hi

About Me

Hey, I'm Tejas.

I'm 23. I build software, run a tiny company called Pixels and Grids, go to the gym, randomly decide I need to learn something at 1 AM, think about the future way too much and have approximately 400 things I want to do with my life.

That's probably the shortest description of me.

I build things

I've been programming for a few years now.

Mostly full-stack stuff.

React, Next.js, Node, TypeScript, databases, AWS, Redis, Kafka, Docker, Go... whatever I need really.

I don't particularly care about being "the React guy" or "the backend guy."

If something needs to be built, I want to figure out how to build it.

I've worked professionally at ZERROR STUDIOS, where I worked on RSS Party. I worked on UI improvements, performance and AWS-based image optimization among other things.

Eventually I started doing more freelance work and then started Pixels and Grids.

That was a completely different education lol.

Suddenly programming was only one part of the problem.

Now I had to find clients.

Talk to them.

Figure out what they actually wanted.

Give quotes.

Negotiate.

Build the thing.

Deploy it.

Fix it.

Explain why the "tiny change" they requested is absolutely not a tiny change.

And then somehow get paid.

Running a company made me realize that building software is honestly one of the easier parts of building a software business.

Sales is hard.

Distribution is hard.

People are hard.

I've built a lot of random stuff

This is probably one of my favorite things about programming.

You can just have an idea and... make it exist.

I've worked on marketplaces, CRMs, fertility/healthcare products, internal business software, AI products, mobile apps, e-commerce systems and a bunch of smaller things.

One of the bigger systems I've worked on was Atlas Commerce, a multi-tenant marketplace with an AI builder.

That involved Next.js microfrontends, Express microservices, Go, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Stripe Connect, Kubernetes, Terraform and a bunch of other things.

Probably an unnecessarily large number of technologies 😭

I've also worked on things like Conceev, AI-DM, RSS Party, Animoox, Penderghast, Fahwa and various client products through Pixels and Grids.

And then sometimes I build things purely because I want to understand them.

For example, I built my own little search engine.

Crawler in Go.

Processing pipeline.

Search through Meilisearch.

At one point I had crawled a few GB of the web.

Did the world need another search engine?

Absolutely not.

Did I want to understand how one worked?

Yes.

That's enough reason for me.

Curiosity causes most of my problems

I have a really difficult time staying interested in only one thing.

One week I'll be thinking about distributed systems.

Then AI.

Then investing.

Then how HFT firms work.

Then biology.

Then why humans can't dramatically accelerate plant growth.

Then space.

Then whether Venus is actually a better colonization target than people think.

Then economics.

Then I'll randomly decide I should learn German.

This is either one of my best qualities or an extremely sophisticated form of procrastination.

Probably both.

But I genuinely love understanding how things work.

I don't like stopping at:

"That's just how it works."

Why?

What's underneath it?

And what's underneath that?

You can keep asking that question for basically anything and eventually you end up somewhere fascinating.

I think almost everything is learnable

This is probably one of my strongest beliefs.

People put themselves into boxes way too early.

"I'm not technical."

"I'm bad at math."

"I'm not a business person."

"I'm not athletic."

"I'm bad at talking to people."

Maybe.

Or maybe you've barely practiced it.

Obviously people have different natural abilities. I'm not pretending genetics and circumstances don't exist.

But I think the range of things an ordinary person can become reasonably good at is MUCH larger than people assume.

So I keep learning things.

Programming.

System design.

Business.

Sales.

Languages.

Driving.

Swimming.

Finance.

Fitness.

Whatever catches my attention.

I want to become the kind of person where if I don't know something, my immediate reaction isn't:

"I can't do that."

It's:

"Okay, how does that work?"

I'm ridiculously ambitious

Sometimes probably too ambitious.

I don't particularly want an average life.

And I don't mean that as an insult to anyone who wants a peaceful normal life.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

It's just not what I want.

I want to build companies.

I want financial freedom.

I want to become extremely good at what I do.

