The thread.

Severe hemophilia A means my blood is missing factor VIII, the protein that makes a clot hold. A normal person carries somewhere between 50% and 150% of it. Unmedicated, I carry less than 1%.

What that means in practice is not "don't get cut". Cuts are the easy part. It means I bleed on the inside, at any time, from anything. Human beings bleed internally all day long: you walk up stairs and tiny vessels behind your knee tear and trickle into the joint, and your body seals them in seconds and you never know it happened. Mine does not seal them. The blood keeps going into the joint until the joint is full, until the pressure pulls the ball away from the socket and the leg stops working.

I have been sent to an emergency room by a heavy door, by a backpack, a high five, a hug... even by the vibrating rumble pack in a PlayStation controller.

So when my mother was told the odds and offered a way out, she was legitimately being offered the reasonable option. Everyone involved could do the math.

She still said no.

I was born at Chinmaya Mission Hospital in Bengaluru, on a Friday, into a family that had been told what was probably coming and had decided to have me anyway.

At 3 months old I would not stop crying. My mother tried literally everything to soothe me and nothing worked: eat, burp, sleep... nothing worked.

Eventually she happened to be carrying me in front of a mirror and in the mirror she saw that my left elbow was the size of my head! It had filled with blood from the inside.

That was the moment she knew. The doctors confirmed it later, but she already knew: severe hemophilia A just like her father, exactly what she had been warned about when she was pregnant with me.

My father grew up poor and without much of an education. He was not on anybody's shortlist for a job, certainly not an international one.

Through a set of circumstances I still cannot quite understand, he was hired by Emirates Airlines in Qatar as a sales professional and they granted him a family visa which would allow our entire family to move there from India. We packed up and moved.

At the time it was exciting and strange: a new country, a new language on the signs, heat of a different kind. Nobody in that airport understood that a man getting a sales job had just moved his son out of the country where his son would have died.

It started as stomach pain. We thought it was Indian food doing what Indian food does. When it did not stop after a few days, my parents talked about the hospital and I threw a tantrum every single time it came up. To pacify me, they monitored the situation.

Eventually, my color changed. I was like pale. Like vampire level pale. Turns out there was very little blood left in me to give me color. I started drifting in and out of consciousness, and then I stopped drifting and went out entirely. The stomach pain this whole time was a bleed into my abdomen, running for almost a week.

My mother took me to the pediatric emergency center in a taxi. The doctors there panicked and put me in an ambulance and rushed me to the larger accident and emergency hospital. Somewhere in there a doctor came out to my hysterical mother and said a sentence she has never forgotten.

Shortly after that I was presumed dead.

The hospital had a large shipment of O+ which they put into me and slowly, I came back. Some time later I woke up to my mother's face, and she was smiling.

Once the immediate crisis was over, the real question arrived: what does a life look like from here, given that this can happen at any time and given what the medicine costs?

The answer was so good it didn't seem real: at that time in Qatar, emergency healthcare was free. For everyone. Including expatriates. Including us. The drug that would have bankrupted my family 3× over was, in an emergency, free.

Read that sentence again, though, because I lived inside the second half of it for 18 years. Emergency healthcare was free. To be given the expensive medicine, I had to present a genuine medical emergency. I had to be close enough to death to qualify.

So this became the shape of my life:

Home, emergency room, home, emergency room. For 18 years. It got a great deal more real once school started.

School turned out to be a physical assault made of ordinary things: walking to class, stairs, corridors full of boys who bump into each other. Every one of those was a bleed waiting to be scheduled.

So in a typical school year, I attended about 19 days. The teachers and other kids called me the "blue moon kid" because of how often they'd see me.

This meant that for the rest of the year I was at home, alone. Both my parents worked in an office and my brother was at school. I had the whole day to myself most every day.

There was genuinely nothing to do. This is before on-demand anything: no Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, brainrot. You watched whatever was on television at that hour, and if there was nothing on, you were bored.

We had a computer which I naturally found myself gravitating toward. I played Prince of Persia, Raptor, Descent, Half-Life: Uplink, and whatever else I could get. After a while, playing the games stopped being the interesting part and the question underneath them started becoming more interesting.

I could not take more than a few steps without bleeding into an ankle. The honest expectation in the house, unspoken and honestly pretty reasonable, was that I would be somebody's burden for as long as I lasted.

