---
title: "Notes on Life, Learning, and What Lies Ahead"
date: 2026-11-01
slug: notes-on-life-and-building
summary: "Personal reflections on moving between finance and technology, lessons from Lucknow and Delhi, and the questions that keep me curious."
tags: personal, life, reflections
personal: true
---

A lot has changed over the past few years, but the through-line has remained surprisingly consistent: an intense curiosity about how complex systems work and a desire to build things that turn noise into clarity.

Looking back from where I am today—working on transaction intelligence and automation at S&P Global, and tinkering with local-first tools like Autofeeder in my spare time—I often think about the inflection points that shaped my thinking.

### Roots and early curiosity

Growing up in Lucknow and attending La Martiniere College, computer science was my first glimpse into the leverage of software: the idea that you could write a few lines of logic and create something capable of solving real problems. Later, studying finance at Christ University in Delhi NCR gave me an appreciation for markets, capital allocation, and the enormous transactional machinery that powers global commerce.

What struck me then, and continues to drive me today, is how fragmented that information often is. Finance is full of brilliant minds bogged down by manual workflows, repetitive data wrangling, and friction that modern tooling could easily eliminate.

### What I'm focused on right now

These days, my personal time is split between:

- **Exploring local-first software**: Tools like DuckDB, SQLite, and small utilities that do one job reliably on your own machine without unnecessary cloud complexity.
- **Financial intelligence pipelines**: Experimenting with how LLMs and semantic embeddings can extract structured insights from unstructured regulatory filings, press releases, and earnings data.
- **Reading and reflection**: Spending more time reading history, economics, and longform essays rather than scrolling transient feeds.

This personal section is where I plan to post candid updates, notes on what I'm learning, and reflections as life unfolds.