# Books
Source: https://wah.al/books
The books I've read and found the most valuable.
### 2026
1. [The Weirdest People in the World](https://amzn.in/d/e0jMdz4) by Joseph Henrich Recommended
If you liked "Seeing Like a State," you can give this a shot as well. It delves into how Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies have shaped human psychology and behavior in unique ways.
2. [Why Nations Fail](https://amzn.in/d/0bCUzuhw) by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
A decent one-time read that tries to build the point, using historical examples, that States should accept humility and allow citizens to have inclusive economic and political institutions if they desire long term sustainable prosperity.
3. [Why The Poor Don't Kill Us](https://amzn.in/d/0dBrEFWd) by Manu Joseph
It's a satirical light-hearted read. You can pick this up after a heavy read to get some comic relief.
4. [Economics in One Lesson](https://www.amazon.in/dp/0517548232) by Henry Hazlitt
A great introduction to economics that explains complex concepts in a simple and accessible way. It's a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the basics of economics.
### 2025
1. [Capitalism and Freedom](https://amzn.in/d/eu4f7ui) by Milton Friedman Recommended
My favorite book on economics and freedom. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom.
2. [Free To Choose](https://amzn.in/d/bD1XjeT) by Milton and Rose Friedman
A great follow-up to "Capitalism and Freedom," this book delves deeper into the principles of free-market economics and individual liberty. Should definitely read it if you enjoyed "Capitalism and Freedom."
3. [Seeing Like a State](https://amzn.in/d/g3f1Y2J) by James C. Scott Recommended
An eye-opening book that completely changed my perspective on how states operate and the unintended consequences of large-scale planning.
4. [In Service of the Republic](https://amzn.in/d/9mvYnxB) by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah
A comprehensive overview of the Indian economy and policy-making. It provides valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities faced by India.
5. [Sixteen Stormy Days](https://amzn.in/d/9NEqsxz) by Tripurdaman Singh
Explains the story of how Jawaharlal Nehru used quasi-authoritarian arguments and excessive rhetoric to justify the downgrading of our fundamental rights. And most other political leaders of that time were trying to prevent him from doing so. This is a very well written book that deserves to be converted into a TV show. Every Indian who is feels strongly about fundamental rights of life, liberty, property and security should read this book at least once.
6. [The Changing World Order](https://amzn.in/d/1YRN8g8) by Ray Dalio
I found the book longer than necessary, but it has some great insights on economic cycles and the shifting balance of global power. I would probably hesitate to read another book by Dalio, but this one was worth it as a one-time read.
7. [India Grows at Night](https://amzn.in/d/fKdZlcN) by Gurcharan Das
It's a short one-time read with valuable examples of how the Indian governments excessively controlled the economy in the past, leading to slow growth.
8. [Thinking in Bets](https://amzn.in/d/3J6gD1J) by Annie Duke
This was a pretty boring book. Felt like I already knew most of the concepts. I wouldn't recommend reading it.
9. [The Hard Thing About Hard Things](https://amzn.in/d/faNQnt7) by Ben Horowitz
A decent read with examples of how to handle difficult situations in business like layoffs, competition, and managing teams. This book can be revisited in the future when facing similar challenges.
10. [Lilliput Land: How Small is Driving India's Mega Consumption Story](https://amzn.in/d/gEiezT7) by Rama Bijapurkar
Rama uses a lot of data to build insights on how small towns and villages percieve brands and consumption. A decent read for anyone building a consumer brand in India.
11. [Behold the Leviathan: The Unusual Rise of Modern India](https://amzn.in/d/0pTYWWc) by Saurabh Mukherjea and Nandita Rajhansa
This book can be avoided. It was a mediocre read that mostly mentions the rise of digital payments and e-commerce in India without providing much depth or new insights.