My brother was healthy, so my brother got to have a future. My parents sent him to a computer class even though nobody was quite sure what for. Just "something something computers".

He came home from every class and taught me what he had learned. He has always been like that. To this day, he loves explaining things to people, and he spent a lot of time showing me what he had just been shown.

What he showed me, without exaggeration, was this:

And on we went until I had the basics.

From there I tinkered nearly every day: alone, bored, with nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. I racked up hours and hours and hours on this, easily more than 10,000. The disease gave me the one thing it never occurred to anyone to call a gift: time.

My parents had started to see something blossom in me around computers, so they enrolled me in an evening course in object oriented C++.

Looking back at it now, 23 years later, I cannot tell you how ridiculous it must have looked. An evening room full of school computer science teachers and working adults, and a 10 year old strutting between the desks.

We did the classic exercises: building command line programs and applications that real people could use like checkout systems, age calculators and such. At the end of it I was given a diploma with distinction.

My school heard about it and honored me in a morning assembly in front of the entire boys' section. After that, everybody around me started prophesying that I would be something great with computers, and that in some sense I already was.

I could not let any of it reach my head, because I was still spending my nights in an emergency room arguing my way toward a drug that was keeping me alive. I knew how fragile I was. I still know.

Growing up we used to read a youth magazine out of the UAE called Young Times, published by Khaleej Times. One month I opened it and found one of my own sites in it: a discussion forum for general discussion, built on PHP and MySQL, made by a kid with an unreasonable amount of free time.

As an 11 year old, this felt very cool.

It happened again the following year.

Two uncomfortable facts about me at 15.

One: I was overweight, which checks out. I mean, think about it: exercise meant injury, and injury meant an emergency room. Food was the only comfort available to a kid who spent most of his time indoors wishing he had not been born.

Two: almost nobody knew me or had any reason to care, because I was at school 19 days a year.

Like, when you're 15 and you want more than anything to be cool, to have friends, to have a girlfriend, to have any of the ordinary things, social approval matters a lot. Unfortunately no one really knew who I was. And those that knew were like "bro this guy is a big fat loser".

And there were the nights. The emergency room was far quieter at like 3am because there weren't so many cases of heat stroke. This meant shorter waiting lines and such, so when I was almost at an emergency, I used to sneak out while my parents slept, take a taxi by myself and go and get my medicine before I passed out. I remember a lot of nights alone in the emergency hospital.

Alone in that building at that hour, I hated my life with real zeal. Why be born like this at all, for some... non life? To be a burden to everyone who loves you and unhappy inside your own head? What kind of God makes a person for this?

So I would like talk to him. God. Who I didn't even really know or believe in, in the middle of the emergency room. Man, I would burn with anger.

Without exaggeration, I genuinely wanted to die and wished I was not born. Many, many, many times until it got boring. I totally didn't really know God or anything, but I was completely alone and that was all I had.

This was the tension I lived in: wanting a social life but also spending most nights in the ER. Eventually, I decided to solve it the way I had solved every other problem in my life: Google. Up until then, I literally established this pattern of:

I took exactly that pattern but applied it to like socializing and being charismatic. I googled "how to be cool", "how do I become attractive" and read and read and read and read. It was exactly like learning to build websites. All I had was time. So much time man. Parents at work, brother at school. Oof, so much alone time. At home, in the hospital, woah.

And a lot of it started to work. I started making friends. Sam, Alanna, Shaun. It was good.

After a while, Alanna invited me to church.

Doha Fellowship was honestly not bad. Upbeat, a genuinely good live band, and the thing that got past my guard: people seemed happy that I was there. It was strange. They were kind and welcoming and forgiving in a way I had no category for.

The service ran like a tech conference with a live band. Songs, then a talk for half an hour, then more songs to finish.

The last song was the problem. Slow, meditative, and the entire room singing, over and over that God loves them.

bruh wat? God loves you? How can you say that out loud? Is he even real? And you are telling me he loves me? Have you seen my life? How does a good God who loves me hand me this shit life where I'm fragile as shit and die by like walking? This God is a joke man, these people are delulu as hell.

But they kept singing so I decided to use the time to internally yell at him, effectively replaying the same rant from the emergency room at 3am.

