About

Hi, I’m Ayan — an Electronics and Instrumentation Engineer by education and an Embedded Software Engineer by profession.

I’m a modern-day tech flâneur—exploring self-hosted systems, privacy-first tools, and everyday carry. Between brewing good coffee and being a dad of two, I spend my time building, testing, and refining systems that make life more intentional and efficient.

I support open source and FOSS by contributing to projects and communities. At my core, I like making things—whether that’s solving everyday problems, hacking together scrappy prototypes, or automating parts of my digital life.

This blog is my personal archive—a place to document projects, experiments, and ideas that would otherwise fade away. You’ll also find thoughts on tools, tech, and everyday carry that I actually use.

Current Interests

Right now, I’m exploring:

• Web scraping systems — building reliable pipelines to extract, clean, and structure data from the open web.
• Agentic workflows — designing autonomous, tool-using systems that can think, act, and iterate with minimal intervention.
• 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.

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