A software engineer by trade, Amit is a human by actions; he builds web applications for a living, blogs to siphon off excess thoughts, does photography for fun and travels for rejuvenation.
Born and raised in New Delhi, the capital & heart of India, Amit has always been curious about how things work. Computer lab time in school meant that curiosity, along with an interest in building things, could be put to good use. So computer languages were then just tools, means to an end, be it Logo for creating fun shapes or BASIC/COBOL etc. for whacky programs.
Amit came across internet in 1998-99 during high school and his curiosity spiked as he wondered how do websites work and how does software work without being installed on the computer. It was that curiosity that drew him towards web applications even though his bachelors degree program in college was focused on on-device software built in C++, Java, VC++ etc.
Amit is a seasoned software architect and engineering leader with close to two decades of experience building and working on complex web applications catering to an audience of hundreds of millions. For more than last 15 years, his programming language of choice has been PHP and occasionally Javascript, though he believes programming languages are just means to help solve problems & so he is always open to try different things in his pursuit of efficiency, performance, maintainability, and perfection.
For almost 11 years Amit worked at Penske Media Corporation, home to some of the biggest and iconic publications like Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, etc. During his tenure at PMC, he donned multiple hats and served in different engineering roles, be it overseeing re-design of Variety or re-platform and re-design of Rolling Stone, introducing & championing software engineering concepts at PMC, building internal tools for code deployment, creating & expanding internal PHP testing framework, mentoring new engineers, leading learning programs, etc. Amit helped create, extend & improve the WordPress based CMS on which PMC publications run online, extending WordPress beyond any normal usage & workflow and scaling for a readership of hundreds of millions.
In late 2021 Amit left PMC and took on the role of Associate Vice President of Engineering at The Good Glamm Group, South Asia's largest content-to-commerce group, where he oversees software engineering for the online publications of the company.
Outside of work, Amit has been actively involved in blogging and community projects. Wanting to start blogging again (which had been an on-and-off thing since 1999), Amit came across WordPress in early 2004 during his search for an open source software which can be used to run his blog. The software was still in its early stages but it clicked and Amit (re)started his blog on 1st April 2004, which was (and still is) primarily focused on web development and related technologies.
In 2005, Amit started his personal blog in Hindi. Shortly thereafter, he came in contact with several other Hindi bloggers and became actively involved with a number of Hindi community projects of Akshargram Network which included the popular Hindi blog aggregator Narad. Amit founded the first online Hindi discussion forum, Paricharcha, in 2006.
In January 2007, Amit started volunteering for Global Voices as an author in the South Asia team, and was also interviewed for Global Voices.
In January 2008, Amit founded Delhi Blog and New Media Society with three of his friends. It was a non-profit entity for promotion of blogging & citizen media in New Delhi and National Capital Region, and its first event on 12th January 2008 got exclusive coverage by NDTV (one of the largest national TV networks in India). In May 2008, Amit founded Indian Blog and New Media Society. It was a not-for-profit grouping of all stakeholders in the blog and new media space from India. The society kicked off in style by organising (in collaboration with DBNMS) first ever BlogCamp in Delhi. As part of IBNMS & DBNMS, Amit helped organize a second blogcamp in Delhi on 7th March 2009 and the first blogcamp in Bangalore on 14th March 2009.
Since 2007, Amit has also been active with BarCamp Delhi and has helped organize 8th & 9th editions of BarCamp Delhi in 2012 and 2013 respectively.