About Me

My name is Swaroop. I currently work as a Staff Engineer in the Machine Learning Platform team at DoorDash in San Francisco.

I write mostly about what I have learned in pursuit of my curiosity, mostly around software engineering, books and ideas.

I have previously worked at big companies, did freelancing, tried building a startup, and was at startups of all sizes (from 6-person company to Series B+ to acquisition).

Long ago, I wrote A Byte of Python beginners book and A Byte of Vim book.

History

1. Started as an intern and fresher at Yahoo!
   • Totally loved Yahoo!, the coolest company (back then) he can ever work for
   • Worked on analysis and statistics of Yahoo! Search, called Yahoo! Buzz Index (a product for advertisers)
2. Worked at Adobe in the awesome Flex team
   • From the IDE to the data visualization platform
3. Wrote a beginner’s programming book on Python
   • Open source enthusiast, so released under Creative Commons license
   • Popular book: Millions of downloads
   • Translations by volunteers to Chinese, Italian, German, Indonesian, and many others (Spanish, Arabic, etc.) in progress
   • Used by NASA and 8 universities
   • Delivered talks on Python at 7 different conferences and colleges
   • Used as a reference book in MIT OpenCourseWare for their “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming” 2011 class
4. Wrote another book released in 2008 on the Vim 7 editor for both beginners and advanced users
   • Got a very good response with more than 10,000 readers in the first 3 days and 5000+ PDF downloads.
   • Lot of nice feedback
5. Writes a weblog
   • Average of 2500+ readers per day
   • Was ranked No. 6 in India according to Indiblogger ranking (as of July 23, 2009)
   • Was ranked No. 5 in India according to Invesp Ultimate BlogRank listing (as of August 17, 2009)
   • Was once listed on BlogStreet.com as one of India’s Top 100 blogs
   • Read how his blog got him a job
6. Passionate about Running, Trekking, Cycling
   • 1 full marathon (42km), 4 half marathons (21km), 1 duathlon (10km running + 10km cycling)
   • Delivered a well-received talk on “Why You Should Run” at BarCampBangalore6
   • 16 treks
7. Entrepreneurship
   • Started right from college by selling Linux CDs in the days of dial-up internet
   • Co-founder of the team that created ion, the iPod Charger, as featured in the Economic Times
   • Finished a full-time experiment called IonLab
   • Previously a product leader at InfiBeam.com working on projects such as Crossword.in and Build a Bazaar.
8. Startup
   • Was a consultant and early employee with Automatic, acquired by SiriusXM.
   • Currently, an engineering manager for AI team at Helpshift.

To know more about Swaroop professionally, see his LinkedIn profile.

Contact : blog (at) swaroopch.com

The Dreamer.
Dream On.
Dream On.