Who am I?

I'm Ravi Ojha, responsible for just about everything on this site. That's me, over to the right. I'm a Software Engineer by passion. A product person. These days, I spend most of my time building products, running them and figuring out what to build next.

I started my career at HackerEarth, had a short stint at Flipkart and later joined LocalCoinSwap as one of its early engineers. Somewhere along the way, I became more interested in the product as a whole than just the code behind it. Engineering, product, infrastructure, talking to users, growth -- I like being involved in all of it.

These days, most of my time goes into SpendCrypto, which makes it easier to actually spend cryptocurrency in the real world. I also built Ticketping, a helpdesk that started because I simply wanted to talk to users of my websites directly from Slack.

I keep building smaller things on the side too. Some turn into products, some remain weekend projects and some quietly disappear after I've satisfied my curiosity. Over the years that list has included an Idioms & Phrases Chrome extension, StartupToolbox, serif.sh, BotPrompts.fyi and a bunch of things that probably don't deserve a mention here.

Lately, I've also been spending an unreasonable amount of time with AI coding agents. I write considerably less code by hand now, while somehow building more software than before. All of my life, I avoided being a manager and now I'm managing a bunch of AI agents lol..

I started Rookie's Lab in 2012 as a freshman in college to rant about extra-curricular activities. It also served as an excuse to practice the art of writing. I started with graphic designs. Then I became a competitive programming fanatic. Later, I got introduced to Python in an online course offered by MIT. After graduation, I started writing about software engineering because that's what I ended up doing for a living.

A decade later, the subjects have changed a bit. I don't do competitive programming anymore and rarely open Photoshop, but I'm still building things and jumping into random rabbit holes. So I suppose the purpose of this site hasn't changed all that much.

As to the part of practicing the art of writing, it's been a mild success so far. I still shy away in embarrassment when I read some of my earlier posts. Maybe, that's a measure of progress. And, from the quote above, I still believe writing helps me generate ideas, other than communicating with the audience.