About

Hi, I’m Ayan. I work as a Developer Advocate, building agentic AI systems and writing about the part most people skip past: the live web-data layer that feeds them.

The hard part of a production AI agent isn’t the model. It’s the fresh, unblocked data you can get in front of it. Models keep getting cheaper and easier to swap, so the thing that decides whether an agent actually works is the harness around it, and that harness is only as good as the data it can reach. Most of my writing circles this one idea.

I came up as an embedded software engineer, electronics and instrumentation by training, and I still think like one: close to the hardware, slow to trust magic. That decade of writing code by hand is also what lets me notice when an agent quietly does the wrong thing, which happens more often than the demos let on.

This site is my archive: projects, experiments, and the tools I actually use, from AI and web data to the analog things I can’t quit.

Current Interests

Right now, I’m exploring:

• Agentic workflows — designing autonomous, tool-using systems that can think, act, and iterate with minimal intervention.
• Web scraping systems — building reliable pipelines to extract, clean, and structure data from the open web.
• Self-hosting — owning my stack, from infrastructure to applications, with a focus on privacy and control.

Alongside this, I consciously balance the digital with the analog— vinyl records, mechanical watches, hi-fi audio systems, and the joy of driving manual cars.

Featured In

Work featured on Hackaday, O’Reilly, and HackerNews. Published in Electronics For You (EFY), Open Source For You (OSFY), and the Mentor Graphics (Siemens) blog. Speaker at PyCon India 2017.

ORCID iD

Background & technical skills

Programming Languages

• Compiled: C/C++
• Scripting: Bash, Python, Node.js
• Markup: HTML
• Notation: JSON, XML

Project Management & DevOps

• Issue Trackers: JIRA, BugZilla
• CI: Jenkins, Travis CI
• Code Management: GitHub, GitLab
• Containers: LXC, Docker

Embedded Software & Design

• Custom OS: Yocto/OpenEmbedded, OpenWRT
• Automotive: AGL, GENIVI
• IDE: PlatformIO, Arduino, Eclipse, Atom, TI-CCS, Atmel Studio

Hardware

• Microcontrollers: Intel 8051, Atmel AVR, ARM7 TDMI, ARM Cortex-M4, MSP430
• SBCs: Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, Intel Galileo/Edison
• SoCs: Espressif ESP8266/ESP32, TI TIVA C, Cypress PSoC

Protocols

• IoT: HTTP, MQTT, CoAP, LWM2M, WiFi, Bluetooth Classic & BLE
• Embedded: UART, MODBUS, I2C, SPI, 1-wire, CAN, LIN
• RF: Nordic NRF24, ZigBee/XBee, LoRa

Hobbies

• Coffee brewing
• Vinyl records & hi-fi listening
• Mechanical watches
• Manual driving
• RC airplanes
• FPV racing drones / quadcopters
• Application-specific drones