The home for
Sarthak's work.|

Welcome to my corner of the web where I write about design, code, startups, growth, AI, and just about anything that interests me.

Back in 2018, I began my journey as a self-taught product designer and developer. Over the last 8 years I've built a portfolio of bootstrapped ventures, focusing on design, AI and growth. Learn more about me

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Ventures.

Winitiate

2025

Codemap

2025

Learnway

2024

Drool

2023

Altpack

2022

Weaveu

2021

Where to draw the line between Imitation and Inspiration?

AI commoditized execution, so "taste" is the new moat. But taste is too vague to act on. Here's the programmer's version: imitation is copy by value, inspiration is copy by reference. A moat is a rate, not a position.

Pixel art of a glass dome with a pink house on grass, on a wooden base.

June 27, 2026•government, security, infrastructure, linux, opinion

Assume the Endpoint Is Hostile

Lakhs of government PCs can reach the core, each one trusting whoever sits in front of it. Borrow Apple's closed system — on open foundations — and make the wrong move unavailable.

Pixel art row of white stalls with blue frames and vines under hanging flags.

June 25, 2026•government, procurement, open-source, india, opinion

GitHub for Government Work

The multi-year, single-vendor RFP is the root cause. Treat the core platform as an open commons instead: small priced tasks, paid per merged pull request, governed hard.

Pixel art tower with a ladder and a character on the balcony against a blue sky.

June 24, 2026•government, software, architecture, india, opinion

How I'd Actually Build Government Software That Doesn't Fall Over

You don't fix a meltdown with experts parachuting in after the breach. You fix it with defaults that make the breach hard to commit: a federated core, HTML-first frontends, and storage you can't make public.

Pixel art girl holding a tall stack of books against a purple cloudy sky.

June 23, 2026•government, software, india, security, opinion

BTS of CBSE's Infra Meltdown.

CBSE called its result-day collapse a cyberattack. The numbers say plain demand: 1.5 million hits in two minutes is barely four percent of its own students. This is what monolithic, one-vendor government IT produces under load.

Pixel art scene with a character, a row of brown mushrooms, and tall arched windows.

May 30, 2026•education, ai, india, growth, opinion

Stop Fixing India's Exams

NEET leaked, CBSE's new marking system melted down, and 23.6% of young Indian graduates are jobless. We keep debugging an exam machine we should replace.

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The home forSarthak's work.|