How I learned to build with high agency, patience, and first-principles thinking.

A lot of my engineering experience came from solo projects, where I had to make product decisions, design the system, troubleshoot bugs, and keep moving without waiting for someone else to unblock me. One of the earliest was a rich-text notes app with a responsive dashboard of note cards arranged in a grid.

I wanted each card to expand smoothly from its exact position, but CSS Grid kept fighting the animation. I used React refs and getBoundingClientRect() to measure the clicked card, rendered a duplicate outside the grid, and animated that copy with Framer Motion so it felt like the original card was opening in place. Getting the offsets right across screen sizes took careful layout math and a lot of debugging, but it taught me to work from first principles instead of stopping at the first limitation.

During my internship at Expert Buddy, I worked on a major feature called StudyBank, where students could upload notes and other students could search, preview, and download them. I built the Next.js product surface from Figma, wired the experience around auth-aware data flows, handled debugging on my own, and used docs, search, and AI to understand why bugs were happening instead of just patching symptoms.

While building the upload flow, I realized the long metadata form created too much friction. I proposed an AI-assisted autofill option, built a proof of concept in two days, and showed the CEO and design team how it could make uploads faster while keeping manual control. Once everyone aligned on the flow, I helped shape the final interface and shipped the production version.

During Smart India Hackathon, I took ownership of the product experience for Mentor Map and helped turn the idea into something usable under real time pressure. Building the core flow in that environment taught me how to move quickly, make product calls, and stay calm while the scope kept shifting.

That same habit shows up across my side projects as well. I like working independently, debugging the hard edges myself, and understanding how something behaves before I reach for shortcuts. Whether it is AI tooling, backend systems, or a first-principles side project, I usually learn the fastest when I am close to the problem.