Student Platforms

IIT Madras' Student Executive Council needed real working software for 47,000 active students: event registration, coordination, information that people could actually rely on. Most of what existed before was ad hoc spreadsheets and forms that didn't survive a semester's turnover.

Talked directly with the students and council members running events and processes to see where things actually broke down, which was almost always at handoff: one batch of organisers would leave, and the next one would inherit a system nobody had documented.

Helped build and ship production features end to end, working directly with the team rather than handing off a spec from the side. Built with continuity in mind from the start, since these tools needed to survive past any one team's term, not just work as a demo.

Early features solved the problem for the team using them that semester, then broke the next semester once the people who understood the system had moved on. The fix was treating documentation as part of what shipping actually meant, not something to do afterward if there was time.

Platforms used by 47,000 active students, still running today.

Software for a community that turns over every year has to be built for the next team, not just the current one. That changed what done means to me generally: working, and understandable by someone new, are two different bars. Only the second one lasts.