$luca@BOB> whoami

About me

I’m Anirudh Katoch, an undergraduate student at Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal. Currently pursuing a B.Tech in Information Technology. I have a passion for creating things and solving problems (in equal parts). I have found that I am best suited for creating through technology. This is my personal website. Some people prefer to call me Luca, which is my online handle.

Hobbies?

Singing, swimming, gaming, football, coding, thinking, sleeping, anime, manga

I am also interested in math, physics, reading and writing. But I’ve not invested enough time in them to be able to call them hobbies. I’ll find the time eventually.

Vices?

Coffee addict

Favorite book?

I haven’t read a lot of books, but Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy was great. As of now I'm reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Introvert or Extrovert?

Highly adaptable.

Dream job?

One that lets me be creative and helps me grow.

Strengths?

Problem solving skills, high moral/ethical integrity, amicable personality.

Weakness?

Most of my projects have had no deadlines, so I have used them as learning opportunities, instead of aiming to complete them. As a result, I am bad at predicting how long a job would take.

I am also really bad at spelling :S

Work hard or work smart?

No reason not to do both.

What if you won the lottery?

Life is like farmville
Hire a financial advisor.

Tell me everything

(TL;DR)^-1

My early childhood revolved around extreme boredom, video games and the internet. Imagine a summer vacation, now imagine feeling that way for a few years. This extreme boredom played out in my favor as I developed a habit of thinking. My thoughts would wander to all sorts of subjects as my tiny brain tried to figure out how telephones are possible at all, why the sky isn’t falling, and all the other questions you would have the first time you encounter life. I did not get the answers to my questions until much later in life, but I believe the process of asking the questions was much more impactful on my development than getting the answers.

Just as reading a good book fills some people with the desire to write, playing certain wonderful video games filled me with a desire to make them. I would fill notebooks with content about my favorite games, and ideas on how to expand on them. Perhaps I had a slight compulsion for documenting things in general, or maybe I was just bored. (Speaking of which, I also religiously recorded all the Pokemon songs on a tape recorder, I probably did have a thing for documenting.)

At the onset of teenage I shifted to New Delhi. My social circle got a lot larger there. As I grew older and figured out how the internet works, I was introduced to Macromedia FlashMX by chance. ActionScript 2 was my third language after Hindi and English. An embarrassing number of years were then spent teaching myself how to code trivial things. I also picked up ActionScript 3 later on. I was also introduced to various forums, and this was my gateway to internet culture.

Eventually I stumbled upon MTA, a fan made, open source multiplayer mod for GTA San Andreas that provides hooks to alter every aspect of gameplay. I joined one of the roleplay servers and then there is a long, tangential story of how I ended up leading an online clan (Which is somehow still alive), and then become a moderator, and a Lua programmer. As a staff member on an online persistent world multiplayer server with lots of rivals, I learned a lot about administration, networking, databases, software architecture, project management, bug tracking, hacking, crisis management and damage control. I also fell in love with Lua, which is still my language of choice.

Fast forward a few years and the 11th grade school curriculum introduced me to (a very old standard of) C++. Working on a lower level of abstraction really cleared my concepts about computers. It made me appreciate and fully understand higher level features such as closures, type systems, runtime checking, complex types being abstracted as objects, garbage collection, and all those things under the hood.

Around the same time, I first started using Linux. I learned basic bash scripting and set up tiny (but useful) scripts that used cron to send my Minecraft server’s IP to a list of friends (Before I knew how easy setting up a DDNS was), or remotely used the webcam to make sure things are still OK in the house while we were on vacation. The scripts were barely a few dozen lines long, thanks to the plethora of wonderful tools and abstractions available, but the experience of gluing them together and applying them to real world problems was very educational. Eventually I would start browsing the Arch wiki and pick up all sorts of Linux trivia.

After that I entered college, and that is where this story yields. I have met some amazing people here. My roommates are a math/physics buff + mad guitarist Arjit Seth, and writing prodigy + very sane guitarist Rahul Basu. I also networked and worked with some amazing people at IECSE. I spent some very memorable weeks interning with some insanely talented people at IIT Bombay under FOSSEE. I spent many sleepless nights writing code for bakaGaijin and Ash. I learned how to perfectly and crisply iron a shirt (among more technical things) during my HP internship. I have also collected a lot of anime at this point.

If you actually read all of that then I applaud your patience. Maybe you want to read about my creations? Or have a look at a more formal and descriptive portfolio?