on 2 weeks of evaluation, there won’t be any payment.”

They kept me for 28 days but claim they only “evaluated for 2 weeks” and therefore owe me nothing. Their claim about compensation is provided based on value added to the company was not mentioned at all anywhere in their offer letter.

I have screenshots of:

• 2 AM calls and meetings with the founder

• Production alerts I resolved within minutes

• Git commits and PR reviews cleaning up others’ broken code

• Their own termination mail that contradicts itself

This is not about the money alone (though refusing to pay even one rupee after a month of full-time work is illegal). It’s about the sheer disrespect and humiliation.

To every student reading this:
Please think ten times before joining Nomora or any company that thinks “intern = free labour + disposable at will”.

Company: Nomora
Founder: Suraj Agrawal
Location: Bangalore

Feel free to share your own experiences if you’ve worked there.

(Posting from a throwaway for obvious reasons, but everything above is 100 % factual and documented.)

Hey folks,

If you’re outsourcing work to India and feel like breathing down our necks every minute take a breath. Please.

Here’s the ground reality:

The average new IT grad here makes ₹7 LPA (~$8,000/year).

Yet we’re expected to perform at Google-level output, on that salary.

Time zones, endless meetings, last-minute deadlines... we’re dealing with it all too.

We’re not machines. We care about the work. But mutual respect and realistic expectations matter. Timelines are important for both sides.

So instead of constant pressure, let’s build partnerships. We’re doing our best, and we know you want the best let’s meet in the middle with some empathy.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Edit : The problem lies with the Indian manager.

Recently, a "popular" app silently introduced "usage fee" for bill payment via credit card. So, I wrote a bash script to roll it back.

I scraped several older versions of the app from APKPure and ran them one by one on an Android emulator. Using a simple Bash script with ADB commands, I installed each APK, launched the app, and manually navigated to the bill payment screen. Then I dumped the UI layout (xml) using uiautomator and searched for any mention of the fee. Eventually, I found a version where the fee wasn’t present. And thanks to the poor backend API design, I was able to skip the fee.

Though it just saves me roughly like 50-54 INR per month, but it gives a pretty hacker-hacker feeling.

Please note - I trust APKPure for clean builds. And I only use this app for bill payments anyway, so I don’t really need the latest version.

>>be me

>>go to random relative wedding in rural bihar

>>electricity gone entire day because of course

>>everyone in lungi+banyan mode

>>meet this avg looking bhojpuri uncle sitting outside

>>start talking casually

>>"so what do you do?"

>>"i work in bangalore"

>>ask which company

>>"nvidia"

>>tfw.exe

>>ask since when

>>"2007"

>>mfw this lungi uncle probably survived every GPU and AI boom known to mankind

>>probably has enough RSUs to buy my bloodline sitting in a village discussing shaadi logistics

Funny how even Sam is citing frivolous usecases. Don't take me wrong, agents definitely have usecases in automating business workflows. For example handling conversational content and deciding next best action.

I got laid off by oracle on Mar 31 as with 30k others. Tbh I didn't think much about it. I was like cool, I have to lock in now.

Here's what I did, and this might help y'all to get out of this "between jobs" phase.

3-4 hours of dsa everyday. Neetcode mostly.

I learned the basics of AI engineering from scratch along with understanding of transformers and attention. 1-2 hours everyday for around a month and I had 2 projects to showcase after this. Learned using claude. Asked to make a 30 day plan and completed the plan accordingly.

Edit: System design from Hello interview helped. Spent like 2 hours on it everyday. And articles from bytebytego and substack as well.

Updated naukri daily. Put as an immediate joiner. Everyone says this but yeah it does help.

Apply at least 10 - 15 positions daily. Doesn't matter where; careers pages, workday, LinkedIn, wellfound, naukri, indeed etc. I found career pages the best to apply and naukri to get reached out.

Got reached out by around 20 recruiters only through LinkedIn. LinkedIn premium will help here. Some called and scheduled interviews as well.

Most of all I was curious to learn everyday. I was soaking in knowledge like a sponge. I get distracted every often by reading some system design articles too deep when not actually needed again, I'm no Saint.

I started giving interviews from early may till mid May. Interviews with 7 companies. Some I failed and ended up with 3 offers. I will be joining as an AI Engineer soon.

If you read all that, you gain respect++. Best luck if you are looking for a job.

Edit: (YOE: 2 Tech stack: java, springboot, go, python, oracle cloud)

TL;DR just keep applying bro good things will happen.

I have some 70 hr contacts rn. Should I make a sheet of it and make it public?

Edit: won't be sharing hr contacts as someone said it will be a breach of their privacy. I'll share their emails.

Tech stack I used:

• Frontend: Next.js with React Three Fiber.

• Physics: Started with Rapier but ended up writing most of it from scratch.

• Multiplayer: Colyseus.js for the WebSocket server, hosted on a VPS.

• 3D models and animations: All models made in Blender, Character animations from Mixamo.

Almost every step felt impossible to solve. Getting the camera, movement, and animations to feel smooth in a browser is already hard enough. Then adding multiplayer on top of that was a nightmare. Syncing player positions, their animations, and all the moving objects in the level across different clients. And doing all of this in React instead of a proper game engine made everything way harder than I expected.

A bit about me: Got laid off from my previous startup last year. I only have 6 months of professional experience, which I know isn't much. I've cleared a few interviews since then but keep getting ghosted or just never hear back.

If anyone’s hiring for a frontend or fullstack dev, or has freelance work, I’d love to connect.

Play now - Climsy.live

Would love to hear your feedback or thoughts.

Told my manager last week...not to put me oncall during Diwali... I'll not be able to handle all alone. His words were...relax, nothing ever happens this time of the year.

Fast forward to tonight. AWS is down. Teams are blowing up. Pager won’t stop ringing. My family think I work for the government because I’m handling some emergency.

I haven’t even lit a single patakha yet, but my whole screen’s glowing red. Happy Diwali, I guess.

Link: spot-transfer.vercel.app

I built this for myself since I wanted to move to Revanced YT Music.

Having only built with NextJs, this was the first time I wrote a separate web server to handle requests. I did this since the ytmusicapi library is built in python.

Feedback is always welcome :)

I recently got the opportunity to move to San Francisco. I was able to connect to a CTO of a unicorn startup on Twitter, and we started talking over DMs. When I got to SF, I asked him to meet, and he agreed.

We met for a casual lunch. This guy runs the entire company, and he was treating me - a new founder - like an equal. He was openly sharing his experiences, his journey, and his insights. When we were leaving, he offered to help with connections, fundraising, whatever I need.

As you know, this was nothing like what I was used to. Back in India, a person with even a 100-person office would have an air of arrogance. They’d guard their knowledge and time, only sharing when there was a clear benefit to them.

It was that day that I understood that India plays a "Zero Sum Game" and how that's holding the entire country behind.

I wrote more about my experiences on my blog: https://nmn.gl/blog/infinite-sum-game. Would love to hear your thoughts and if you have any similar experiences?

So recently I decided to resign from my current company where I worked for more than 3.5 years. Every one here follow hybrid model and Infact we can ask for wfh if there is any reason. Today had a call with HR and told me that I have to come to office daily till my notice period ends and I can't take more than 1 leave in a month within 90 days of NP. I can't go to office daily as I'm giving interviews and also completing all task within timeline, My office is 25km away from where i stay. Please someone suggest what should I do?