This went on for a while. It was like a 12 minute song fr

And then, and I am not making this up, the voice I had been arguing with answered me. It was exactly like in the book of Job.

honestly i shit myself a little ngl

What I heard was: my turn to speak. And I will show you how I love you, and how I have loved you since before you were even born.

What followed was, more or less, this page. It came at me the way a season of television comes at you from Netflix man. Episode after episode, each one an ordinary fact of my life that I had never once looked at from the other side.

I decided then and there that there might be something to this and I said fine, imma follow this Jesus thread. Before I knew any theology or anything, I was just like let's give it a try. Eventually I would study more and more and Christ only became more real and more coherent over time until I was like okay, this is the real deal. More about that later.

As always, I was at home with like nothing better to do.

I read the judging criteria and the list of topics. Environmental conservation was the one that landed, so I built a site called EnviCon.

For 2008 this thing was ridiculous: a hero carousel, accordions, scriptaculous everywhere. It had grass, position fixed, running along the bottom of the viewport at all times. The iPhone had just been invented and fr this website was peak.

I had no idea how you were supposed to deliver a website to a committee. Like do I host it and send a URL? Do I give them the source code? So I burned it onto a CD and then built the CD a case with printed cover graphics and everything and handed it over. Shit was polished AF.

I submitted it and the committee asked to meet me. While I was in the room I heard one of them say to another, "this is our guy."

I was their guy. At the award ceremony, I won the first prize: 10,000 Qatari riyals, and a full scholarship for a bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering.

My future settled! Full-ride scholarship and everything! All the prophecies about my future with computers... everything everyone had been saying about me was coming true!

Computer science was an elective in my final years of high school called "Informatics Practices". At the first exam, I scored 100% lol. I graduated high school in 2010 and then spent the next few years drifting between church and a social life and whatever else presented itself.

I was kinda just drifting here with not much to do. I dabbled in teaching singing, guitar, stand up comedy, whatever.

Once again I had time. Enormous, undivided amounts of it. My parents went to work and my brother was at university in Australia, leaving me alone with my interests.

This God thing was new, so I went at it properly. Christianity. Why this one? What if it was a group of men who got drunk one night and decided to start a religion? How is it different from everything else on offer?

For the first question I looked at the early Christians and how they died. Genuinely, look it up. They were killed in the worst ways available at the time. I do not know about you, but if I had invented a religion over drinks, I would recant at the first sight of a knife. These people said kill me then, it changes nothing. Hundreds of them. They were like ready to die for this. Something had happened to them. This exactly turned out to be the answer to my second question.

What I found was that almost every religion I looked at is the same shape: do your best, try your hardest, avoid the bad things, and perhaps you will earn good things and please God and maybe go to heaven one day. Christianity starts somewhere else entirely. It opens by conceding that you have already failed. It says out loud what I already knew about myself, and then it says that trying harder is going to exhaust you for nothing because you cannot save yourself from where you actually are. Instead, it says God wanted me anyway and dealt with the gap himself.

Put like that it sounds kinda odd tbh, but the more I turned it over, the more it clicked with the way my engineering brain works.

Then I found Jefferson Bethke's spoken word piece about the difference between Jesus and what popular culture had sold me as religion, and that reframed the rest of it.

I kept going until I decided it was time to get baptized. I decided that because I had learned that baptism isn't really much more than like a wedding ceremony. It is a public promise that says: I have given my life to this. It changes nothing except that now everyone has heard you say it.

I was in the emergency hospital again, bleeding internally, waiting to be seen. The doctor came over and told me he had bad news.

I went home in tears, genuinely believing that this was it. I told my parents. I called my friend Daniel and we prayed together. Then I went out on a prayer walk and spoke to the same voice from 4 years earlier, except this time without any anger in it at all.

And he answered.

I was shaken but also completely fine. I went home. The bleed stopped on its own, and I healed with no medicine at all. Everyone saw it and it was honestly unbelievable.

These were embarrassing years. All my friends moved on and I did not.

It was routine for a school friend's parent to run into mine at the supermarket.

And then my parents and I would squirm. I watched them do it more times than I want to count. How do you explain any of this to someone in an aisle? Truth is you don't. They would just decide I was a loser.

Even once at a family gathering, I heard my mom to my aunt Bana,

That really stung man.

