I am working on Tiles Research, which aims to provide smarter and faster compute. Since childhood, I have been fascinated by Science and I wanted to know what lies beyond this universe, and how we all are made, nature’s every creation was like a question to me. I still remember the times my father used to come back from his job, buying me new gadgets, fun DVDs, and games and suddenly I was surrounded by all that electronic stuff.. which didn't make sense to me much at that time but I was always curious about how those things work. That is how I identified my natural interest in science and technology. Playing and modding video games, creating all sorts of art digitally, and writing stories and poems on text editors, all these interests were my initial kick for computer science when I was not even well versed with the giant force, the Internet. Back in middle school, when I first created a website on my fascination with cars. Basic HTML. No CSS. No java script. It was the first time when I jumped and got excited about creating something on the internet that I could share with someone through links. The second project was again a website that I created to promote Science and Technology, a curious digital hub for people who can ask questions and interact with each other. Fast forward to 2020 lockdown, it was a harsh time for everyone around the globe. We were all locked up with our thoughts and dreams so that was the time when I decided to pursue a Computer Science degree in university. I used most of my lockdown time in researching science and astronomy my idea was to use my Computer Science knowledge to apply in the multi-disciplinary field of Astronomy and Physics i.e., Astrophysics. I wanted to take Astrophysics as my minor and study Quantum Physics.
I pursued my interests and joined university in India, after the 9 to 5 uni rat-race(typical private Engineering Indian university), I used to spend time learning about technologies. I tried running astronomy software recommended by NASA but I faced massive roadblocks in my journey, some of them were software performance and resource-intensive nature, lack of cross-platform features, and not being accessible for an amateur astronomy enthusiast like me. These factors blocked my flow of experimenting with complex software in scientific computing and demotivated me to pursue such fields. The next two years at college were very diverse full of different experiences personally as well as in my tech and science journey. I completely forgot and moved on with my science multidisciplinary dream, me and my friends tried to start an Astro club at our university but failed due to lack of support from higher authorities. That was the end of my astronomy exploration(at least temporarily). But the thirst to learn new things every day and to keep growing did not end. I diverted all my curiosity and time to technology. Learning from the internet and various internet spaces where I can explore new tech and interact with cool people around the globe, I began searching my newbie doubts on the internet and loved the process of trying different domains in tech before I finally stuck with one for the last six months.
Read Tiles dream to understand the story of this project in brief. I wonder how I met this person online one day sharing a resource on xyz. That's when I found that we have similar backgrounds and interests. I find the idea of Tiles amazing and worth putting my time and energy into it but it didn't seem to happen very quickly. It took me months to finally realize that I am well suited for this kind of work [popularly called as “early stage work”]. I began experiencing- that science nerd coming out slowly again, I can dream of making scientific computing much more accessible to every amateur like me out there who does not want to restrict his/her learnings and focus on their childhood dreams of exploring the vastness of this universe. [poem on universe written by me].
Here, I am today, contributing to CERN project- ROOT/PyROOT/Cppyy. It wouldn’t have been possible if I were not okay with being uncomfortable going deep down the rabbit hole of low-level intricacies for straight six months.