About Sandeep

I'm a Senior UX Designer at IBM in Bengaluru and an aspiring design engineer. I design in code, which is my goldilocks zone for prototyping: close enough to a live product that the edge cases show up while you can still do something about them, not after a polished Figma file has already been signed off. A static mock will let you skip the states nobody demos. A coded prototype won't.

I now live in Bengaluru, trying to make sense of the world one question at a time. I started my career in Gurgaon. I'm originally from Chennai. I speak Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, English, and enough Kannada to survive an auto ride without Google Translate. If you want the longer manuals: who I am is in my personal user manual; how to work with me is in my work user manual.

Outside work I'm usually deep in movies, music, or some oddly specific Perplexity rabbit hole, war and period dramas, and, for reasons I can't explain, backpack reviews on YouTube. I play badminton most weekends (trying to make it daily), hit the shooting range a couple of times a month, and would love to own a pool table someday. I like organizing things and pushing past my comfort zone until the discomfort becomes normal, and I have a knack for talking people into trying things they resist. Only for good, I promise.

I also give talks on design, productivity, and whatever else I happen to be obsessing over.

In college I studied Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering, which threw open a new world for someone who'd been wiring up breadboards, LEDs, and motors. Suddenly there were embedded systems, microprocessors, and microcontrollers. Around then a school friend pulled me into web programming, and that rabbit hole carried me from script kiddie to developer to designer to design engineer. Software gives me the same charge hardware once did. Figma, Notion, and Claude are the components I build with now.

I loved toys with DC motors and LEDs, and in school I practically lived in the science center: free internet, tools to tinker with, a science fair every year (a few of which won grants and scholarships). Watching Nanban, the Tamil remake of 3 Idiots, in 9th grade sealed it: I wanted to be an engineer. Physics was my favourite science and I loved biology too, so I took PCM with Biology to keep the door open.

As a kid I was drawn to technology, not the gadgets themselves, but the parts inside them. My parents thought I was into cameras, but I was really turning over film cameras, watches with FM radio, digital contact books, the first Nokia flip phones, a Motorola with that enormous battery, and pocket FMs, wondering what I could make from them. I remember most of them from old photographs, but they made me genuinely happy back then.