+ ABOUT +

I am Naman. I live in New Delhi, but I spend as much time as I can in the Himalayas. My life usually has three things in progress: something I am building, something I am training for, and somewhere I want to go next. It keeps life interesting and my weekends unnecessarily full.

Building, training, and travelling may look unrelated, but I enjoy them for the same reason. I like starting with something uncertain, learning as I go, and staying with it until the end. Sometimes that means tracing an AI agent failure from a customer report to a production fix. Sometimes it means walking a trail while praying for the full support of the mountain and weather gods, or finishing a race after my feet stop moving.

I follow the problem

I care deeply about problems I believe are worth solving. Most of my work has been in developer tools and AI products, including code search, coding agents, context retrieval, evaluations, and systems that diagnose production failures.

I do not like being limited by a job title. I may spend one day solving a hard engineering problem and the next talking to customers, running a sales enablement session, or working through ideas with designers. If it helps solve the problem, I consider it part of my work.

I try to understand why something matters before deciding what to build. I then want to stay responsible for the decision and its result. Good work, to me, is not just code that runs. It should be useful to the people it was built for.

AI agents fascinate me because they are capable, strange, and easy to misunderstand. I spend a lot of time building them, testing them, and finding where they fail. One experiment ran for almost fourteen hours and taught me that working for a long time and making progress are not the same thing. This is true for agents and, occasionally, for me.

I feel normal in the mountains

I have been trekking for years and have done more than ten treks that lasted about a week. For days at a time, there may be no roads, electricity, or phone signal. Everything I need fits inside a rucksack, plans can change with the weather, and the group has to look after itself.

This feels natural to me. I am comfortable beyond the last road, where the day becomes simple: walk, eat, help at camp, watch the weather, sleep, and repeat. Preparation matters, and so does being useful to the people around me.

Some of the best sleep of my life has been inside a 6 × 6 foot tent shared with another person, with rocks pressing through the ground beneath me. It should not be comfortable, but after a full day on a trail, it is.

My first trek was Kheerganga. Since then I have crossed high passes, walked through the great valleys of Kashmir, and climbed Kanamo Peak in Spiti, just shy of 6,000 metres. Kashmir Great Lakes is still the most beautiful trek I have done, but the people changed me more than the landscape. On the road to Kibber, I met people from four earlier treks before the new one had even begun. The mountains now feel full of familiar faces.

I run, but not very fast

I am mostly a runner, though not a great one. My current personal bests are 23 minutes for 5K and 1 hour 48 minutes 34 seconds for the half marathon. I am proud of both and still want to run faster.

What I like about running is close to what Haruki Murakami describes in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Most runs are private and repetitive. I follow the same routes, spend time alone, and measure myself against who I was before. Progress comes from showing up regularly, not from making every run feel important.

Running became serious after the Kashmir Great Lakes trek in 2024. I met two runners there who happened to live near me. Back in Delhi, our Saturday mornings became long runs followed by breakfast. Those mornings carried me to my first half marathon, and eventually much further than I expected.

I have since run my first full marathon and completed the Procam Slam, 98.292 kilometres across four races and four cities. I also finished my first HYROX in Delhi in 1 hour 49 minutes 49 seconds after preparing for about a month.

My running-shoe collection has become a small logistics problem. The Alphafly 3 waits for race day, the Vaporfly 3 handles intervals, and the Zoom Fly 6 and Superblast 3 split training and long runs. The Mafate 5 covers trails. This is already too many shoes, which somehow makes it no easier to avoid buying another pair. For treks, my Alpine Cruiser 1000 boots were a huge upgrade: waterproof, roomy, and comfortable enough that my feet finally stopped complaining.

Running is the main discipline, but I enjoy the side quests too. Skiing in Gulmarg has become a yearly ritual. I have also surfed in Mulki and travelled to Kamshet to learn paragliding. I am usually enthusiastic before I am competent, which is part of the fun.

I am often faster at committing than preparing. My pursuits include a faster HYROX, an Ironman 70.3, a 6,000-metre peak, and the original Marathon to Athens route. I also want to run the Middle-earth Halfling Marathon through Hobbiton because I have watched The Lord of the Rings eleven times.

I travel to pay attention

I have travelled through France 🇫🇷, Spain 🇪🇸, Portugal 🇵🇹, Mexico 🇲🇽, Singapore 🇸🇬, Japan 🇯🇵, Italy 🇮🇹, Austria 🇦🇹, Poland 🇵🇱, Norway 🇳🇴, and Nepal 🇳🇵. That list says where I have been, but not what I enjoy about travelling.

I want to see more than the airport, the main landmarks, and the popular photographs. I walk through ordinary neighbourhoods, eat local food, and ask people where they actually like to go. Food is one of the easiest ways to understand a place, so I make time for it.

I almost always take a day trip outside the main city. A train or bus to a smaller place helps me see more of the country. I plan enough to use the day well, usually starting with where to eat, but leave room for a local recommendation, a missed turn, or another unexpected meal.

I usually remember people more clearly than the itinerary. A friend showing me Kolkata through its street food, a volleyball game near Manu Temple, or meeting the same trekker at another base camp can become my main memory of a trip.

I care too much about my desk

I am proud of my desk space. I have improved it for years, one monitor arm, cable, keyboard, and questionable accessory at a time. It now has a walnut standing desk, two 27 inch 4K monitors on matching arms, a stereo pair of HomePods, and hidden hubs that turn one cable into an entire workstation.

I enjoy gadgets and care about how things work, feel, and fit together. Some changes remove a real annoyance. Others simply make the walnut match. Both can feel equally urgent at the time. The setup is never finished, and my stuff page keeps a record of the things that have earned a place in it.

Why this site exists

This site is my second memory. The first one keeps the feeling and quietly loses the details. I use this one to keep races, trips, useful objects, unfinished ideas, and small moments before they disappear into old photos and forgotten notes.

Now has short updates. My writings have longer thoughts about software, travel, running, and life. The running archive records my races, including the difficult ones. I keep everything in Markdown so the words remain mine even when the software around them changes.

Contact

Email me at naman@outlook.in, or call me at +91 85277 05775. You can also find me on X, LinkedIn, GitHub, and Instagram.

For a less conventional hello, leave a note or a tiny 64 × 64 piece of art on my pixel wall.