Category: Retrospective

Having written a retrospective pretty consistently for the last decade or so, at this point its almost customary to start with how different this year felt compared to previous ones. But this one was truly one for the books!

Work

A big year for Xfinity Moments

Moments is the internal name for the digital keepsakes and gamification platform my team launched late last year. The project has been my baby for the last 2 years and taking it from an idea to an internal prototype to a system in production with hundreds of thousands of keepsakes now unlocked has been an amazing journey. We ran 5 experiences around Moments this year with a 6th one around the SNL coming very soon. I have written about the success we had with the Olympics experience before, but in general it has been a very rewarding experience for me personally to see something you truly believed in now actively considered for various initiatives. I have learned so much about building systems at very different scales through the project but am even more thankful to the small team that built it and the various leaders at Comcast who both believed in it and championed it at various forums.

Managing teams

For the last 20 years I have worked as a technical contributor in various teams at various capacities leading up to a Senior Principal Engineer role at Comcast Labs that led me explore various emerging technologies and how they might fit at Comcast. However the last couple of years with the gaming initiative previously and the Moments project more recently, my role has been more directional with day-to-day engineering time often getting subsumed by things like release plans, coordination meetings and defining and allocating tasks to my team. This year, after a lot of deliberation, I took the advice of various mentors and transitioned to management and took on the role of Director of Engineering at the Emerging Products and Technologies team. The new role brings with it the opportunity to influence multiple projects and work with a lot more people. I still get to write code to explore some technical avenues, I just don’t have to worry about holding up the deliverables for the project sprint in progress which has relieved a fair bit of guilt 🙂

Agentic AI

One of the new areas I have been focusing on at work is the rise of Agentic AI and its impact not only on products themselves but in the processes and workflows that go into creating and evolving products. Exploring that landscape for the last couple of months and seeing a new breed of tools that can completely disrupt the traditional processes has eye-opening to say the least. If this is a space you have any thoughts on, do drop me a line.

Non-work

Becoming an American citizen

Having lived in the US for about 22 years now, I finally became an American citizen this year. It feels weird to think that I don’t have to stress about any kind of mistake in my paperwork or some change in government policy that might force me to leave the life I have built here. It is also a moment of reflection on my own identity. It is poetic that this happens this year, my 22nd year in the US when my first 22 were spent in India. I have a lot of thoughts that I hope to condense into something sharable soon.

Writing

Having moved-off Twitter for the most part, I have been trying to use the alternatives (you can find me on BlueSky, Mastodon and Threads) and they are fine but I have lost most of my Twitter friend circle in the transition. I had been noodling on starting a newsletter for a while and I finally pushed the trigger a couple of months ago and started a Substack newsletter. I am still trying to find the right format there but its been a good place to collect and share the various links I read in a week or 10 days, which is mostly what I used Twitter for. Please subscribe!

Reading

2024 was not the greatest year for reading book, but I did enjoy a few. Ended up reading a lot more graphic novels which were great.

Here is to a great 2025!

It’s almost mid-February, so I am pretty late with this, but better late than never I guess. I do enjoy writing my yearly retrospectives (you can see my previous ones here) since they give me an opportunity to pause for a second and reflect on the work done, something I usually don’t do as I am always running to the next thing I want to work on.

Web3 and NFTs

My retrospectives for the last few years have begun with the myriad of technologies I have learned that year, from VR/AR, to chatbots and Machine Learning. This year was a bit different though. I finally got to pursue a technology that I have been passionate about for a long time (and have written about a number of times previously) but have had a hard time finding a project relevant to my company: Blockchain and Web3.

In 2022 I spent most of my time developing and pitching a Web3 idea that resonated well internally. I am really excited that the effort is ramping up in 2023. The Web3 space is a curious one and is often a target for ridicule but the potential for creating experiences where end users are not just passive consumers but active participants in the evolution of an experience is pretty exciting. I wrote some of my thoughts on why NFTs are an exciting space and worthy of a second look, but even if it doesn’t immediately convert you into a believer, at least be aware that a lot of very smart people are working with more noble goals than get-rich-quick schemes.

Building Teams

My role has often been at the early stage of products that then ramps up to a full production team. This year I did quite a bit of that as well, ramping up the UI team for a soon-to-be-announced product. The role involved helping migrate an internal prototype to production quality code as well as hiring a team that would take it forward.

While I have interviewed candidates for small teams before, this was for a larger team with folks being hired for roles at various levels. I am pretty proud of the team we finally built but I do want to grow my own internal framework for assessing engineers and managers.

