Developer. Designer at heart.
Photographer by compulsion.
I'm Ashwin — a full-stack developer who found his home on the frontend. I started writing code because I wanted to build things. I stayed because I discovered that building things well is an art form, and I've never been able to resist a craft worth mastering.
Over the past year and a half, I've worked across three companies — from a scrappy product studio where I shipped features solo, to a larger team where I now lead frontend architecture. Each place taught me something different: how to move fast, how to think in systems, how to care about the details even when no one's watching.
My bias is firmly toward the frontend. Not because the backend doesn't matter — it does, deeply — but because the frontend is where code meets people. It's where a decision about spacing or timing or color becomes the difference between something that feels right and something that merely works. That gap is where I live.
Outside of work, I'm a photographer. I shoot mostly on the streets — Mumbai, Bangalore, wherever I happen to be. Photography taught me to see before I act, to look for the composition before reaching for the camera. That habit has made me a better designer and, I think, a better developer.
I'm drawn to work that takes craft seriously. Teams that argue about the right abstraction, that care about the experience as much as the implementation, that understand that how something is built is inseparable from what it becomes.
Building frontend systems at Placeholder Technologies. Reading about design history. Shooting on weekends. Looking for the next interesting problem.
Dieter Rams. The Bauhaus. Massimo Vignelli's grid. The idea that good design is as little design as possible — and the discipline required to actually achieve that.
Henri Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment. Vivian Maier's anonymity. The way Saul Leiter used colour as a compositional element before anyone else thought to.
The history of the web. How browsers work. Why certain abstractions survive and others collapse. The craft of writing code that other people can read.
Design books. Long-form journalism. The occasional novel. Anything that takes its time and trusts the reader to keep up.
I'm always open to interesting conversations — about work, design, photography, or anything in between. If you have a project in mind or just want to talk, my inbox is open.
Prefer a document? Here's my resume.
Download Resume (PDF)