buddywhitman

About Me

A decade or two down the line, I would love to launch a consumer-facing hard tech venture. I am also into music production, socio-poitical activism, military stuff and comparative religion. My belief in absolute equality, world peace, love, individuality and internationalism stems from an avid interest in the Vedanta philosophy. The earliest memory that I have of the stuff that runs on the screen takes me back to the fifth grade. My father, meaning to introduce me to HTML, showed me how to click a button and receive a warm greeting: Hello, Pulkit! I was shocked at how the computer knew my name, something I did not recall saying before, and I wanted to learn how my dad accomplished the feat. By the time I answered that question by learning HTML, CSS and the WordPress platform by the seventh grade, having started two blogs and seemingly destined to end up in software development, a thousand new questions were all begging for attention. That is when I decided to learn what's truly under the hood – stepping into hardware. I joined a local maker lab – going by the name of SP Robotics Works. Every day after school, I'd spend three to four hours in a highly stimulating environment - surrounded by passionate individuals working on building robotic and IoT systems using the Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms, implementing several sensors, actuators and communication modules.

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By the time I graduated from their year-long programme, I knew that I wanted to explore the intersection of hardware and software, where man meets machine. I designed algorithms for gesture recognition for an interactive hologram and dreamt up BCIs long before I heard of Neuralink. Growing up reading a lot (I used to spend the entire day at the exhaustive library in my mother's school through middle school), I'm grateful to my parents for giving me exposure to a wide range of uncensored knowledge: conflicting schools of thought, jarring insights into the lives of personalities I'd only heard about.

me looking at graphs

All of this helped shape a complex perspective, understanding love, peace and freedom despite or rather, because of the many things that unite and divide the people of our world. Around this time, I started exploring existential questions to understand spirituality and politics for myself, inspired by Walter Isaacson's biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. Never entirely emerging from my indulges in humanities, all my future endeavours featured a design/human perspective, trying to understand what people find beautiful, what gives us a reason to smile amidst this rat race. Throughout high school, I focussed a lot more on coursework, implementing hobbyist projects like R/C skateboards and AWS-enabled smart speakers while being able to secure straight As in my sophomore and senior years.

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In college, I'm expanding my knowledge across three fronts: Web/App Development, Coding/DSA and Embedded Development/Hardware Design. My day is spent balancing classes with meetings and workshops organised by several of the student clubs (ACM, IEEE, GDSC, etc.) that I actively participate in and bond with friends over heartfelt conversations and music jamming sessions. I conclude my day at the workshop, where we (a team of eight) work on building a solar-powered racing car for the World Solar Challenge (WSC) and the Electric Solar Vehicle Championship (ESVC), where I work for the electronics subsystem. I also handle website and app development for some start-ups incubated at our innovation centre while helping local businesses with their digital transformation journey through a local freelance-facilitating platform. Now, now I'm feeling pretty honoured that you stayed with me all the way till here (blushes). Scroll down to explore my journey!

Github homescreen

My Journey

The journey continues...