### 2024
1. [What Went Wrong With Capitalism](https://amzn.in/d/0V4OOtF) by Ruchir Sharma Recommended
The first book I read that taught me how monetary policies work and how governments print money. It beautifully explains how excessive money printing and excessive regulations lead to inflation and economic inequality.
### Older
1. [Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind](https://amzn.in/d/cHgpxDi) by V.S. Ramachandran
A fascinating exploration of the phantom limb phenomenon and what it reveals about the brain's functioning. Ramachandran's storytelling and experiential examples make this book very engaging.
2. [Kautilya's Arthashastra](https://amzn.in/d/1OaHSN0) by Kautilya/Chanakya
An ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, economic policy, and military strategy. While the ideas may have been relevant in its time, many concepts are outdated today. I would call this a one-time read for historical interest.
3. [Mandukya Upanishad](https://amzn.in/d/1ieJBtf)
By far the best Upanishad I've read. It provides deep insights into the nature of reality and consciousness in a concise manner. A must-read for anyone interested in Indian philosophy.
4. [Algorithms to Live By](https://amzn.in/d/fK0f1b4) by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
A fascinating exploration of how computer algorithms can be applied to human decision-making and everyday life.
# Who am I?
Source: https://wah.al/index
Computationalism. AGI. Techno-Capitalism.
* Software engineer who loves building products.
* Feel strongly about liberty, free markets, and individual freedom.
* Think a lot about artificial general intelligence and consciousness.
* Coffee enthusiast who is always hunting for the perfect dark roast.
* Enjoys cafe-hopping and discovering hidden gems around the city.
* Appreciates quality whisky with a lot of ice.
gmt+5:30 / dilli / bangalore 🇮🇳
I'm Right-Libertarian
![I'm Right-Libertarian]()
Bachelors in Technology (Computer Science & Engineering)
# Papers
Source: https://wah.al/inputs/papers
The papers I've read and found the most valuable.
1. [Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?](https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy2013.pdf) - Robin Hanson's seminal paper on Futarchy, a governance model where policies are decided based on prediction markets. A thought-provoking read for those interested in alternative governance systems.
# Other Readings
Source: https://wah.al/inputs/readings
The essays and other readings I've read and found the most valuable.
1. [The Use of Knowledge in Society](https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html) - Friedrich A. Hayek's essay on the limits of knowledge and the importance of decentralized decision-making. A must-read for anyone interested in economics, political philosophy, and the role of markets in society.
# argonaut.dev
Source: https://wah.al/jobs/argonaut
It was a small 5 member team funded by Y-Combinator.
### Roles and Responsibilities
* Core backend team member.
* Features I built:
* Added support for multiple AWS integrations in Argonaut's stack.
* Built a debugging/operations job procedure to allow users to troubleshoot/manage their K8 clusters.
* Added support for Keda based auto-scaling to in users' K8 clusters.
* Fixed bugs in existing features.
* Migrated some legacy services in the API.
* Collaborated and coordinated with the front-end team for UI changes for the features I built.
### Culture
* Permanently remote team. India-wide distributed.
* Small team of 10 people. Including design and marketing. Rest engineers.
* Directly reporting to the CEO i.e. Surya.
* \~ 2 week sprints.
* Daily standup calls.
* Townhalls every Tuesday.
* Hangout session every Friday.
* Tickets on GitHub Issues and Linear.
* Communication and coordination over Slack.
### Stack
* REST APIs in Golang
* React for front-end
* Kubernetes for orchestration
* GitHub Actions for CI/CD
* AWS, GCP and Azure for infrastructure
# City National Bank
Source: https://wah.al/jobs/cnb
My first time working in a massive enterprise.
### Roles and Responsibilities
* To be completed.
### Culture
* To be completed.
### Stack
* To be completed.
# InstantPost
Source: https://wah.al/jobs/instantpost
My first job in college.
### Roles and Responsibilities
* Automated remote servers across India for a production-ready edge-computing environment.