I want a great body.

I want to travel.

I want to understand a ridiculous number of things.

I want an amazing relationship.

I want to meet interesting people.

I want to build things that matter.

Basically I want everything 😭

Which creates another problem:

There are only 24 hours in a day.

I'm still figuring that part out.

I think long term

One person who has influenced how I think a lot is Jeff Bezos.

I've probably watched an unreasonable number of his interviews.

I literally have a YouTube playlist of them.

There are a few Bezos ideas I keep coming back to:

Day 1.

Regret minimization.

One-way doors vs two-way doors.

Customer obsession.

Long-term thinking.

Being stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details.

Create more than you consume.

I especially like the idea of making decisions by asking what your 80-year-old self would regret.

A lot of things that feel terrifying today become surprisingly small when you zoom out.

I'm very pro-risk

Calculated risk, obviously.

I'm not going to put my life savings on red because "risk is good" 😭

But I think people optimize way too hard for safety.

Get degree.

Get job.

Don't leave job.

Buy house.

Get married.

Have kids.

Retire.

Again, nothing wrong with that.

But I don't want to choose my entire life because something is the safest available option.

I'd rather attempt something ambitious and fail than spend 40 years wondering whether I could have done it.

You can recover from a failed company.

You can recover from a bad project.

You can recover from rejection.

Time is harder to recover.

I'm an atheist

Pretty strongly.

I don't believe in God, astrology, numerology, auspicious dates or supernatural explanations without evidence.

If someone makes a claim, I want to know:

Why should I believe that?

That doesn't mean I think religious people are stupid.

I just don't think tradition makes something true.

If evidence appears tomorrow proving something I currently believe is wrong, great.

Change the belief.

Reality doesn't care about my opinion.

I dislike blindly following tradition

This applies beyond religion.

Caste makes no sense to me.

Judging people based on what community they happened to be born into makes no sense.

Treating girls completely differently from boys makes no sense.

Doing something purely because:

"This is how we've always done it."

isn't a particularly convincing argument to me.

Traditions can be beautiful.

Keep the ones that make life better.

Question the ones that don't.

I don't really understand the men-vs-women thing

The internet has made this unbelievably weird.

"All girls are gold diggers."

"All men cheat."

"Women only want X."

"Men only care about Y."

Bro.

There are billions of people.

They're not running the same software.

Obviously there are biological differences between men and women.

But when I'm talking to someone, I mostly just see... a person.

Some people are amazing.

Some people are idiots.

Gender doesn't have a monopoly on either category.

Relationships matter a lot to me

For all the stuff I write about ambition, money, companies and technology, I don't think I'd consider myself successful if I had all of that and nobody I genuinely loved sharing life with.

I'm definitely a romantic person.

Probably embarrassingly so 😭

My type isn't really "baddie."

I want a goodie.

Someone strong and independent but also loving.

Caring.

Supportive.

Empathetic.

Loyal.

Emotionally mature.

Someone with her own opinions.

Someone relentless.

Someone who pushes me when she knows I can do better.

And someone I can do the same for.

Most importantly, someone I just vibe with.

Girlfriend + best friend basically.

Someone I can have a serious conversation with at 1 AM and send absolute garbage reels to five minutes later.

That's the dream.

I care a lot about becoming physically capable too

I go to the gym pretty consistently.

Part of it is obviously aesthetics.

I'm not going to pretend I don't want to look good lol.

I want the shoulders.

Arms.

Back.

Abs.

V-taper.

All of it.

But I've started liking the process too.

Watching your body slowly change because you repeatedly did something is satisfying.

Gym is actually a pretty good metaphor for almost everything else.

You can't read your way into getting strong.

Eventually you have to pick the weight up.

Repeatedly.

For months.

And progress is slow enough that you don't notice it day to day.

Then one day you look back and realize you're not the same person.

I think skills work similarly.

I also like learning languages

This is another rabbit hole.

I know English, Kannada, Hindi, Tulu and Havyakka to different degrees, and I've been learning Japanese, German and Spanish.

