Hi, I’m Mathan.

I’m from Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India. I grew up and did all my schooling there, then moved to Coimbatore for five years to do an integrated M.Sc. in Data Science at PSG College of Technology.

These days I’m a founding engineer at DataGenie. It’s a small team full of people with very different perspectives, and there’s always something new to figure out. Before that, in my third year of college, I interned at ZeroDown, a YC startup. That was my first taste of working with experienced engineers, in a real production environment, at a startup.

Outside of work, I just like building and tinkering. That’s how I started, actually. My first real project was a social network, basically a mini Facebook clone, that a few of us built while learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript from CS50. I still remember the late nights getting the chat to work, then the rush of deploying it and nudging everyone to sign up. That same circle kept building after that: hackathon projects, side projects, and Bunker, an attendance tracker for those of us who liked to skip class. Some juniors still find it useful.

It’s a strange, exciting time to be a software developer. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, but AI and the new coding tools make building far more accessible than before. To me they’re less a crutch and more a personal assistant, like Jarvis to Iron Man. Coding agents like Claude Code are reliable enough to build interesting things with, and with the right planning, getting a proof of concept started is easy. The rest is time and your own curiosity.

I’m building this site to document what I work on, so that in a few years I can look back and see how I, and my thinking, have changed.

Last updated 3 October 2026.

Feel free to reach out: mathanamathavas@gmail.com