Hey there, I’m Harsh
I was born in Faridabad and still live there with my family. I started my programming journey with game development and here it goes:
2014
I started building stuff in eighth grade when I discovered the game engine Unity3D. I was an avid gamer. Most of my time after school went into finding and playing Flash games.
Knowing that I could build my own games, I got supercharged and dived into Unity. I spent a few years learning and building small games and published them on the Android Play store.
2016
In 11th and 12th grade, I got to learn C++ in my academics and I also went through CS50. I discovered that there is so much more to Computer Science and programming than writing instructions in a language.
Apart from games, I built a quiz app with Tkinter for a school event and went on to top the Computer Science class at my school.
2019
After spending hundreds of hours crafting a portfolio and writing tens of essays, I got into my dream college NYU with a $100K scholarship. But I wasn’t able to finance the rest of the tuition and boarding costs.
I then enrolled in a college in India. When I got to know about coding boot-camps, I was dazzled, it was the perfect opportunity for me. I joined one of them. Within 3 months into the bootcamp, I got an internship + job offer from Avalara. I dropped out and joined the Chennai team.
2020
I spent nearly two years at Avalara working with some of the smartest people in the industry on challenging problems. There I was trained on a variety of topics and prepared to pick up any problem and solve it. I built full-stack apps, built an intuitive and resilient scraping system, and maintained and extended data pipelines that processed terabytes of data.
2022
Now was the time to take another leap of faith. After having run side projects in the past and recognizing potential problems I could solve for developers, I bid goodbye to Avalara and started working on DevKit in Jan 2022 to build developer tools that empower and delight.
Had a successful launch of v1.0 on Product Hunt on Jan 15. Received nearly 100 upvotes, became the 6th product of the day and received intent to purchase from multiple people.
Now, It’s been 3 months. I got my first few paying customers. Continuing to make the product better every day. The journey is long and tiring but I am prepared for it!
In the first few months of our launch, we made INR 10K in revenue ($125) from 3-5 paying customers (annual subscriptions). And registered users crossed the 400 mark.
But after that growth curve was flat and I was wondering what I was doing with my life.
My last job was a little better in multiple ways than my current consulting contract and also I was still in the first year of my online degree. Because of those worries and a lot in my head, I just grew a lot of anxiety and hit a bit of depression and borderline suicidal thoughts. Sounds pretty strange now that I am okay but that was the state back then.
A couple of things that helped me to overcome my depression to become a much stronger version of myself:
- Shared with people my problems and deepest insecurities and got their advice and thought about it and acted upon it
- Starting an exercise regime. 3km morning jog no matter what.
- Realizing that life is long. No matter how hard life knocks you down, you can still come back and find a way to a decent life.
- Going out more and talking to more people. We as human beings need the company of other human beings. Still, as an introvert, you need lots of human connection and human touch.
- Attended concerts and went bowling for the first time. Went on office trips.
I overcame this phase and doubled down on DevKit from mid-Novemeber. Started building a team and getting into different programs like Buildspace N&W S2. Build a team of 3-5 people by the end of 2022.
2023
Finally, in February, I took the leap of faith and left my high-paying US startup remote job and went on DevKit full-time with my amazing team.
We recently hit 10 members on the DevKit team.
I am having the best time of my life right now talking to people, traveling, and coding.
Carpe Diem 🥂