So once again I found myself with even time on my hands because I didn't like have school to study for or a job to go to or anything. In this time, I learned to sing, working through coach Brett Manning's Singing Success. I started doing standup with the local comedy group SUCQ, Stand Up Comedy Qatar, started by Halal Bilal, and I ended up performing on shows, sometimes with famous people like Gabriel Iglesias and Maz Jobrani. I taught guitar and vocals for money here and there, I gave my first public talk at TEDxYouth@Doha, honestly I was just throwing things at the wall to find out who I was.

In that stretch, my long-time childhood friend Omair was visting Doha again from India where he moved for university. While we were hanging out, he asked me where I was going in life and I hadn't the faintest idea. I said I dunno man maybe I'll be a singer or something.

bro literally slapped me

He slapped me with words (otherwise I'd die lol). This slap was exactly what I needed because it reminded me of all those prophecies earlier and snapped me back into my coding mode.

I was stagnating, so we went to visit my brother in Australia who by then had a house of his own.

One night he said this to me.

He was carrying the whole thing on his back and had been for a while.

That lit a fire under me. I came back and applied to work everywhere I could. At some point I even went door to door asking random small businesses if they needed a website. bro was grinding.

There was a branding agency in Doha called Grow that looked really cool. I liked them immediately, mostly because of how they hired: no postings, no process. If you have a fire under you, email iwannawork@growqatar.com.

I emailed. They emailed back. I had a job.

My boss was Wiebke Wenzel, a German creative director with real taste, who saw something and eventually made me the digital lead on a team with designers Eli Abejo, Kyle Francia, and Jessica West. It was wonderful.

I had no degree either. School had been a 19 day a year proposition, so university was never a realistic thing to spend the family's money on. You might reasonably ask about the full scholarship I won from Qatar University in 2008. We tried, but they said it was no longer valid. That was the whole conversation. There is no appeal for that sort of thing there, so we left it.

So what do I do?

I prayed, and then I did what I always do: Google! I searched for countries with good healthcare systems and applied for engineering jobs in all of them, with no degree and pure "trust me bro" energy. Canada, because I have an uncle there. The UK, for the NHS, and I have an aunt there. The Netherlands, because Booking.com was hiring. Germany, and Australia where my brother is. Australia rejected me immediately because I wasn't healthy enough.

I got a lot of interviews and I failed all of them. I particularly remember failing Booking.com in the Netherlands for not having enough A/B testing experience. Go and look at Booking.com and you will see the joke: the entire site is one enormous conversion test.

Then a small Berlin startup called McMakler offered me a job as a software engineer, with relocation. Germany had a serious shortage of engineers at the time and was willing to hire more or less anyone, including a sick fool like me. Similar to my father, I who grew up poor without an education, *somehow* got a job that relocated me to greener pastures.

After we sorted out visas, I took my parents to dinner and put the employment contract on the table. I have not often seen them like that: they were shocked, surprised, and pleased all at the same time.

I moved to Berlin in November 2015. New country, new start, and one enormous unresolved variable.

On my first day it was a real gift to meet the team in person, but they could see something was off.

I was not okay. I had no idea what the medicine situation was in this country and I could start bleeding at any hour. I told them so, and my manager, Michael Haizmann, said: take the day, on company time, go and get it sorted.

I had done the research before I moved, so I knew exactly where to go and exactly whose name to say. I got on a tram to Vivantes Klinikum im Friedrichshain, which all these years later is a short walk from where I live, and went to find Dr. Robert Klamroth, who runs hemostaseology and the hemophilia center there.

I explained. He asked what brand I had been taking. It took me a minute to remember, and then I told him.

They had exactly what I needed, covered by Techniker Krankenkasse, the statutory insurer. They gave it to me and then they taught me how to find my own vein and infuse myself.

To this day the medicine is shipped to my door and I take it at home, on a schedule, before anything happens. That is a very long way from the taxis I used to sneak out and take at 3am.

With the medicine settled, the next problem was the right to stay: the Blue Card. A Blue Card is a permit that lets a highly qualified professional live and work anywhere in the EU. It normally wants an engineer, a high salary, and a university degree. I had been told the job came with one.

We went to the Ausländerbehörde, the foreigners' office, on the appointed day and sat down with a clerk.

I argued a bit. She went into a back office and came back with a Blue Card and gave it to me.

I do not understand what happened in that back office and I never will. I am just grateful.

