Exhibits A through whatever

a.k.a. JD
I’m from Calcutta, I studied buildings, then went into payments. Both load-bearing; only one ships at midnight.

I trained as an architect and never designed a building. This bothered me for about six months. Then I started working on payments and found the same job waiting - fewer beams, more edge cases, still mostly invisible when it’s right.

Architecture school teaches you to care about things nobody thanks you for. How load travels. Where the light lands. Whether a corridor makes you slow down or speed up. Nobody walks out of a building saying the circulation was well-resolved; they just felt fine, and left. That turned out to be excellent training for software, and terrible training for having a portfolio anyone can look at quickly.

Currently at Juspay, Bangalore

September 2024 - Present

I work on the layer underneath the payment - routing rules, orchestration, fraud logic, and Blend, our open-source design system. Nobody screenshots a rule builder. If a merchant configures something and never thinks about it again, that’s the whole job.

What the work has taught me, mostly, is patience with the model. The screens are the last thing you design; get the underlying structure wrong and no amount of polish rescues it. I’ve also learned that consistency is not the same as sameness, and that the interesting question is usually which differences are accidents and which are the product genuinely needing to be different.

I travel to be somewhere long enough to get the rhythm of it - how people eat, when the streets fill up, what everyone knows that isn’t written down. I’ll go a long way for one good meal as well.

I play football and padel badly and often, go to shows for the room as much as the set, and spend most evenings building small things with Claude at hours I shouldn’t be awake.