Home

Applying to PhD programs in the US is admittedly intimidating, as it is a process that is, of course, unfamiliar, but also vastly different from the relatively straightforward process of applying to higher-education programs in India1. A friend recently asked me to share any resources that I found useful during my application cycle, and having s...

I graduated from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) on July 10, 2026, at our convocation. Officially speaking, this means I completed eight semesters’ worth of coursework with satisfactory performance. I did complete, but definitely not just my credit requirements. It would be quite disappointing if that is all I completed in the nearly 45 m...

This blog post is a consolidation of the recurring advice I have given to many juniors who have asked me about finding internships and research opportunities. I don’t know if my advice helped them, but I do hope it will be of use to others1. This is highly opinionated, and I am sure there are other perspectives that one should consider based on ...

I have been working as a research intern at Microsoft for quite some time now1 and during this time, our project2 has grown to be quite complex. Somewhere along the way, one of our team members figured out that we could parallelize a particular operation in our codebase, which could potentially become a bottleneck as we start working with larger...

A few weeks ago, I came across the phrase “nethi nethi” and was amazed by how succinctly it captured what I was planning to say about the year 2025. Nethi is a Sanskrit word for “not this,” (coming from the words na meaning “not” and ithi meaning “this”). Nethi nethi is a simple phrase, but it has been used in Vedic philosophy to denote the proc...

My work on detecting ambiguities in Internet Protocol specifications, RFCScope: Detecting Logical Ambiguities in Internet Protocol Specifications, has been accepted to appear at the ASE 2025 conference in the Research Papers track. This work is from my 6th semester1 when I was working with Prof. Wenxi Wang from the University of Virginia, along ...

Some problems in software engineering do not naturally manifest until the software in question is sufficiently big — which is the case for a lot of real software. By big, I don’t mean just a few thousand lines of code, but rather hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines. This is software that supports large parts of modern life1, and it i...

Tonight is different. It could have been like any other night, but tonight, he has chosen to escape. As he walks, a cold breeze slashes through the sweat trickling down his forehead. The night is chilly, yet he is almost fuming. His heart hammers against his ribs — its frantic rhythm could convince anyone he has just finished a sprint across th...

It is surprising that there is no single place1 that lists all of GitHub’s CodeQL queries in a nice, searchable format. So here it is as an Airtable so you can search, filter, sort, or do anything else you like with it. The script to generate this list is available as a Gist2. I hope this is useful for anyone who is looking for a specific query...

Imagine a country where only the rich have access to good healthcare. Or where only the top 1% of the population can obtain a quality education. Or where only the powerful have nutritious food and clean water. This used to be a reality in most of the world, and unfortunately, continues to be a reality for a significant part of the population. To...