Japanese especially fascinates me.

There's something really cool about slowly reaching the point where sounds that previously meant absolutely nothing suddenly become understandable.

It's almost like unlocking another section of humanity.

I'd love to become properly multilingual eventually.

How many languages?

No idea.

Knowing me I'll probably keep adding them until this becomes another impossible goal.

I'm interested in money, but not just for buying stuff

I think about money a lot.

Companies.

Investing.

Markets.

Business models.

How people become wealthy.

How capital compounds.

But the part of money I find most attractive isn't buying a Lamborghini.

It's optionality.

Money lets you say no.

No to a job you hate.

No to a client you hate.

No to staying somewhere you don't want to live.

It lets you spend six months learning something.

Start a company.

Help your family.

Travel.

Take risks.

Buy back your time.

That's the version of wealth I want.

Freedom.

I'm worried about AI replacing me

I'm probably much more pessimistic about programming careers than most programmers.

I think if we genuinely achieve AGI, coding jobs are basically finished.

Not "AI-assisted."

Finished.

If an artificial intelligence can reason better than me, understand an entire codebase simultaneously, work continuously and copy itself essentially for free, why would someone pay me to manually type code?

So I'm trying not to make "programmer" my entire identity.

I'm increasingly interested in sales, marketing, product, communication, finance and business.

Today I build using code.

Tomorrow maybe I build by directing AI.

I don't really care.

I want to be a builder, not a human compiler.

I like weird questions

Probably more than normal questions.

Could humans colonize Venus?

Could biology become programmable?

Can we dramatically accelerate plant growth?

What happens when human labor isn't economically necessary?

Will countries still matter in 200 years?

Can one person eventually operate a billion-dollar company using AI?

Could humans become biologically immortal?

What's the theoretical limit of intelligence?

Most of these questions don't have immediate practical value.

That's exactly why they're fun.

Not everything needs an ROI.

Sometimes you should follow an idea purely because your brain went:

"Wait... why?"

I believe in iteration

This is probably the closest thing I have to a philosophy.

Try something.

It doesn't work.

Okay.

Why?

Change something.

Try again.

Still doesn't work.

Change something else.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Eventually either you get somewhere or you understand the problem well enough to realize you should be solving a different one.

I don't think failure is particularly profound.

Most of the time it's just information.

You tried something.

Reality responded.

Now you know something you didn't know before.

Use it.

I'm nowhere near the person I want to become

This is important.

Reading all this probably makes me sound like I wake up at 5 AM, meditate, run a company, read three books, learn Japanese and then casually solve distributed systems problems before breakfast.

Absolutely not 😭

I procrastinate.

I scroll reels way too much sometimes.

I overthink.

I compare myself to people ahead of me.

I start too many things.

I struggle with consistency.

Sometimes I know exactly what I should be doing and still don't do it.

Sometimes I'm extremely productive.

Sometimes I somehow accomplish nothing despite being "busy" the entire day.

I'm figuring it out.

That's kind of why I made this site.

I don't want it to be a polished corporate version of me where everything sounds impressive.

I want somewhere I can put what I'm building.

What I'm learning.

What I'm thinking about.

Things I believe.

Things I might change my mind about later.

Random experiments.

Random questions.

And hopefully, over time, you can literally see the person behind the website changing.

Basically

I'm Tejas.

I build things.

I ask too many questions.

I want to understand how everything works.

I'm probably too ambitious.

I want to become strong, wealthy, knowledgeable and genuinely useful.

I want to build companies and weird projects.

I want to learn languages.

I want to travel.

I want to find someone I absolutely adore.

I want to keep changing my mind when I'm wrong.

I want to take risks while I'm young enough to recover from them.

I want to create more than I consume.

And I really, really don't want to wake up at 50 and realize I spent my entire life playing safe.

I have absolutely no idea how much of this I'll actually accomplish.

But that's the fun part.

I'm 23.

It's still Day 1.