...and that was that. I was an employed adult with a job and an apartment and rent and a completely normal life, which is a sentence I could never have expected to write man for real!

McMakler eventually became more than I could take. The place was racist and sexist and full of tech bro bullying. My name in the office was shit boy. When I asked why, the answer was "look at your skin color bro wtf", and then, "also because you write shit code hahaha bitch".

I went home and cried about twice a month. I remember saying to myself that I'd use the pain to improve and one day they'll admire me (they do today ironically).

When I had finally had enough, I went to Stack Overflow Careers, sorted every frontend job in Berlin by salary descending, applied to the one at the top, interviewed, and got it for 15% more money!

With leverage secured, I took it to my CTO and asked for a raise after 2 years and me becoming the frontend lead. Honestly if the price was right I may have stayed and endured it a bit longer, I guess we'll never know, because the conversation went like this:

I told HR. HR said that was unfortunate and did nothing.

So anyway I quit and everyone was all shocked and sad but I was like... what did you expect man? I went to Contiamo which was a real step up! It was a good company with great culture.

At Contiamo, we used to have Friday beers in the coworking space where we worked, hub:raum in west Berlin.

One Friday, we noticed new people in the building.

So I went to investigate and found a group of people I had never seen who had unmistakable coder energy. I invited them to Friday beers. They said thanks but they didn't come because they were super busy. I kept running into them in the courtyard anyway, and eventually got out of them that the one Andrés recognized was Arunoda Susiripala indeed from MeteorJS!. They worked for a small company called ZEIT and were putting on a conference in Berlin. ZEIT would eventually be renamed Vercel.

The next day I saw there was a conference in Berlin called ZEIT Day Berlin from that company with those guys, so I bought tickets for me and my frontend team Andrés and Peter and we went.

It was September 2017 and it was the first tech conference I had ever been to. It was huge for me. I met Ives van Hoorne, the founder of CodeSandbox, who was 15 and so super eager about his project. He gave a talk about making the mountain of web development easier to climb. I met my hero at the time, Dan Abramov, and got to talk to him. He asked me: if there was one thing about React you would change, what is it? I was too star struck to think of anything so I just blurted out some nonsense and I was like hahah yeah nice man.

The networking, the people, the content... conferences were amazing and I loved it!

I also spent time at that conference with Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of ZEIT then/Vercel. A few months later he would invite me to join ZEIT as head of developer relations alongside Sarup Banskota.

I also learned to ride a bicycle that year at 24, because for the first time in my life falling off one was survivable.

At this time everything was really awesome: I had a great job, I was enjoying church and conferences, riding my bicycle... wow. Dude, I can't believe this had become my life honestly.

I was attending Saddleback Berlin at the time, and one Sunday I met a girl named Lea. It was her first day in the city. She had just moved to study law at Humboldt, and she looked like a deer in the headlights.

We spoke a bit, but I was serving as a youth leader and running all over the place. What we did after church was go to lunch as a group, often 15 or more of us. That Sunday we went to Burger Vision on Rosenthaler Platz, and within my earshot I overheard this.

You need to understand that I live in Berlin. People here do not tend to have commitments like that. That's not a knock on the city, it's just the vibe of the city: people come here to like party and do drugs and get fucked. Instead, here was somebody with a conviction strong enough to wear.

bro wtf

tbh this put me between a rock and a hard place, because at the time I was deliberately not dating. I was committed to being and staying single because in the Bible it's like "do not seek a wife" so I was like "ok God fine I won't seek a wife". The problem was we were in the same group for everything: lunches, projects, social gatherings... there was just a lot of overlap and I could not avoid her.

At the same time, she did not like me at all. I was a big entertainer, always making jokes, and it was too much for her. She was like "bro this guy is so fake i hate him"

It was around then that our church ran a campaign called 40 Days of Prayer, where you partner with someone and pray for one thing for each other over 40 days. Lea was new and had nobody, so she called her mother.

They both thought it was strange but they prayed anyway.

It was inside those 40 days that I could not take it anymore and asked her out on a date. I did not find out until our wedding day that it landed in the middle of that prayer. She said yes, and the rest is history (that's written down here later).

I had a job. I had healthcare. I had been to a conference. From where I came from to here, things had started to click and it was wonderful.