I have seen 2 approaches to hiring:

1. Have a loose idea of the skills you are hiring for and then find the candidates that are close to those. If the matches aren’t close, still hire for the skills you find.
2. Have a very exact idea of what you are looking for and seek out those who match that very strictly
   
   Most approaches fall somewhere in the middle of those 2 extremes but sometimes we lean too heavily on #1, especially when we are in a rush to hire candidates. One approach I found useful was to explicitly list the technical and cultural skills I was looking for in an Airtable table, develop a set of questions that would reveal those ahead of time, and use the table to explicitly score the candidates. It worked well for the most part but I have a lot more to learn myself in that role.

Lightning JS

For both the unannounced product and our explorations of Web3, I spent a lot of time working on TV UIs using Comcast’s open-source Lightning JS UI framework. LUI is a JavaScript-to-Canvas/WebGL framework that skips the HTML DOM completely. The approach makes it a lot more performant on low-memory devices like TVs and Set-top boxes. While the approach is great, some of the patterns in LUI are very different compared to other UI frameworks I have worked with. I am pretty competent with LUI now but it was an adventure to get there.

An interesting approach at work is that higher-order UI components are now being built by a team reporting to the design/UX leadership. This has made the components very faithful to the visual design patterns that the UX team imagines, though I do think there are optimizations at the performance level that need to happen since we do hit weird jank issues on some of the devices we work with.

LUI is focused on TV-based experiences but might be fun to try some mobile/desktop-optimized apps/games that don’t need the native UI frameworks.

Flutter

In my off-time, I still enjoy working in Flutter. This year’s fun side project was a grocery-tracking app I named Grocery Timer. GT has not revolutionized the world of grocery management but has still been a fun playground to try different UIs for a surprisingly complicated problem space. Keeping things simple so that data entry isn’t a chore while still providing value and the right reminders has been a challenge. That said, I personally find the app very useful and so its relative obscurity on the app stores doesn’t hurt too much 🙂

Books

Didn’t do as much reading as usual this year but did find some very good reads, specially Loonshots and The Courage to be Disliked. Highly recommended. I am also rediscovering the joy of graphic novels and YouTube channels, especially For the love of Comics, has been a great source of great recommndations.

I didn’t write as much in 2022, at least not publically, but that is one of my resolutions for 2023. Stay tuned 📻

Writing my personal yearly review on this blog is always a good way for me to reflect on my wins and challenges of the year. But this year’s post is harder to write just cause the whole year has been such a blur. Being mostly locked up at home as the world lives through the second year of a global pandemic has denied me the usual anchors of travels, conferences, and other social activities that I write my narrative around. And while I am thankful that my own immediate family has not been affected too badly, we did have a few deaths in my extended family in India, which was sobering, to say the least. I am hopeful that this ends in 2022 or 23, and that everything we have learned through this crisis, from new ways to work to the advances in virology and vaccination technology can be used for better ends in the future 🤞

I seem to start this writeup every year by talking about how educational the previous year had been working on new technologies at Comcast Labs. This year was no exception though maybe slightly more focused in a domain that I had never worked in before: AI-generated speech. While deepfake technologies have mostly been in the news for the wrong reasons, there is a huge opportunity for useful applications using synthetic video or audio as well. Specifically, I explored the current state of the art in synthetic speech, the differences in the offerings of the various cloud providers and startups in that space, and its applicability to some of the domains I am focused on. We tried a number of open-source Text-to-speech libraries like Mozilla TTS and ESPNet and used them to power a “voice-first” device-setup experience. This year definitely seems to be the year of voice-first platforms, with the explosion in voice platforms like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces as well as the continued proliferation of voice hardware like Amazon Echo and Google Home. Our prototype was not only educational technically for me but also highlighted the prototypical nature of the current state-of-the-art in Voice UI/UX.

The customer experiences I worked on this year were mostly iOS-based which gave me a good opportunity to really get into SwiftUI this year. After about 5 months of working with it, I am feeling pretty confident with it. I like it though there are some language features in Swift that still make me go cross-eyed. Another part of the iOS stack I had never touched before was their on-device Machine Learning stack, CoreML. I built a fairly simple classifier in CoreML to handle customer responses and it worked pretty well, though I haven’t had the chance to compare it to something like Tensorflow Lite. I also spent a little bit of time with Jetpack Compose (I wrote about that experience here). Between SwiftUI, Jetpack, React, and Flutter, I feel my front-end bingo card is pretty much all checked 🙂

Speaking of Flutter, I shipped my first Flutter-based app to the Google/Apple app stores. The app, Jax, is a JavaScript learning app powered by Flutter on the frontend and a Rails/Firebase combo at the backend. Side apps can take a long time and this one certainly did, having started as a native Android app first, and then a React-Native app, and then finally a Flutter app. I learned a ton about Rails and Firebase through that journey and am really starting to dig the Flutter+Firebase stack for projects.

