The Story

Started where everyone starts — enterprise software. Learned how to build systems that serve thousands of users with zero tolerance for failure. Also learned that I'd rather jump off a cliff (with a bungee cord) than attend another 3-hour planning meeting.

Enterprise-grade discipline acquired. Corporate satisfaction? Not so much.

Jumped ship to one of India's hottest fashion e-commerce startups. Built the web platform, contributed to mobile. Fast iterations, tight timelines, real users. The work was great — but something was still missing. Possibly the mountains.

Fashion e-commerce — web + mobile. Itchy feet intensifying.

Built flight booking systems for Flybe, Europe's largest regional airline. Millions of passengers, complex pricing engines, real-time inventory. Ironic — building travel tech while desperately wanting to use it myself.

Flybe — millions of bookings. The travel bug was officially terminal.

India's #1 e-commerce platform. Built the post-order experience and Sentinel internal tools. Big Sale Days, millions of daily transactions, real-time everything. Peak engineering satisfaction? Maybe. Peak life satisfaction? Still searching. Started rafting trips to Rishikesh between sprints.

India's biggest e-commerce — shipped at insane scale.

Finally did the thing — went independent. Worked with Doodhwala (hyperlocal delivery) and Seclogic (cloud security — CyberQ Shield for AWS/Azure/GCP). In between? Traveled across India, did adventure sports, made contacts in the tourism world. The kind of "networking" that involves rapids and harnesses.

Freedom acquired. Travel contacts: growing dangerously.

Consulted for Adobe Sydney as a front-end engineer on Tourism Australia (australia.com) — a national-scale digital platform built on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), serving millions of travellers. This was the project that connected the dots. Years of travelling across India and Southeast Asia, contacts in adventure tourism, and suddenly I was literally building the tech for the tourism industry. The Xcapade idea? Inevitable.

AEM front-end on Tourism Australia — the lightbulb moment for Xcapade.

Took a break from consulting to build my own products end-to-end. Formed WDA. Still a frontend craftsperson at heart — every product I ship is pixel-tight React and Next.js — but now with the full backend, payments, and infra stack underneath. Vibe-coding with Claude Code and Windsurf — what used to take a team of 10 now takes one slightly unhinged developer with a decade of context and the right AI tools. Hodol and Xcapade — both built, both shipping.

Hodol · Xcapade — vibe-coded from scratch, solo.