It was in that season that I saw a call for papers for JSConf EU, Europe's largest JavaScript conference. I had no idea what a call for papers was, but I knew it was how you speak at conferences: by submitting them.

The form was intimidating: there was a title field, and then a field called abstract. Abstract. Wtf is that? That is so scientific! I didn't go to college or anything, wtf is that?! I am a sick hemophiliac kid who is not educated. Am I allowed to do this?!

I sat and looked at that field for a long time. Eventually I was like yolo let's just try it.

So I filled it out and sent it and I had a gut feeling about it, I could say I heard a voice saying "you're going to get this". I prayed and then texted Lea and said I have just submitted something, it feels right; kinda like I'm going to get it. Let's pray about this because it could be life changing.

Months later, the next year, I got an email saying I was accepted, and everything changed.

I was so shocked to be accepted that I had no idea what to do. I had spoken at TEDxYouth@Doha earlire and at a few meetups, but now I had to make slides and I had to work out what my process even was. Today I have this down to a science, but then I did not. Going down that road for the first time was wild.

While I was preparing, I was working at Contiamo as the frontend lead and we were using a CSS in JS library called glamorous by Kent C. Dodds. To me he was one of those famous people on Twitter. Then a better library came out, called emotion, and Kent published a post deprecating glamorous and telling everyone to move.

Codemods were all the rage then. A codemod transforms your code: you write one that rewrites a codebase from library A to library B. I thought I would take a stab at it, so I wrote one that migrates an entire codebase at scale from glamorous to emotion. We used it on our own project and it worked so I published it.

Kent saw it. His post on deprecating glamorous names the migration path as one of the reasons he could deprecate it at all, with a credit to me.

Then JSConf EU came around and it was enormous. Booths, food trucks, a stage the size of a building, Twilio with a huge stand. This is where I met Dominic Kundel, who works at OpenAI now, and gave me a pair of sunglasses he still remembers 8 years later. I saw Ashi Krishnan give a talk about AI that blew me away.

My talk was on the side stage, which is understandable for a new speaker. I gave it. It is called From You Can't to You Can, and it is this story with some code in it.

It went well. People seemed to like it. I was satisfied.

Everything snowballed from that first talk. I got invited to so many conferences after that. I also now knew how to submit an abstract, so I went a bit mad and sent them everywhere.

Conferences involve travel, and that is the part that had been impossible my whole life: before Berlin, leaving Qatar meant leaving my medicine behind and a bleed in a foreign country with no access to factor VIII is not an inconvenience, it is death. In Germany they give me the medicine to keep, to travel with, and to infuse myself wherever I am.

So I could travel. Armenia. Across Europe. Boston, where I met Shawn Wang (swyx). Utah, for UtahJS in Sandy, and so many places.

Speaking about Utah, turns out Kent C. Dodds was speaking at the same conference as me! A few months after I published the codemod that let him retire his own library, we met and took a selfie. It was 2018, back when I still had hair.

What I kept noticing, at conference after conference, is that the web platform and I grew up together. The timing of when I was born meant I reached a level of maturity at the same moment it did, so that we could converge like this. Every talk since 2013 is on this site.

Our first date was at Datscha, a Russian restaurant. She is Russian German. I laid out what I thought a healthy relationship looked like.

Anyone else would have been weirded out. She said: good plan, I like it.

That is exactly what we did.

2 years later, I took her to the Reichstag because of her love of law and politics, and we had dinner at Käfer on the roof. Afterwards we stood on the rooftop looking over the city.

Then I got down on one knee and asked her to marry me. She said yes. 🎉

Marriage is the best thing I have ever done. It gives you joy you have not known. It also gives you friction that makes you a better person: opposites attract for a reason, because she sees my blind spots and helps me see them, and the other way round. I am the biggest fan.

Between ZEIT and here there was G2i, which builds Orchestrator now. And then Spotify.

I got the offer and I could not believe it was me. You know where I come from. Barely any school, no university, nothing. I was always supposed to be the weak one. Spotify said: we would like you to join us as a staff engineer.

I went through the interviews, got the offer, and joined, on Backstage, the developer portal large companies use to discover and observe their services across an entire organization. It is open source and it is still going.

The interesting thing about Spotify is that there is no specialization. There is no frontend engineer or backend engineer. There is engineer, senior engineer, staff engineer, principal. So I did everything, including scaling a database across regions with region level failover.