I continue to run the Comcast Blockchain Guild as well as the Philly Google Developers Group. This was of course the year of NFTs whether you love them or not, and I enjoyed doing some technical explorations in that space. I also got pulled into some very interesting conversations around how the city of Philadelphia could leverage that technology. The fact that the Phila.gov site now has a page up on https://phila.gov/blockchain is a great sign.

As with a lot of technology meetup groups, the pandemic severely shrunk the group that met monthly for the Google Developers’ Group meeting at the Comcast Center. One thing I did start late this year was using Twitter Spaces to host some of our meetings and that has gone off pretty well. We will definitely continue that in 2022 and I am excited about the possibilities of that format.

Otherwise, life has been good. I enjoyed reading a fair bit of books this year including a bunch of graphic novels. I am in the middle of 3 books right now and have half a chance of finishing at least one of them before the year ends in about 24 hours 👋

🙃 Can’t believe 2019 is over. Fun was had, life was lived. So let’s talk about it

Tech

Most of my work in 2019 was split between conversational technologies (bots and such), Flutter, some Machine Learning and finally some Blockchain stuff. So here is a quick recap of the year:

🤖 Chatbots

I spent a lot of time this year evaluating various technologies in the context of virtual conversational assistants. I still remain very passionately a believer in the chatbots space and even with the fervor around that space dying out with the whole “Bots are the new apps” idea not really happening.

As with a lot of domains of technology right now (VR, Blockchains, etc), the dying out of the initial mania is allowing some really interesting work proceed and evolve the space without a harsh spotlight and investors expecting 10x returns in 2 years.

The problems in that space (IMHO) right now really come down to the facts that:

• Writing bot dialogue is hard and manually authored conversation trees can’t scale
• Tools for authoring and previewing bot dialogues are poor
• AI-based systems that can hold a true dynamic conversation aren’t really there yet and
• There is very little exploration of the user-experience beyond text and animated gifs.

I still really believe that we will need virtual agents as proxies for ourselves and services we interact with as the digital world becomes more complex. It’ll be interesting to see if this space evolves or becomes the next IVR system that no-one loves

Flutter

Speaking of user-experience, I played a lot with Flutter this year and have already written about it in a previous post. There are 3 reasons I like Flutter:

• It’s a cross-platform tool that gives me a lot of control over the graphics (unlike, say, React-Native)
• Dart is enjoyable to code in, having co-opted the best parts of JavaScript/TypeScript and then gone beyond it
• It’s pushing a culture of advanced UI’s that are simple to build which I felt kinda suffered when Flash died

The fact that Google commissioned GSkinner.com to create some amazing UIs that they gave away the code for others to use in their apps just underscores the kind of experiences they wish people would create with it. Here’s hoping Flutter gets more adopted in 2020

Machine Learning

I finally got to work on some Machine Learning based projects this year which was interesting. While I wouldn’t call myself competent in that domain yet, I feel I could get there in 2020 (hopefully). I am also very interested in the emergence of higher-level tools that make working with ML even easier, like Uber’s Ludwig and tools like RunwayML.

One particular area of ML that I got into this year was Affective Computing. I am fascinated by the idea of empathetic systems (whether they use AI or not) and exploring the area of Affective Computing gave me a lot to think about. Some of that I even shared at a couple of conferences this year, including the PHLAI conference.

