I am Krishna Kumar, Currently working as application developer/ Senior Consultant at Thoughtworks, Hyderabad, India.

Programming languages I work on:
- Erlang (2 years)
- Golang (2.5 years)
- Rustlang (hobby)

Projects:
- Securing Enrolments for an Identity Project for Govt. of India (Golang and Java)
- Retail assortment application (Java, React, AWS and GCP)
- Network Test Simulator (Erlang and on-prem cloud)

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My scrambled brain omlette (Li’l about how I think:)

I study for invention and problem solving. Believe me or not, I like to be a jack of multiple trades as It gives me flexibility to solve a problem end to end with some compromises on perfection. Perfection needs time and lot of commitment. But I am not committed to any one thing as I fear of getting stuck and not able to do grasp the next big idea which will mostly be completely orthogonal to what I have done so far. What is parallel in all of this my desire to do something different and be a person who can solve multi disciplinary problems easily.

I am krishna kumar. I did a lot of stuff. But, definitely not a lot or atleast as comparable to the people who have created the “Erlang” language itself. I mean, How creative is for someone who came up with a completely new language and a runtime, with a programming paradigm that people don’t believe it’s pragmatic. That’s unique.  May be u know what I like the language so much and I am blabbering now. Let’s move on.

Primary and Secondary schooling days:

When I was doing my primary education. By looking at the tick tick pen. I actually thought I can make a missile launcher out of it. I am fascinated how a cork and screw mechanism works which converts your rotational motion to linear motion. While I was doing my secondary education, there is this scene terminator movie which is very interesting in which Scwazznegger cuts open his arm to show internal mechanics of his arm. For few days, it kept me awake and finally understood how to fit in such mechanics in that small form factor, it’s just cork screw arrangement built in the form of veins in terminator arms.

I actually bought a book written by a DRDO scientist and thought by making some of those projects will make me a scientist at DRDO one day. No it didn’t happen.

While I was playing with flying crackers on a Diwali day. I thought I have found chemical composition for making a rocket. I have read few pages on a perpetual machines book and then made my own perpetual motion machine and perfectly failed as mentioned in the conclusion which i have never reached to see it. 

I have read in one newspaper that someone made bio fuel out of plants and started scraping trunks of trees in search of the fuel. Of course, I have lost interest in it in a couple of days.

By looking at bunch of capacitors, resisters and transistors in some old radios. I thought of building a remote control system by just try to connect them various combinations which never really worked out. I wish I know about electromagnetic waves then.

Quest for Inventing something new:

The quest for invention has always been kept me awake. Sometimes inventions do happen by accident, popularly called as trail and error. I have taken an old cassette walkman which has the capability to record and replay. By carefully examining the circuitry and shorting few connections I have built a PA system out of it. This was lauded in one of science fares that happened during my school days.

I even proved myself as good artist at town level in my primary and also as a good chess player in my secondary and totally stopped doing for the rest of my life.

The Engineer moment:

All my life I have waited for the moment to become an engineer. I have taken electronics and communication in GMRIT, Rajam. Started building towards my scientist dream. Initial days, I don’t know what new to do and certainly not something everyone would do. All my first year of college is a void which no one filled. I have tried to build connections to lecturers who have done robotics in the past. None of them really taken me into consideration, because I was pretty bad at explanation and persuasion. Towards the end of my first year engineering, I have got my own laptop. I wanted to prove myself in whichever way I can to get started, there comes a college level 3D animation contest which is open to all 4 years of students. Theme was to pick a topic related to our own discipline and build a 3D model and animation out of it. I had explored what I can pick up and found this Cathode Ray Oscilloscope(CRO) very much fascinating about how the signal in electrical form is shown visually on the display. I thought it’s nice for someone to know internally how that works. Set out to get more insight into CRO, took help from our department lab incharge and got an inside look of a working CRO. I took multiple photos at different POVs and built my first full blown end to end 3D animation which runs for 6+ minutes and submitted the video. During this course of time, I have learnt 3DS max, maya and after effects with trial licenses and won the contest. Few more animations and moved on.

I have then changed gears towards building some robots. Spent, rest 3 years of college building basic line followers to walking robots. Finally settled with second prize at a nation wide robotic showcase called ELECRAMA in 2014.

Stepping into programming:

While I wanted to do MS after college. I have settled with being systems engineer and then developer learning different programming languages like Erlang, Golang and Rustlang.

Built bunch of applications and most of them, people don’t generally don’t use them on daily basis😒. But satisfied more than ever by the idea of building it from scratch and by myself. 

I am curious to see what awaits for me next.

While I have picked up a job as software engineer instead of electronics or robotics. I have a side project which I have been doing with one of my friend at Indian Oil Corporation, cochin. It’s an industrial automation project and the same have been tried by lot of people and couldn’t achieve it over the years. But we were able to find a solution which worked in the first attempt and we are in the process of improving speed and efficiency of the automation now.

Questions I have on my mind right now:

• Am I constructively doing something for future?
• Am I working towards my dream of becoming a robotic engineer or scientist? Because, software plays a big role in them anyways.
• Am I really just surviving like everyone else? This hurts my feelings a lot but may be true.
• Am I taking up new challenges?

Looking for my next challenge.

Fun Fact:

I think this “about me” can definitely serve as a source to profile me and to train recommendation engines against me or classify me in to one of the filter bubbles, using some clustering techniques😁.