It lasted a few months. In 2021 the world was still in the middle of the pandemic, Spotify was an office company, I was remote, and our communication did not work very well. I decided it was not healthy for anyone, so I left along with the other engineer on my team, Juan who left soon after. It was for the best, and I wish the team well.

Veins scar. They get damaged and fatigued, and there are only so many of them. And truthfully, because I was so healthy, I would sometimes just forget. It was starting to gnaw at me again, not the way it used to, but still.

Then my treatment center called. There was a new drug and a clinical trial for it. They asked if I would like to be in it.

The drug is a long acting version of factor VIII. Instead of 3,000 units 3× a week, it is 3,000 units once a week, and it decays slowly enough to stay in the bloodstream the whole time.

I said yes, and it was some kind of panacea. I responded extremely well. My baseline without medicine is <1%. On this, at any given time, I was always over 20%.

This set me on a path I had never been on. I could run. I could lift weights. I could ride a bicycle and come off it. I was normal, provided I took it once a week.

It was 2021 and we were deep, locked down in the pandemic. We were allowed to leave the house for outdoor exercise, so I ran. Every Saturday, I ran a half marathon, 21.1km, because I could.

Meetups were struggling in lockdown, and the React Berlin meetup was barely starting. It was raining, speakers canceled, and Robin Pokorny asked me whether I had anything.

Which is what I did. I said: you use React, but have you ever wondered how it is built? Let's find out. Then I wrote import React from "react" without installing React, wrote a component, and ran it. The browser said it cannot read property 'createElement' of undefined.

So I defined it: I wrote an object with a method called createElement. Literally this:

const React = {
    createElement: () => {}
}

The error went away and I kept going, live, until I had polyfilled a poor man's React on stage.

New medicine, enhanced fitness, Spotify on my CV, and a talk that took off. The trajectory that year was insane.

At the end of 2021 I joined Xata as director of developer relations. Me, a director. Wild.

In 2022 the world swung the other way on public events, and I spoke at something like 30 conferences. I was permanently at a conference, and I met so many good people. Brandon Bayer, Cami Ramos, Facundo Giuliani, bruh...

I also got interested in investing, because I had disposable income for the first time and startups in the developer tools space were taking off: Replay, Liveblocks, companies like that. So I wrote some checks. Some got acquired, some did not. They are all on the investing page.

Toward the end of that year I noticed something I had never been able to say before. I had been an employee and an immigrant my whole life, and now I was a permanent resident. I did not need a visa to have healthcare. I did not need a job to have a visa.

I have been dependent on a visa for healthcare my entire life, and suddenly I was not. This was cool! I could be self-employed! I could start my own company! I could do so many new things!

I was already into this before it was a thing. In 2018 I built a chatbot with Brain.js. Through 2022 I was enamored with DreamBooth and Stable Diffusion and highly fine tuned image models, making pictures of myself as a Fortnite character.

When ChatGPT arrived I was already primed for it.

Then Shawn Wang, Swyx, who I had met at React Boston in 2018, wrote Rise of the AI Engineer, which describes what AI engineering even is. What I learned from it is that you do not need a machine learning background, or Lambda calculus, or a PhD. You mostly need to be able to make a network request to be an AI engineer. I was like... bro I can do this!

Again, notice the timing: I grew up with the web, and I was getting into AI as AI itself was/is growing up. By the grace of God I keep happening to be on these waves.

I had never founded a business, and I had been in Germany a while, so I thought: let's do it. I had no idea what I was in for.

I started Tejas Kumar e.U., an Einzelunternehmen, doing developer relations consulting. It was very good business. Lots of collaborations. It was the most money I have ever seen in my life.

And then the bureaucracy. I know it sounds like biting the hand that feeds me the healthcare, but the bureaucracy was wild man.

On top of that, there is the Industrie- und Handelskammer, the chamber of commerce, which you must belong to and pay a membership fee to, scaled to your income. So I asked what I get in exchange.

Germany made it impossible to run this business: taxes on taxes, fees on fees, bureaucracy on bureaucracy. Honestly at the end of it I was going bureauCRAZY.

The other side of it is that consulting means selling your time, and if your time is money you can't really take a holiday. We went to Bali while I was running it and I genuinely could not enjoy it because I was thinking about it the whole time. It was also nearly impossible to rent an apartment because Germany wants an employment contract and payslips and I had neither.