Blockchains

I wish I had done more with Blockchains this year, but my efforts in that space this year were mostly limited to managing the Comcast Blockchain Guild, attending the local Ethereum meetup and the Philly BlockchainTech meetup and trying to keep up with the torrent of news coming out of the dev community. My personal goal is to do a little more hands-on coding in that space again in 2020 🤞

Conferences

I attended a few conferences this year which were very different from one another

• Google IO was really inspirational with a lot of ideas to come back with. It is amazing to see how much Google has embraced AI and the kinds of experiences AI has enabled. I actually kept the Android sessions I attended this year to a minimum as I was getting a lot more interested in other spaces like AI, Flutter and Firebase. I was also very pleasantly surprised by the Chrome experiences on display at IO. Its amazing to see how far the web platform has come.
• My favorite tech conference of the year had to be EyeO Festival. The conference explores the space at the intersection of art and technology and had some truly inspiring sessions with amazing speakers. You can check out my Twitter thread of some of the sessions I attended but I’d strongly encourage you to check out as many of the sessions as you can from Eyeo 2019 on Vimeo
• I spoke at PHLAI on Affective AI. Had a lot of imposter-syndrome going on given that I was speaking at an AI/ML conference with some very high profile speakers
• I was at a panel on Smart Contracts at Coinvention 2019 moderated by the amazing Thomas Jay Rush (of Quickblocks.io)
• Attended the Blockchain and Other Networks conference by TTI Vanguard which was really interesting, especially with a format where every attendee could interrupt the speaker at any time if they had a question. Someone later recognized me there as “oh yeah, you are the one with all the questions” 😜

Books

Read a bunch of books, half-read even more. Life is too short for bad books 😉 Here is the list of the books that I did complete:

Personal

On a more personal front, 2019 was definitely a great year. I finally got engaged and bought a place in the city (Fishtown, Philadelphia). So far, doing this whole adult thing has been pretty good 😁

I am a little behind on my 2018 review, seeing that its almost mid Jan already. But better late than never, so here goes

VR

2018 continued to be a year of tremendous education professionally. For a big part of the year I continued to work in the VR space, specifically using A-Frame and WebVR. I am definitely a fan of WebVR and I really do believe that the app model that is prevalent in the mobile ecosystems is a bad idea for VR. I completely agree with the vision of VR being a web of experiences, and the web technology stack has matured to a point where deploying a VR experience is trivial. Hopefully more people will take up building VR experiences in JavaScript and WebVR. What the community really needs is a diversity of ideas and to grow VR beyond its early base of gamers.

While it was a lot of fun, I am looking at other things beyond VR this year and am excited for certain new ideas I am playing with. Will share more on that later.

Blockchains

I did a fair bit of work on Blockchains in 2018, mostly at the Dapp level. Its early days for this space but I do believe they present a once in a generation opportunity for a step function change in how we use technology. There is a lot of pessimism about the space right now, after the unrealistic craziness that was the 2018 bubble when Bitcoin hit $19,000 but I am excited about where the tech is going.

I spoke at a panel at the Coinvention Conference on the Philly Blockchain scene (Thanks Mike) as well as at the inaugural session of the Drexel Blockchain club (Thanks Adit)

Besides these, I did work on a LOT of JavaScript and Rails which has been pretty rewarding and learned a lot about Google’s cloud infrastructure, specially Firebase. I need to distill a lot of that into a future blogpost

Reading

I did a fair bit of reading this year but I did abandon a lot of books halfway. I am trying to be okay with that rather than pushing through a bad book, just to complete it. I wish there was a better app than Goodreads for books though

Misc

Some other things that happened this year:

• Philly Google Developer Group (GDG) continues to go strong in its 8th (!) year since its start as AndroidPhilly in 2011. Its a great community that I look forward to meeting at least once a month and have made some great friends there.
• I didn’t travel as much for work this year, which was good. My favorite event though was the MIT Media Lab’s Fall Member Event. I do like all the demos that the Media Labs groups present but the best part is the talks with other sponsors from different organizations.
• I worked with a lot of interns and co-ops this year, mostly from Drexel, and I loved it. These guys and girls are smart, enthusiastic and I find conversations with them refreshing since they question a lot of assumptions I often have. Maybe I should consider some work in academia 😉

2019 is guaranteed to be a year of many changes and I am excited for most of them. Stay tuned.

2017 was an intense year of learning for me. A change of charter for the labs group I work in late last year meant we focused deeper on core technology which was exciting as a technologist. This year that list included Unity, WebVR, Blender, React, React Native, Ruby on Rails and Blockchains (specifically Ethereum). Phew!

Oh! And I got recognized by Philadelphia Business Journal as one of the city’s 10 Technical Disruptors to watch

A big part of this year for me was centered around building Virtual Reality experiences. The first half of the year was focused around building these experiences in Unity which is a very different environment to work in compared to as XCode or Android Studio (which I was deep into last year) but more reminiscent of my previous work in Flash. I really do enjoy Unity and this year made me truly appreciate the game development process. My friend and colleague Jack Zankowski (who did most of the design for our earlier VR work) gave a talk on our early VR experiences at a WiCT event early this year.

