Journal · 46 articles
Build logs from real systems, hackathon stories from both sides of the judging table, guides for GenAI engineering, and notes from mentoring 200+ students. Every claim traces back to something shipped, won or taught.
Latest · RAG & retrieval
Inside RAG.NextUpgrad: hybrid dense + BM25 retrieval, cross-encoder reranking, and the confidence gate that refuses to answer on weak evidence.
A confidence gate stops an LLM from answering when retrieval comes back weak. Here's how to design the threshold and what it costs to skip it.
Why combining vector search with keyword search beats either alone, and how Reciprocal Rank Fusion merges the two without score normalisation headaches.
What retrieval-augmented generation actually is, why it exists, and the components a real RAG system needs beyond a vector database.
How FineTune Studio runs QLoRA fine-tuning end to end in a browser, on hardware a student can actually afford, with honest base-vs-tuned evaluation.
If you can't show the before and after on the same prompts, you didn't fine-tune — you spent GPU hours. Here's how to evaluate properly.
What QLoRA actually does differently from full fine-tuning, why it fits on consumer hardware, and the steps to run your first job.
FaceVision runs detection, recognition and liveness checks entirely in the browser with ONNX Runtime Web. The backend never sees an image, only vectors.
A Mistral-powered workspace for page-batched PDF OCR, live speech-to-text, and document-scoped chat with citations.
Running inference in the browser with ONNX Runtime Web isn't just a latency trick — it removes an entire category of data breach.
DocuLens AI extracts, compares and compliance-checks business documents with schema-validated, deterministic scoring — not a free-text LLM summary.
As CTO of SCULT INDIA, I designed and built the internal platform for project, client and operations management that the whole team uses daily.
Docker, CI, structured logging, tests — the unglamorous parts that separate a demo from something that stays up.
Groq, Claude, Gemini, OpenAI — the right answer depends on your constraints, not on whichever model topped a benchmark this month.
Prompt injection resets when a chat ends. Memory poisoning doesn't. If your agent has memory, it needs a different threat model.
How to fit a production AI service inside a 512 MB free instance — the choices that matter and the ones that don't.
An LLM asked the same compliance question twice can give two different answers. Here's how to build a document-AI system that doesn't.
How a hackathon-winning project — a real-time platform connecting food donors, NGOs and volunteers — became something we kept building after the trophy.
Team TechVerse's 1st prize at MeetKats' BYTEBATTLE hackathon, and what it took to win against 60+ competing developers.
A top-3 finish at IIT Kanpur, a cybersecurity runner-up and a debate runner-up — the near-misses that taught me more than the trophies.
1st prize at Vividhotsava 2025's Product Genesis for BrandHive, a startup concept helping small businesses with AI content and UGC collaborations.
How Team Techverse won 1st prize at IIT Roorkee's National Social Summit with Krishi Gyan, an AI agribot for real-time farming guidance.
We lost this one with a two-minute pitch for a system that took days to build. Clarity beat depth, and that lesson has outlasted every trophy.
The one line I repeat in almost every session, and why it's the most actionable advice I have for a student who feels behind.
The three roles look similar from the outside but need completely different preparation. Here's how to tell which one your event needs.
What a hands-on session with me actually looks like on the ground: live system, real repo, one takeaway students can act on that week.
Three hackathon wins and a loss on a two-minute pitch taught me the same thing from opposite sides of the judging table.
The economics of free campus talks, and why I still say yes to almost every student community that asks.
What actually works, and what flops, when you found and grow a student tech community while mentoring 200+ people through it.
The three-year roadmap I gave incoming BCA students: foundations and AI tools, then hackathons and internships, then placements or a startup.
Inside the VSICS session where I mapped how AI now touches every stage of the software lifecycle, from requirements to maintenance.
At INSIGHT — The Talk Show, VSICS Kanpur, I argued against the motion on nationalism and policy. It's a soft-skill exercise every engineer should try.
What makes an invitation email easy to say yes to, from someone who receives them and someone who's sent plenty.
A simple structure for turning a project you built into a post worth reading, even if you've never written one before.
TechVerse Enclave went from five admins to 500+ developers. Here's the actual sequence, not the highlight reel version.
The three real paths a final-year BCA student has, and an honest framework for choosing between them instead of drifting into one.
LinkedIn, YouTube and GitHub are your resume now, whether you've decided to use them that way or not. Here's how to do it without it feeling fake.
I lost a hackathon on a two-minute pitch for something that took two days to build. Here's the structure I use now.
A recruiter opens GitHub before they open your certificate folder. Here's how to build a portfolio that survives that first thirty seconds.
Three first-place wins, a top-3 finish and one loss on a two-minute pitch — the real pattern behind winning, condensed into a playbook.
Not a hype list. The tools that actually change what a student can ship in a semester, and how to use them without becoming dependent on them.
How to register for TCS CodeVita, what the coding rounds actually test, and how to prepare if you're a BCA, MCA or B.Tech student.
Looking back at a year that included co-founding a studio, growing a 500-member community, and shipping five production AI apps solo.
48+ hours of system design, dashboards, pitch prep and coffee — what building in public during a hackathon actually looks like.
Every mentoring session I run starts with the same admission: my first real project failed hard. Here's why that's the part worth telling.
A short map of the institutions and teams that shaped the last few years, from a first failed project to co-founding SCULT INDIA.