About

I'm Vikram. I've been a software engineer, tech lead, and exec at early stage startups for over a decade.

I like building things, writing, exploring topics in-depth, and sharing what I've learned. I write about those things on this blog and I also post to Twitter, Threads, and LinkedIn.

Currently:

• I am a CTO-for-hire for startups and run Baxter with Gabriel Garrido.
• I write Keys to the City Council, a newsletter on NYC City Council activity.
• I work on katiebcartoons.com, a site showcasing my partner's art – she's drawn over 1,000 cartoons over 10+ years – and a small art business.

Professionally:

• I've been a CTO-for-hire since 2018 with a stint at Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio in Seattle, and I've run Baxter since 2023.
• I was the 7th employee at Harry's, where built and grew the engineering org as VP Engineering.
• I was an early employee at Cloudera, where I worked on support and ops tools for Hadoop.
• I was an early employee at Meebo, a now-defunct startup that launched on Digg and, for a short period in the early 2010's, became one of the largest ad networks in the US. I built out our data platform there.

Some other things I've worked on:

• Atari Email Archive: a curated showcase of emails set at Atari in the 80's. You can read about it on this post and hear me talk about it on this podcast.
• A Primer on Roaring Bitmaps: this in-depth article is my most popular post. It hit #1 on Hacker News one weekend and now sees steady traffic from Google and many (software engineering-centric) corners of the Internet.
• Landlubbers: my partner and I love old-school point-and-click adventure games like Monkey Island and we make them together. Landlubbers is about an executive assistant whose annoying boss makes her do pointless things.