* Handling load balancing, health monitoring, fault tolerance, auto-scaling of services and secure server-to-server connections.
* Technical writer for all the innovations and developments within the company.
### Stack
* Python
* Headless Servers
* Docker
* LXC
* Ubuntu
* RHEL
* OpenSSH
# locale.ai
Source: https://wah.al/jobs/locale
Most insane job I have ever had.
### Roles and Responsibilities
* Core backend team member.
* Designed the architecture for Locale v2 which is an Notes engine that runs queries on top of your conventional databases.
* Contributed to Locale v1 as well. But we decided to close it's support shortly after I joined.
* Handled design, development, testing, documentation and deployment of the CLI.
I quit Locale due disagreements with the founders about the product and their wisdom to pivot to version 2.
### Culture
* Hybrid attendance. Had to physically visit office at least 2 days/week.
* Small product team of 10 people. Including designers. Rest were engineers.
* Reported to an Engineering Manager, who in turn reported to the CTO.
* 2 week sprints.
* Daily standup calls.
* Tickets on GitHub Issues and Linear.
* Communication and coordination over Slack.
* Product demonstrations on Friday.
### Stack
* API written in Java (Quarkus)
* Hasura as the core GraphQL engine
* Kubernetes for orchestration
* GitHub Actions for CI/CD
* GCP for infrastructure
### Learnings
1. Be careful in startups where founders panic due to rejections and low sales and decide to make a bad pivot.
2. When you sense your company is running out of funds and a new round doesn't seem to be going through anytime soon - it's better to leave and move on to your next project, instead of waiting.
# nhost.io
Source: https://wah.al/jobs/nhost
Best job I have ever had.
### Roles and Responsibilities
* Second core team member.
* Designed and maintained the Nhost CLI from scratch. The source code is open-source and [available here](https://github.com/nhost/cli). This repository can be used to judge my Golang skills.
* Contributed to all of Nhost stack, in the early stages, including front-end SDKs, authentication and storage.
* Wrote an experimental Golang library for exposing local environment using HTTP tunnels to the public internet to increase testing time, and serve as an alternative to preview environments.
* Handled design, development, testing, documentation and deployment of the CLI.
From May 2021 to February 2022, I worked with [Nhost](https://nhost.io/), as a backend engineer. Was one of the core team members after Nhost raised \$3 Million from the founders of GitHub and Vercel.
### Culture
* Permanently remote team. Globally distributed.
* Small team of 10 people. Including design and marketing. Rest engineers.
* Directly reporting to CEO and CTO.
* 2 week sprints.
* Weekly standup calls every Monday.
* Tickets on GitHub Issues and JIRA.
* Communication and coordination over Discord.
* Directly solving users' issues over Discord channels.
### Stack
* CLI written in Golang using Cobra
* Hasura as the core GraphQL engine
* Docker for orchestrating Nhost's auth, storage and DB services
* GitHub Actions for CI/CD
* AWS for infrastructure
### Learnings
I learned a great deal from [Johan](https://twitter.com/elitasson/) and [Nuno](https://twitter.com/nunopato) about how to set up an early-stage engineering team. Everything from carefully handpicking engineers, to prioritizing which features make sense to be rolled out next, to finding workarounds from troubling yet insignificant engineering problems, and finally building a great product, whilst placing a lot of focus on user feedback. Apart from how much I loved writing code and solving engineering problems, I have a special respect for both of them.
# oversight.in
Source: https://wah.al/jobs/oversight
My first real startup.
You can read my entire story of Oversight's inception and death [over here](/oversight).
### About the Product
* CMS for research collaboration to allow scientists, faculties and students to collaborate on each other's research through mentorship, internships or professional collaboration.
* Crowdfund on your research or generate monthly income from your followers.
* The primary platform is available at [research.oversight.in](https://research.oversight.in).
We ran Oversight for 1.5 years (until Q1 of 2021). Until we fell short on distribution and sales and decided to quit. We shut down Oversight in March 2021.
