buddywhitman

About Me

A decade or two down the line, I would love to launch a consumer-facing hard tech venture. I am also into music production, socio-poitical activism, military stuff and comparative religion. My belief in absolute equality, world peace, love, individuality and internationalism stems from an avid interest in the Vedanta philosophy. The earliest memory I have of the stuff that runs on the screen takes me back to fifth grade. My father, meaning to introduce me to HTML - showed me how to click a button and receive a warm greeting: Hello, Pulkit! I was shocked at how the computer knew my name, something I did not recall telling it earlier, and I wanted to learn how my dad accomplished the feat. By the time I answered that question by learning HTML, CSS & WordPress by the seventh grade, having started two blogs and seemingly destined to end up in software development - a thousand new questions were begging for attention. That is when I decided to learn what's truly under the hood – stepping into hardware. I joined a local maker lab – going by the name of SP Robotics Works. Every day after school, I'd spend three to four hours in a highly stimulating environment - surrounded by passionate individuals working on building robotic and IoT systems using the Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms, implementing several sensors, actuators and communication modules.

staring into the vast ocean

By the time I graduated from their year-long programme, I knew that I wanted to explore the intersection of hardware and software, where man meets machine. I designed algorithms for gesture recognition for an interactive hologram and dreamt up BCIs long before I had heard of Neuralink. Growing up reading a lot (I used to spend the entire day at the exhaustive library in my mother's school through middle school), I'm grateful to my parents for giving me an exposure to a huge range of uncensored knowledge, conflicting schools of thought and jarring insights into the lives of personalities I'd only heard about.

working

All of this helped shape a complex worldview - understanding love, peace and freedom are the only things that matter despite, or rather because, of the many things that unite and divide the people of our world. Around this time, I started exploring existential questions to understand spirituality and politics for myself, inspired by Walter Isaacson's biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. Never entirely emerging from my indulges in humanities, all my future endeavours featured a design/human perspective, trying to understand what people find beautiful, what gives us a reason to smile amidst this rat race. Throughout high school, I focussed a lot more on coursework, implementing hobbyist projects like R/C skateboards and AWS-enabled smart speakers while being able to secure straight As in my sophomore and senior years.

Be Here Now

In college, I'm expanding my knowledge across three fronts: Application/Services Development, Systems/Embedded Engineering and Hardware/Silicon Design. My day is spent balancing classes with meetings and workshops organised by several of the student clubs (ACM, IEEE, GDSC, etc.) that I actively participate in and bond with friends over heartfelt conversations and music jamming sessions. I conclude my day at the workshop, where we (a team of twenty) work on building a solar-powered (endurance) racing car for the World Solar Challenge, Australia. I am responsible for the LV electronics - MCU, Displays, Sensor Fusion, Task Scheduling, etc. I also handle web/app dev for some start-ups incubated at our innovation centre while helping local businesses with their digital transformation needs. Now, now I'm feeling a lil proud of my storytelling that kept you hooked all the way till here (blushes). If you are still not bored to death, scroll down to explore my journey!

Manipal

My Journey

The journey continues...