About
I’m Vikram. I’ve been a software engineer, tech lead, and exec at early stage startups for over a decade.
In addition to writing about topics I’ve explored here, I post to Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Currently
- I consult with early-stage nontechnical founders as a fractional CTO independently and via Baxter.
- I am building citymeetings.nyc, writing its newsletter, talking about it at conferences, and sharing notes with interested city agencies, newsrooms, and civic hackers.
- I am exploring commercial ideas related to capabilities I’m building for citymeetings.nyc as I figure out how to coax LLMs into producing useful things with messy, real-world data.
Previously
- Aside from a stint at Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio in Seattle, I’ve been a CTO-for-hire since 2018 and I’ve run Baxter since 2023.
- I built and grew the engineering org as VP Engineering at Harry’s, where I joined pre-launch as the 7th employee.
- I built support and operations tools for Hadoop as an early employee at Cloudera, a now-public company that was one of the first to commercialize Hadoop.
- I built capabilities for our data platform as an early employee at Meebo, a startup that, for a short time in the early 2010’s, was one of the largest ad networks in the US.
- I studied Computer Science at Stanford, where I took a lot of systems courses (my favorite being operating systems).
Some things I’ve made
- citymeetings.nyc is a site that makes it easy for busy people to navigate multi-hour New York City Council meetings. I use LLMs to extract useful, granular chapters from long hearings and present them on-site. You can read about how it works here.
- Atari Email Archive is a curated showcase of emails sent at Atari from 1983 to 1992. You can read about it here or hear me talk about it on an episode of the Data is Plural podcast.
- katiebcartoons.com is a site showcasing over 1,000 cartoons my wife has drawn over 10+ years. She is prolific and hilarious and her work shows up in my posts frequently.
- Landlubbers is a goofy old school point-and-click adventure game my wife and I made in the style of Monkey Island and Thimbleweed Park. Landlubbers is about an executive assistant whose annoying boss makes her do pointless things.