### Culture
* Permanently remote team. Nationally distributed in India.
* Small team of 10 people. Including engineering and sales.
* Directly coordinating with each other.
* 2 week sprints.
* Weekly standup calls every Monday.
* Tickets on GitHub Issues.
* Communication and coordination over Discord.
* Directly solving users' issues over Discord channels.
### Stack
* NuxtJS for front-end
* Golang for API, using Echo framework
* Hasura for GraphQL
* AWS (Hasura on EC2, RDS, ELB)
* Razorpay for Payments
### Learnings
You can read my entire journey of Oversight, and the learnings I got from it, in detail [over here](/oversight).
# Blogs & Articles
Source: https://wah.al/output/blogs
My published blogs and articles, as well as self-hosted intellectual pieces.
1. [Configuring Python StatsD Client](https://www.metricfire.com/blog/configuring-python-statsd-client) - MetricFire (November 15, 2019)
2. [Cloudwatch Vs. Alternatives](https://www.metricfire.com/blog/cloudwatch-vs-alternatives) - MetricFire (February 13, 2020)
# Papers
Source: https://wah.al/output/papers
My research papers and academic articles.
### Published
1. [Hydra — Anonymous Network Routing Mechanism](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8286011/) -+- [Read Paper](https://mrinalwahal.com/papers/Hydra.pdf) - 2017 International Conference on Infocom Technologies and Unmanned Systems (ICTUS'2017), Dubai, UAE
2. [Intrusion Detection System in Python](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8442909/) - January of 2018 in Noida, India
3. [Captcha Generation and Identification Using Generative Adversarial Networks](http://vixra.org/pdf/1909.0513v1.pdf) - Preprint pushed on September of 2019 in Chennai, India
### Self-Hosted
1. [Neural Privacy, Personhood and Agency with Brain-To-Brain Interfacing](/Neuroethics.pdf) - Preprint pushed on May of 2019 in New Delhi, India
# Lectures & Talks
Source: https://wah.al/output/talks
Talks, webinars, speeches and guest lectures that I've delivered.
### Talks
1. Artificial Intelligence in Food Industry - By Department of Food Processing & Nutrition, Karnataka State Akkamahadevi Women’s University Vijayapura - January 18th, 2020
2. Can AI replace judges of a court? - By Argute, IP University, Delhi - May 4th, 2020
3. The New Wave of Funding Your Research Projects - By Amity Innovation Incubator, Noida - October 30th, 2020
### Guest Lectures
1. Artificial Intelligence - IIT Madras, Research Park Madras; March 25th, 2022. [Presentation](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BFTxljxFQzgI94JkO-mnasrfpHRP4pOvcZ12vKkublg/edit?usp=sharing) [Resources](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/deep-learning)
2. Ethical Hacking - IIT Madras, Research Park Madras; May 14th, 2022. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
3. Machine Learning - IIT Madras Research Park, Madras; May 15th, 2022. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/deep-learning)
4. Ethical Hacking - IIT Madras, Research Park Madras; September 15th, 2019. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
5. Neural Network Programming - IIT Madras Research Park, Madras; September 14th, 2019. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/deep-learning)
6. Security 101 - IIT Madras, Research Park Madras; July 14th, 2019. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
7. Machine Learning - IIT Madras Research Park, Madras; July 13th, 2019. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/deep-learning)
8. Ethical Hacking - IIT Madras, Research Park Madras; June 30th, 2019. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
9. Neural Network Programming - IIT Madras Research Park, Madras; June 29th, 2019. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/deep-learning)
10. Machine Learninig - Anna Centenary Library, Madras; February 10th, 2019. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/deep-learning)
11. Ethical Hacking - Anna Centenary Library, Madras; February 9th, 2019. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
12. Security Engineering - Anna Centenary Library, Madras; September 9th, 2018. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
13. Network Engineering - IIT Madras Research Park; August 5th, 2018. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/deep-learning)
14. Ethical Hacking - IIT Madras Research Park; August 4th, 2018. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
15. Security Engineering - IIT Madras Research Park; July 15th, 2018. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
16. Machine Learning - IIT Madras Research Park; July 14th, 2018. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/deep-learning)
17. Ethical Hacking - IIT Madras Research Park; March 10th, 2018. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
18. Security Engineering - Madras Institute of Technology; March 3rd, 2018. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/ethical-hacking)
19. Neural Network Programming - IIT Madras Research Park; January 27th, 2018. [Download Notes](https://gitlab.com/Wahal/deep-learning)
# envsecrets.com
Source: https://wah.al/projects/envsecrets
CLI-first management of your environment secrets. Save once, synchronize continously.