At some point you notice there are things no amount of money satisfies. I ran it through 2023 and 2024 and then I closed the consulting arm. Now I just have a shell corp to receive royalties and shit.

I grew up looking at that name and those animal covers. A few years before this I had actually searched the web for how to write a book with O'Reilly, and the answer was that they just have to come to you somehow, which felt completely inaccessible.

Then they came to me. My suspicion is they saw Deconstructing React, decided there was demand for it, and wanted a book on exactly that. They suggested we call it Fluent React and honestly I was like bro call it whatever you want lets gooooo.

At this time, I was traveling constantly to speak which means a great deal of waiting: in airports, at gates, on planes. That is where I sat with my laptop and typed and typed and typed and typed this book out, asking for help and insight from friends and peers along the way. I handed them a manuscript toward the end of the year.

I started the podcast in 2023. I had always wanted to, because long form is so much better for depth. Talks are wonderful, but they never let me go as deep as I want to because of the time factor.

My name is Tejas, pronounced like contagious, and the idea is that we take the joy, mine or a guest's, and make it contagious to infect the listeners with it.

It worked. For most years it landed in the top 5 of developers' Spotify Wrapped, which means a great deal to me. We have had genuinely great guests and leaders from the industry on it. It is on hiatus at the moment and it will come back in some form soon.

We published Fluent React with O'Reilly in January 2024. It sold fast and it was the number 1 best selling JavaScript book on Amazon for several weeks running.

Developers loved the deep dive, which is the strange part: the book is not really useful for using React. It satisfies curiosity about how React is built. I still earn 4 figures a month from it in 2026.

The crazy part is that I, after all you've heard about me by now, disease, emergencies and all, published a book that sold well. Ridiculous. To me, given the prophecies, given the odds, that is still hard to hold.

I had shut the business down. A full time job is genuinely better: paid holiday, a guaranteed paycheck, an employment contract, and a landlord who will talk to you. If you're trying to decide between self-employment and full-time work, I cannot recommend full-time work enough.

Serendipitously, I saw that Carter Rabasa who I knew from CascadiaJS in 2022 was hiring at DataStax. I applied and it fit immediately! We didn't even negotiate much at all! It just worked.

I joined as a developer advocate. This role was very AI forward and we did a lot of good work: public things, talks, demos, and I even built a multiplayer game. About 8 or 9 months in, we were acquired by IBM.

The acquisition closed in early 2025 and I found myself at IBM.

There are around 400,000 employees, and we have a works council, which in Germany is real protection. You can see by now why protection means something to me: healthcare and visas have been the same question my whole life.

It is the best job I have ever had. I make good money, I do good work, I am well protected, and it is genuinely peaceful.

IBM is not known for the mass market products everyone uses, so I do sometimes feel like I am missing out. At the same time, maybe that is exactly why I am there: maybe I get to help with that.

My school did classes by roman numerals. When I got to grade IX, my mother said this to me:

And now it is 2026. I have been married to the love of my life for 7 years. I have the best job I have ever had, with the best team. I am physically fitter than 80% of men my age by VO2Max and lean mass.

The best part is that I cannot take credit for any of it. I had time, and with the time I learned things, but I did not arrange the time. I did not arrange for my father, with no education, to get a job in Qatar, where the medicine happened to be free. I did not make the web grow at the same pace as me so that there would be demand for what I could do at exactly the age I could do it. I did not make AI take off just as I was ready to get it.

I do not write this script. I live it. I feel like a passenger in a car driven by grace.

Take a moment and consider even this website. There is a red line down the left margin of every page on this site. It is a vein. You know why now. The entire design of this site tells a story. Somewhere on the journey, the red becomes gold, because somewhere on the journey I met God and things became different in ways I could not have imagined.

Also part of the design, there's black because there is darkness in this story. It is not all light.

Red for blood, gold for grace, black for the holes.

Coincidentally (not really lol i put a lot of thought into this) these are also the colors of the German flag: schwarz, rot, gold. This is where I live, and where I hope to become a citizen in 2026.

The story is not over. I plan to keep this page updated as the timeline progresses. At least now, there's not that much of a backlog.

If any of this touched you, please do reach out to me and let me know (or LinkedIn). I would love to hear from you.