I just wanted to build things

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me that, I’d probably have enough to treat myself to something nice.

The honest answer is frustratingly simple: I don’t really know.

There was no grand plan. No moment where I woke up and decided this was the career I would pursue.

It felt more like wandering through a series of rooms, occasionally getting lost, occasionally finding something worth staying for.

But if I had to start somewhere, it would probably be 6th grade.

Schools in Bangalore tend to take computer science seriously (duh!). Which means at some point you’re a kid sitting in a classroom staring at code thinking:

what the hell is this?

Most of my classmates had already been learning programming for a while. I had just joined the school after living elsewhere. It felt like walking into a movie halfway through when everyone else already knew the story.

It took some time before anything clicked.

Then somewhere around 8th or 9th grade, Supriya ma’am showed up.

To this day she’s the best computer science teacher I’ve ever had. And I went to engineering school, which should tell you something.

She had a way of explaining things that made the foundations of programming feel obvious. Suddenly logic made sense. Programs weren’t mysterious anymore.

She encouraged me to explore outside the syllabus. Sometimes she lent me books. Sometimes she just nudged me to try things on my own. When the course required us to write a programming exam in C, she even allowed me to write mine in C++ because that’s what I was learning at the time.

That kind of encouragement stays with you.

I started exploring programming outside school. Codecademy. Udacity. Random tutorials. I remember taking a Python course that explained how to build a search crawler. Most of it went over my head, but the idea fascinated me.

Somewhere around that time a thought started forming in the back of my mind. 

I wanted to build something.

***

Then Supriya ma’am left the school.

And suddenly the momentum disappeared.

Learning programming alone was hard. Stack Overflow existed, different forums existed, but they rarely answered the strange, tiny questions that appear when you’re actually trying to learn something.

Then came the two years of JEE preparation.

If you ever want to slow down a young engineer who is obsessed with computer science, make them prepare for Indian engineering entrance exams.

For two years I spent most of my time solving physics problems, memorizing chemistry reactions and doing math drills that had very little to do with building anything that I wanted. Programming practically disappeared from my life.

Then came the entrance exams themselves.

I managed to mess up most of them.

There was one university in particular that had an excellent computer science program. The problem was that the confused version of me back then didn’t even know if I wanted to pursue design or computer science.

The day of that exam I was extremely sick.

I answered about half the paper, looked at the rest of the multiple choice questions, filled them all with the same option just to finish the thing and walked out.

Predictably, that didn’t end well. I didn’t get computer science.

Instead I ended up studying Electronics and Communication Engineering.

To this day I’m not entirely sure why I picked it.

What I do know is that I hated almost everything about it from the beginning to the end. But even during those four years, one thought kept coming back.

I wanted to build something.

A website. A mobile app. Some small product people could actually use.

The problem was I didn’t really have any skills apart from some graphic design.

For the next four years I tried to learn Android development. Tutorials and experiments. Over and over again. Nothing really stuck.

Eventually I pivoted and started learning frontend web development instead.

But the idea of building mobile apps never really left me.

Then COVID happened.

Somewhere during that strange period I connected with Kushagra, who introduced me to SwiftUI.

And suddenly a new door opened.

SwiftUI made building mobile interfaces feel approachable in a way Android never had for me. Something about the way it worked just clicked. I dropped Android completely and never went back.

Around this time I was already working as a Product Designer. But the urge to build things myself never really went away.

So weekends became SwiftUI time. Thanks to the 100 Days of SwiftUI course I slowly started understanding how iOS apps actually worked.

Then ChatGPT arrived.

Suddenly none of my questions were stupid anymore. I could ask anything, anytime. That accelerated everything.

Eventually I started shipping apps to the App Store.
And I loved the feeling of designing and building something end-to-end.

Then another rabbit hole appeared. Curiosity in building animations and interactions.

I discovered animations.dev and started learning Framer Motion. Web animations opened up an entirely new playground. Interactions suddenly felt expressive and fun again.

I finished that course and had a blast doing it.

But around the same time burnout from my job started catching up with me.
Eventually I decided to take a break.

After all the travel during my break, I couldn’t quite imagine myself going back to Product Design.

For years, sitting on the sidelines waiting for an engineer to prioritize interactions or UI details the way I imagined them felt like a special kind of torture. They never quite understood why I cared about things like border radius being exactly right. And after a while you get tired of explaining it.

“Nobody cares about this.”

I heard that sentence more times than I can count.

The other thing I wasn’t excited about was going back to managing a parade of stakeholders again. Endless discussions, endless opinions.

Before the break I had also spent nearly nine months interviewing for product design roles. I kept getting rejected for reasons that had very little to do with the actual work, business decisions that were made somewhere else, design system choices I didn’t control, things like that.

It started to feel like I was being judged for everything except the craft.

And that gets exhausting.

Because the part of the job I loved the most, the moment where you sit down and actually make something better, felt like the smallest part of the job.

Design engineering felt different.

In design engineering you’re judged mostly on two things: your craft and your engineering.

Can you build it?
Can you make it feel good?
Can you ship it?

That was incredibly appealing to me.
No waiting around for someone else to prioritize the detail you cared about.

You build it. You show it. The work speaks for itself.
And after years of explaining why details mattered, that felt like a much saner way to spend my time.

So I started building more. Animations. Interactions. Experiments. Rebuilding things just to understand how they worked.

I shared the work publicly. At some point I noticed something interesting. I was spending more time in Xcode and Cursor than I was in Figma.

And that realization felt important!

I kept sharing the work. Slowly people started noticing. Designers I deeply admired began responding to it. And the kinds of conversations around me started to change.

More and more people were reaching out about design engineering roles.

Eventually I got tired of pretending I was still deciding between two identities. 

So at the start of 2026 I made the decision. I pivoted completely to design engineering.

A few weeks later I joined Rox as a full-time design engineer.

One of the things I love most about working here is the autonomy. If I see something broken or awkward in the product, I don’t have to wait around for permission or a long chain of approvals. I can just fix it and ship it.

That freedom to actually build things, and take responsibility for them, is exactly what I had been looking for.

Since then I’ve been learning something new almost every day. 

People still ask me how they can become a design engineer. I struggle to answer that question.

It was a long chain of things, a great teacher, curiosity about programming, years of product design experience, side projects, animations, SwiftUI apps, a lot of experimenting.

It was messy.

But I wouldn’t change that path for anything.

My five years working as a Product Designer were incredibly valuable. I learned so much about design, product thinking and engineering from working with great teams. That experience made it possible for me to become a design engineer in the first place.

There’s still a long road ahead. There’s still so much to learn.

But as I like to say, it’s still day 1 and I’m just getting started.