This project was acquired in March 2024 and since then has either been decomissioned or disabled new signups.
### What is envsecrets?
envsecrets is a centralized cloud account to store your environment secrets and synchronize them with third-party services, platforms or cloud accounts.
You can also granularly control access of your team members down to every environment. And regularly rotate your secrets for security.
### Features
* Replace your .env files with the `envs` CLI.
* Synchronize your secrets in real-time with third-party services like Github Actions and AWS Secrets Manager.
* 25+ Integrations.
* Add your team members and control their access with custom roles.
* Regularly rotate your secrets.
* Inject your secrets into your process directly at runtime. This is much more safe than copy-pasting .env files over Slack.
### Opportunities
I'm a very good engineer. I can build great products like envsecrets. But I suck at sales and lead generation. I'm looking for someone who can join me either part-time, or full-time, to search and onboard more users, who can start using the platform. Can either be done through personal contacts, cold calls, cold emails, or marketing. Compensation is something we can discuss over the call. Doesn't matter how old you are, or how qualified you are. If you can find me paid clients, just drop me an email. Or reach out on Instagram.
### Stack
* Nuxt.js SSR (Deployed on Vercel)
* Golang (API)
* GraphQL (Hasura)
* Nhost (for Hasura, auth, storage and hosting)
* Stripe (Payments)
### Story and Timeline
Resigned from my job at argonaut.dev and started working on envsecrets full-time.
Spent the first month living with my then-cofounder in Mumbai doing research, competitor analysis, and designing the product. Started development in May 2023.
Launched the beta version of envsecrets with 5 integrations and basic team management features. Started onboarding free users and collecting feedback for improvements.
A web-dev agency in London became our first paid subscriber, signing up for the Pro plan to manage secrets for their client projects.
A Canadian company acquired envsecrets for an undisclosed amount to license it out to Royal Bank of Canada and City National Bank.
Since then I've been working as a consultant for them to help with the integration and onboarding of their teams onto envsecrets.
# oversight.in
Source: https://wah.al/projects/oversight
Story of my first start-up. And how we failed at it.
**Oversight was a crowdfunding platform for advanced scientific research. And content management and collaboration system for academic research.**
When we were in college, I and my friend [Hemant](https://instagram.com/hemanttvats) wanted to build a
self-driving/autonomous military tank. One that can drive to the target location by itself, neutralize/engage the targets, and drive back to the base by itself. While trying to fetch research grants for building the first prototype, we realised the monumental lackadaisical problems driven by attitude and ego in India's academic research ecosystem. Nobody would give us funds because we were *too young*. We were told **we didn't even have a PhD**. As if that was mandatory for building advanced tech.
We both envisioned that we would go on to build an in-house research incubator, along the lines of India's DRDO, which would work on all the latest technologies, including deep learning and quantum computation. We were young and green at that time, so we were naive enough to start such a journey.
## Business Plan
We started small by trying to connect mentors inside colleges, who were mostly professors, experienced in writing research papers, with mentees, like students, who were looking for guidance and mentorship on how to write their own research papers, and how to get them published.
