Hi, I’m Mathan.

I grew up in Madurai and went to school there, then spent five years in Coimbatore doing an integrated M.Sc. in Data Science at PSG College of Technology.

So far I’ve had two stints in industry. The first was an internship in my third year, working as a software developer at a startup called ZeroDown. These days I’m a founding engineer at DataGenie — a small, collaborative team where I’m constantly learning. It’s unconventional, full of interesting people with very different perspectives, and there’s always something new to figure out.

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. I picked it up alongside my coding buddy Ashish, learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the famous CS50 course just to figure out how to put it together — and we went on to build plenty of other interesting projects together. I still remember the late nights getting the chat to work, then the rush of deploying it and nudging my friends to sign up and see it live. Another favourite was Bunker, a college project I built with Partha and Sukumar for those of us who liked to skip class whenever we could — some juniors still find it useful and have carried it forward.

It’s a strange, exciting time to be a software developer. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, but I think that 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 — Jarvis to Iron Man. Coding agents like Claude are genuinely reliable for building interesting things; the rest is just time and your own curiosity. They’re enablers.

I’m building this site to document what I work on, so that in a few years I can look back and see how my thinking — and I — have changed over time. In the meantime, I’ll keep building projects and taking part in hackathons to sharpen my skills and help with the things I work on day to day.

Feel free to reach out: asmathav01@gmail.com