Now

This is a now page, and if you have your own site, you should make one, too.

Updated July 2026

Where I Am

  • SkybootLabs - Staff Member. No single lane here. On a given week I'm writing code, sitting in product conversations, working on content, or doing marketing. Early-stage teams don't have room for specialists, and I've actually come to like the range. It keeps me close to the whole shape of the work instead of one narrow slice of it.
  • Boston University - PhD, precluded. I was offered a fully funded integrated Master's and PhD in Comparative Studies in English and American Literature. Medical exigencies got in the way before I could take it up, and the offer is gone now, not something I'm still holding a door open for. What's left is the research interest itself, which I've kept going on my own, outside of any program.
  • Location - Digital Nomad. Most of my work happens wherever the WiFi holds up. I've never settled into one city or one desk, and at this point I've stopped fighting that.

What I'm Stuck On Right Now

The Trauma-Linguistics-Engine keeps giving me false positives on stammering markers whenever a text uses deliberate repetition as a literary device rather than an actual speech disruption. Distinguishing "the author meant this" from "the character is struggling to speak" turns out to be most of the problem, and I don't have a clean answer yet. It's the kind of thing where I keep telling myself the fix is one more feature away, and it never quite is.

Building

  • StudyInfo.net. An education platform I've been building out, resources and information for students trying to figure things out without a guidance counselor holding their hand.
  • Cotraveler.co. A project around travel and shared journeys, still early, still shaping up as I figure out what it actually wants to be.
  • TextAndTech.me. My other corner of the internet, where writing and technology overlap in ways that don't fit neatly into this portfolio.
  • Work at SkybootLabs. Can't get into specifics, but a good chunk of my week goes into shipping things that touch product, infrastructure, and the messy space in between where most early-stage decisions actually get made.

The Gita Project

I grew up around the Gita without really reading it closely. It was recited, referenced, half-memorized in fragments, the way scripture often is when it's part of a household rather than a subject. Building the verse-by-verse tool on this site started as an engineering project, honestly. Somewhere in the middle of wiring up translations and commentary, I started actually sitting with individual verses instead of skimming past them, and that changed the project. I'm not a religious authority and I don't want to pretend to be one. What I'm adding, verse by verse, is closer to what I'd tell a friend if they asked what a line meant to me specifically, not what a scholar thinks it means in the abstract. Some of it lines up with how I think about attachment and control in my own work, where the instinct to grip tightly onto outcomes is usually the thing making everything harder. Some of it just sits there unresolved, which feels honest too. I don't think a text like this owes you a tidy answer on the first pass.

Research

  • Trauma-Linguistics-Engine. An NLP pipeline trying to quantify silence and stammering as they show up in South Asian literature. Easy to describe in one sentence, genuinely hard to build, because most of what I'm trying to detect lives in what a text doesn't say.
  • Syntax of Silence. A slow-moving paper on postcolonial cinema, working through how absence and pause function as a kind of grammar in film, the same way I think they work in prose.
  • Digital Humanities generally. This is the part of the PhD that survived the PhD not happening. I never needed the program to justify being interested in where literature, trauma studies, and computation overlap, so I just kept going without it. It's a small field, smaller still when narrowed to South Asian texts specifically.

Infrastructure I Keep Coming Back To

  • NanoLink. My distributed URL shortener. Not because the world needs another one, but because it's the project I return to when I want to think about systems instead of sentences for a while.
  • Self-healing cloud archives. Cloud-native, Kubernetes and Terraform-based infrastructure aimed at cultural heritage data that needs to survive decades, not a single funding cycle. Still mostly a personal experiment, but one I take seriously.
  • LitKit. A RAG-based literary research tool. The hard part isn't the retrieval, it's making it actually useful for close reading instead of just summarizing texts, which turns out to be a much harder problem than it sounds.

Reading

  • The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry. Still reading this out of genuine interest, not for a program that no longer exists. It treats pain as something structural, not just personal, which is close to how I still think about the research even without a PhD attached to it.
  • Whatever SkybootLabs demands that week. Documentation, runbooks, other people's postmortems. Less a reading list, more a constant background hum.

Writing

  • Syntax of Silence. The postcolonial cinema paper. Slow, unfinished, written for its own sake now rather than toward a degree.
  • The Gita commentary. Not writing in the traditional sense, more like thinking out loud in public, verse by verse.
  • Notes I don't publish. Most of what I actually write never leaves my notes app. Half-formed arguments, things I'm still working out, reading annotations that only make sense to me.