After running these operations manually, over Google Docs and spreadsheets, we started building a platform, which would go on to be hosted at Oversight.in.
We (it was mostly my own idea) took a bet that we will build a crowdfunding platform where young researchers would publish their research projects/ideas, and a target amount for the funds they need to either execute their idea or to take it to completion.
> And a small portion of those sponsorships would go to us as **platform fees**. Enough to generate a stable revenue for us.
I was inspired by Experiment.com which was serving the identical audience but in the United States. And no such platform was available for Indian students.
## Journey Begins
I hired a team of interns to start coding the platform. Because I'd never ventured into web development and didn't even want to, and most of my experience was in writing neural networks. I was paying their stipends with the money I'd earned while doing open source work for Google. But soon I realised that there's only so well interns can do. The platform we wanted to be designed actually required the skills of at least Software Development Expert Level 3 (SDE-III). And these were mostly just 2nd-year interns in a random private engineering college in India.
After spending months trying to babysit them about nitty-gritty like minor UI/UX changes, and insignificant bug fixes, I was starting to give up on them. Besides the platform looked nowhere what I wanted to design. Wasn't even professional. We weren't even sure if it was safe enough to handle payments.
I finally fired the team of interns and started to learn web development myself. [Hasura](https://hasura.io) immediately caught my eye with how easy it made working with database schemas, automatically handling migrations, and giving a straightforward GraphQL interface using which I could perform queries and mutations on the database directly from the frontend. This was my first time encountering GraphQL. I'd only rarely even worked with REST before this.
Then I began my journey into Golang. I always wanted to learn it. Had heard a lot about this phenomenal language at that time. Besides, I could only write in Python until then.
And my search for a first-class easy to use front-end framework landed me on [NuxtJS](https://nuxtjs.org). And I immediately fell in love with how easy Nuxt makes it to develop and deploy a straightforward front-end.
And that is it. It took me about 2 months to learn all these new tools and put together a beta version of the platform that could be rolled out for first the batch of users. This is just a few months before the pandemic.
## Stack
* Nuxt.js SSR (Deployed on Vercel)
* Golang (Stateful API on Echo framework, deployed on Elastic Beanstalk)
* GraphQL (Hasura)
* AWS (EC2, S3, RDS/Postgres, ELB)
* Razorpay (Payments)
## What went wrong?
The pandemic. Almost once in a lifetime phenomenon, which no one could've imagined in their wildest dreams. Almost the entire planet shut down. On March 24th 2020 Prime Minister Modi announced India's first nationwide lockdown. Since most of our initial clients/leads were inside colleges and laboratories, almost all of which had shut down, we just lost the entirety of our initial leads almost overnight. All of this meant - **no revenue at all!**
As a side effect of this lockdown, even government offices started working too slow. Compliances which used to take not more than 2-3 days, were now taking weeks, and sometimes months, due to lack of staff at offices.
## Where did we primarily fail?
But the pandemic wasn't the fundamental reason why we lost the game. It was us. We were simply not good enough and simply didn't realise how tough building a venture is. The world of enterprise turned out to be nothing of the sort we'd hoped it would be.
We learned something the hard way, which I want every single first-time entrepreneur to know. That **it is easy to build a software. It's tough to sell your product. And it's even more fucking tough to turn it into a business.** Building software isn't equal to building a business.
I wish someone would have told me this before we incorporated our company, that we should first establish a guaranteed list of early users, who wouldn't ditch us and will definitely generate revenue for us. And only then start building the software. Otherwise, it would turn out to be a waste of time. As it did!
It's easy to code a website. It's tough to get users.
And that is primarily where we failed. **We failed to sell the idea. We failed to get enough users.** We even tried to introduce new features, and ultimately pivoted to an entirely different fundamental product, which was a social networking platform for academics, keeping crowdfunding research as a supporting/miscellaneous feature.
