Player One

I grew up in Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu. When I was in 5th standard, my family bought our first PC, and for me it was a game machine: Road Rash, Mario and every flash arcade game I could find.

I didn't know what code was. I only knew I wanted to understand what was happening inside that box.

I studied Mechanical Engineering, but my evenings belonged to Photoshop and Illustrator. I edited photos for my friends' Facebook and Instagram posts, first under a page called Psycho Designs and later Ashies Editography.

Nobody taught me. I learned layer by layer, one edit at a time.

For our college symposium I designed every banner. Seeing my work printed bigger than me, hanging where the whole college walked past, was the first time I felt: I made that.

It was my first real work, and the first time other people relied on something I designed.

After college I designed posters and ad creatives for an optical showroom as a freelancer, and started Ash Vexel Arts for digital portrait painting.

I liked the work, but one question kept coming back: what's next?

The answer was the web. I learned from YouTube tutorials, built a basic portfolio website from scratch, and took it to my first interview.

Design taught me how things should look. Code let me make them work.

AK Infopark took a chance on me as a fresher. That's where I met PHP and real business software: clients, deadlines and live users who depended on what we shipped.

Three years later I left as Web Team Lead.

Joining Qdev at Technopark was my first time living outside my hometown. A new city, a new team and bigger systems.

In a year and a half I learned more new concepts than ever before, and I learned that growth starts where comfort ends.

Not every day is a launch. There were deadlines that wouldn't move, uptime issues at the worst hours and escalations that landed on my desk.

They taught me the parts of engineering nobody puts in a tutorial: stay calm, find the root cause, keep people informed, and fix it so it doesn't happen again.

I moved to Bangalore for bigger exposure: product engineering for live-event ticketing, at a scale where every millisecond and every seat counts.

Ashi Code Studios is where I take on projects of my own. The one I'm proudest of is the ordering and arcade gaming lounge system for Mario's Shake Shack: a room full of the same kind of games I played on that family PC.

The kid who played arcade games now builds them. And the question is still the same: what's next? For me, it's AI that actually ships.