Keshav
Nautiyal
Curiosity leads. I just follow.
Technically an engineer. Practically, I build things until they work.
I'm a builder. I like making things that are actually useful to the people on the other end. I like the challenge of it, and I like that there's always more to figure out.
Curiosity is the thing that keeps me moving. It pulls me deeper into technology and pushes me to keep getting better at it.
The right prompt extracts elegant code.The right knowledge knows when to trust it.
The things I hold.
First-Principle Framing
Give the engineer the problem, not the instruction. An engineer should never be handed a technical specification stripped of its reasoning, rather they should be given the business logic that derives it. For example: do not tell an engineer to centre a button. The button is the primary CTA. Users struggle to find it, so it cannot sit hidden or unclear. Hand them that reasoning and the liberty to arrive at the solution on their own terms.
Cultivated Intuition
Intuition is not a shortcut. It is the compound interest of every problem you have shipped before. Call it pattern finding or learned practice if you like, but in day to day engineering it comes down to the instinct you have earned from past experience. An engineer must hold the balance between reasoning enough and staying decisive, never reasoning so much that nothing moves. Creativity and innovation thrive in the standard deviation from the already known solution, not from the goal. Reason hard about the why, then trust yourself to push past the boundary already known to you. Be scrappy.
Realistic Optimism
Stay optimistic about the outcome even when it looks out of reach, and let the right intuition carry you to the nearest point to the primary goal. I try not to let technical ego blind me to whether the effort translates to any real world benefit. Realism is seeing constraints clearly, whether they are technical constraints in a system or organizational constraints in a team. When something is out of reach I make the call early and commit to it, rather than going quiet and saying no at the deadline when both paths were still open. Optimism gives you the direction, realism keeps you honest.
A snapshot of what I hold. I wrote about it at length.
Read the full pieceThe work is the evidence.
I do a lot of things. Making memes for my friends, running GTM for a friend's side project, fixing problems that were never mine to fix. Most of it never makes it onto a page like this. What follows are the professional milestones, the work I'd actually stand behind.
See what I've done