## What I Learned
The biggest learnings out of all were **humility** and **contentment**. Some time into the lockdown, my dad was laid off from his job at a reputed airline, as was the case with millions of others all over the globe whose companies had decided to downsize to optimize for survival during the pandemic. When I started Oversight, I always had it at the back of my mind, that it was okay for me to not be able to generate stable income from Oversight for a few months, or years, because my dad can comfortably take care of our family finances. But now that comfortable option was gone.
I remember, a few months after my dad lost his job, my mom used to regularly check up on me, while I was typing on my laptop all day long, to inquire whether we started generating a reasonable revenue. She made it sound as if she was just casually inquiring and not really concerned over our monthly expenses. But as months passed, her lowered voice started making it even more clear to me why she was inquiring, even if she never admitted it.
I knew exactly the situation my family was in. And I used to politely tell my mother that from the following month we're more hopeful that we'll have good money flowing into our accounts from the new users. It was the standard response from my end, every single month.
I continued to run Oversight knowing precisely the fact that I was lying to her about our realities. In hindsight, I feel I was being fairly selfish. Oversight, by then, had become more of my obsession instead of a reasonable idea that deserves to be perceived.
Every single day, after tens of cold calls, mass spamming over Instagram, and shooting cold emails, when I would go back to bed at night with a **deflated ego** from having heard "no" so many times, there was little escape but developing humility.
## Game Over
Since Oversight had already taken a toll on the mental health of both myself and Hemant, we decided to call it off. Also, it didn't make sense to continue bootstrapping the venture since our finances were now diluted, and our families also needed our help more than ever.
Hemant went back to working with Infosys, from which he had taken a sabbatical to build Oversight with me, and I subsequently took down the entire AWS infrastructure.
Oversight was officially shut down in March 2021.
All of this with a heavy heart. But also a sense of relief and a weird hope that some very troubling times are now behind us.
From April onward of the same year, I started working with [Johan](https://twitter.com/elitasson/) and [Nuno](https://twitter.com/nunopato) at [Nhost.io](https://nhost.io).
You can read more about my journey at Nhost [over here](/work/nhost).
# pragyaan.co
Source: https://wah.al/projects/pragyaan
Event management for educational events, workshops, webinars, training sessions and more.
**This was a side project.**
This project is now officially shut down and no longer available for use.
I often deliver guest lectures at colleges like IIT Madras and Anna University, Chennai, on topics like Artificial Intelligence and Security Engineering.
And my organisers often used to complain about how the platforms that they use for event management and ticketing, like BookMyShow, charge as high as 25% commission and take weeks to disburse payments.
To solve their problem I started building Pragyaan.co, which is tailored for educational events, webinars, workshops, industrial training, and offers are much more straightforward and transparent pricing.
## Features
* Publish unlimited events.
* Publish free events.
* Accept feedback after the event.
* We disburse your earned funds within 3 days of the event getting over.
* Automatically generate Google Meet links for your online events. And anyone who registers will get the meeting link and password in their email.
* Dynamics change pricing. Give early bird offers.
* Refund your customers Coming Soon
* Subscriptions and discounts Coming Soon
* Accept Payments In Multiple Currencies Coming Soon
Features might change. So keep an eye on the [platform](https://pragyaan.co) itself.
## Opportunities
I'm a very good engineer. I can build great products like Pragyaan. But I suck at sales and lead generation. I'm looking for someone who can join me either part-time, or full-time, to search and onboard more organizers, who can start using the platform. Can either be done through personal contacts, cold calls, cold emails, or marketing. Compensation is something we can discuss over the call. Doesn't matter how old you are, or how qualified you are. If you can find me clients, just drop me an email. Or reach out on Instagram.
## Stack
* Nuxt.js SSR (Deployed on Vercel)
* Golang (Serverless Functions)
* GraphQL (Hasura)
* Nhost (for Hasura, auth, storage and hosting)
* Razorpay (Payments)