Anand Baburajan

Hi, I'm Anand.

I built CQ2 — a tool for RFCs, designed for thoughtfulness and coherence. It's 10x better than existing tools for RFCs such as Google Docs, GitHub PRs, Discourse, email threads, etc. It hit #2 on Hacker News, got 20k impressions, 235 early access sign-ups and 300+ GitHub stars. Currently in talks with open source communities about their RFC process.

Before starting CQ2, I worked as a Product Engineer at Frappe, where I primarily maintained the Assets Management module in ERPNext and did a bunch of other things.

I built Samay — a free and open source meeting poll tool to help people find a time which works for everyone. It has been used to create 2.5k+ polls, has 300+ GitHub stars and won a prize at FOSS Hack 3.0.

I was one of the SWE interns in HackerRank's Summer '21 batch, where I built the HackerRank Interviews for Slack integration and a bunch of features for HackerRank for Work.

I contributed to LiberTEM (under the Python Software Foundation) through the Google Summer of Code '20 program, where I enhanced the data pipeline to allow reshaping pixelated STEM datasets and built a feature for handling datasets with sync/acquisition issues (and continued contributing for more than a year).

That was my first, proper introduction to open source and real-world software development, and was one of the most transformative experiences I've ever had. When I realised how many smart and motivated students in my college (GEC Palakkad) lacked mentorship and haven’t ever been exposed to what they’re capable of, I started FOSS OpenHack '20 — a program which helped 25+ students build 10+ open source projects and helped 3 students who went on to do a GSoC with MSS, CERN and Intel.

Before my GSoC, I tried building things to solve real-world problems (movie piracy, finding status of roads during the Kerala floods, accessible mentorship, etc.) and failed, but took part in small hackathons and won some. Before that, in my first year of college, I did freelance WordPress development for 5+ clients. I got started with WordPress when I helped build my parents' WordPress news sites such as TelecomLead.

I got started with programming in my Class 6th by building simple web pages with HTML and CSS but quickly moved on to building simple Flash games. Even that interest was short-lived since I got more interested in gadgets. Hence, during high school, I covered tech news, did reviews, attended tech press conferences and produced videos for GizmoLead, which achieved 2.7K+ subscribers and 1M+ total views.

My current areas of interest are startups, product, communication platforms, ritual social apps, psychology and education.

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