However later in the year, we started doing a lot more work in WebVR which, though flaky at times, with platform-specific eccentricities, still was a much faster way to prototype VR experiences. Using AFrame, ThreeJS and WebGL  was a fantastic learning experience and hopefully I can do more web animation and 3d graphics work, with or without VR, next year.

I gave a talk on building WebVR experiences at PhillyGDG that you can find below.

One thing I didn’t see coming was how much time I’d end up spending with Blender this year. I had never worked with 3d modeling tools before but our VR project needed 3D models and since I have some experience with illustration and design (I used to work as a freelance illustrator), that task fell on me. In the last 4 months of working with Blender I have gone from god-awful to okay-ish.

Another project I was very involved with was an internal knowledge portal for our team that we built with ReactJS and Express. Having never done React till before this year, that was educational as well, and I completely fell in love with it (even given its weird licenses though hopefully thats starting to change).

The project also made me look deeper into React Native as a platform for mobile experiences. Late last year I had started an app (more on that later) that needed a CMS and a native mobile client and gave a talk on that at Modev DC and at React Philly

I built the CMS in Rails, being most familiar with that, though that wasn’t saying much as of last year. This year, I definitely feel I have leveled up my Rails game a bit. Perfect timing as most Rails devs I know are moving to Elixir/Phoenix or Node/Express 😅

A lot of time this year was also spent giving talks on Blockchains to various internal and external groups. Turns out I needn’t have bothered since Crypto-mania swept the US this year and now EVERYONE is talking about Blockchains. But I did get to work on one project on it, so that was cool

That about covers the tech news in 2017, and there are already a few interesting projects in the hopper for 2018. Stay tuned 🙂

Another year passes by.  Here is a quick summary of my professional and academic 2016.

Work
It was a year of a lot of change at work. The make up of the team I work in changed dramatically as we rethought how a corporate labs group should operate. I worked on 2 big projects this year, one exploring the world of bots and messaging platforms and the other around Virtual Reality. The VR project was a great showcase piece which meant a lot of demos at various locations. As used to VR as I have become, its still great to see new people experience it for the first time.

I did a lot more work-travel this year than the previous year (which is saying something) VR on the Lot and Re:Code were probably my 2 most memorable trips, the former at the Paramount Studios Lot and the latter where I demoed our VR app to a few bigwigs in the tech world.

Education
I took a 3 months-ish bootcamp on Entrepreneurship organized by Philly Startup Leaders. It was really educational and I learnt quite a bit on quantitative competition analysis, business model generation etc with talks (and homework) by some of the most successful entrepreneurs in Philadelphia. It was also great to meet some people with a strong “makers streak” in them.

I also spent a couple of weeks at Microsoft (Redmond) learning to code for the Hololens system at their Hololens Academy. Hopefully I’ll be able to carve some time out next year actually do some apps for it.

The other technology I continue to academically investigate is Blockchains and Bitcoin. I am such a fan of the system and its potential to revolutionize the internet. I seem to be having a “I see Blockchains needed everywhere” phase. I started coding some Blockchain based apps this year but didn’t get too far. Hopefully next year I have something to show there.

I also participated in the RET program with UPenn working with teachers from local high schools and PhD graduate students.

Code
I started 2016 working a lot in Swift 2 as we scrambled to finish an iOS app around iOT and bots. We finished that project around March and spent the rest of the year at work mostly in Unity and C#. I have grown to like that system a lot which reminds me of my early years in Flash where creativity and design was so integrated into the engineering process, not the design/developer dichotomy we seem to have drifted back into today with mobile or web apps.

On personal projects I continued to build some Android apps (stay tuned for that in 2017) and learnt enough Ruby on Rails to consider myself fairly proficient at it now.

Android Philly
The Android Philly group I run is still going strong and with a lot of familiar faces there, it has really become a community I enjoy being a part of. One of the big reasons has been the #androidphilly Slack channel on the PhillyDev Slack account that we all connect in in between events.

Talks
I also gave a couple of talks at AndroidPhilly, two at the Coding Bootcamp we organized early this year and one later on building Bot-based apps. I also gave a talk at a Women I Cable Technologies event on VR and a couple of other internal work events.

Patents
I was issued a patent grant on a method for pairing devices this year and another was published on image based group creation. Some others around VR are being moved forward as well, so thats cool.

Books:
The free library continued my reading addiction. Here is what I read this year: