Since the past few months, I've been building and maintaining indie-projects. Indie-hacking involves conceptualizing, designing, building, launching, growing and monetizing these projects. It is quite challenging, especially having to work across various fronts: Design, Product, Sales, Content, Marketing, Growth. At the same time – it is super rewarding.

Some of the projects I've launched recently are:

Read Next is a website which recommends books to read. It includes over 4000+ books with 50000+ datapoints curated from more than 100+ sources. You can read more about why I built Read-Next?

Collate is an automated, personalised and verifiably secure financial management system built on top of Airtable. It tracks all your transactions – income, expenses and even transfers between your accounts with no manual effort required and is verifiably secure and private.

Playment is an early stage startup building the infrastructure to provide high quality training data for computer vision systems. We help companies and startups working in autonomous driving space to accelerate their AI development process.

Working as a Designer at a fast growing early stage startup is a lot of fun. The roles are muddy, processes are vague, requirements are unclear and the products are unpolished. Everything is a constant interation mode.

At Playment, I also learn more about the business impact of Design, and how to build products that creates value for the customers. Having seen the various iteration cycles of the Products and all the different touchpoints, it helps me look at things from a variety of perspectives — from product and technology, to sales and marketing.

I also help set up the Design function at Playment. This involves hiring Designers, onboarding, mentoring and managing them. It is a completely new experience for me, with different sets of challenges and an intimidating learning curve.

I'm incredibly proud of the products we are building and designing at Playment. It isn't possible without the amazing team here. I also spoke about some ways we design interfaces at an Design event organized by Myntra.

Sprinklr is a unified customer experience management platform for enterprises, It provides social media marketing, social advertising, content management, collaboration, advocacy and social media monitoring for large brands like Nike, Microsoft and McDonald's.

I worked on the Care Cloud, which encompasses a host of products which help companies to engage with customers across digital channels, contextualize the conversation, and gain customer insights.

I realised that designing for enterprises is a different ballgame altogether. The complexities involved, the constrains, the features, the functionalities, the technicalities, the stakeholders, and hundreds of use-cases – it is mind boggling.

Some of the work I've been a part of at Sprinklr is truly revolutionary, at the conceptual level in terms of how enterprise UX works. Message me up if you’d like to know about it (can’t put it up online yet.)

In the summer of 2015, I interned at Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit which owns and operates Wikipedia and other Wikis) at their San Francisco headquarters.

I worked with their small but amazing Communications team, creating tools which enable them to share the size and the scale of the Wikipedia world through social media graphics. I worked with some of the most passionate Designers, Software Engineers and Data Scientists I've known.

More than that, working and living in the Bay Area had been an eye-opening experience. There were so many people I met, so many friends I made, so many places and events I went to, and so many things I learnt. It was my first experience of the Silicon Valley, and it has left me with learnings which have helped me a lot since then.

Charts and graphs was my favourite section in Microsoft Excel as a child. I spent hours playing with obscure .csv files, morphing them into pretty charts and fancy visualizations.

The tools and techniques have changed a lot since then, but the interest remained steadfast. The idea of transforming big huge incomprehensible datasets into engaging stories and insights still fascinates me to no end.

Here are some of the Data Visualization projects I've worked on:

Sometimes I also speak about Data Visualization. Here’s one of an introductory talk I gave about Visualizaing Data at a Facebook Developers' Meetup in Delhi.

A great deal of my learnings in design and technology are a direct result of the internship experiences I've had over the years. Instamojo was my first taste of what a technology startup is and how they work. Read more about my experience at Instamojo.

I also worked at Cobalt.io, a penetration-as-a-service platform for a few months – designing and developing a part of their client side dashboard, working on a few product improvements, and lots of really random impromptu design tasks.

Internships have been an incredible opportunity for me to dip my toes in the startup ecosystem, meeting and connecting with amazing people, brainstorming ideas, discussing, debating, learning and growing.