FAQ

infrequently asked questions

how do you stay creative in such a technical field?

i think the best engineers are secretly artists. every algorithm is a composition, every system architecture is a sculpture. i stay creative by constantly asking "what if?" and "why not?" sometimes the most innovative solutions come from combining completely unrelated ideas. like using game theory for trading algorithms or applying medical AI concepts to financial modeling.

what's something you're passionate about that might surprise people?

i'm absolutely obsessed with escape room design. there's something fascinating about creating puzzles that challenge both logic and creativity. i've designed several escape rooms for friends, and the best part is watching people's faces when they finally solve a particularly tricky puzzle. it's like watching someone discover a new superpower.

what's a useless skill you have that's actually kind of impressive?

i can remember song lyrics from years ago but forget what i ate for breakfast. it's like my brain has a separate hard drive just for music. also, i can spot typos from a mile away and predict what song will play next on shuffle with scary accuracy. my brain is just weird about patterns and letters.

what's something you think is weird but actually makes perfect sense?

the fact that we spend 8 hours a day staring at screens, then come home and immediately grab our phones to scroll through more screens. it's like we're training ourselves to be digital creatures. but then i realize that's exactly what's happening - we're evolving to process information differently. our brains are literally rewiring to handle the digital world. so maybe it's not weird at all, just evolution in real-time.

what's your approach to learning new technologies?

i'm a firm believer in the "build first, understand later" approach. i'll dive into a new framework or language by immediately trying to build something with it, even if it's terrible. you learn more from making mistakes than from reading perfect examples. plus, there's nothing like the satisfaction of getting something working, even if it's held together with duct tape and prayers.

what books have shaped your thinking?

i'm a voracious reader who believes in the power of diverse perspectives. some recent favorites that have completely changed how i think about the world:

Academic & Professional

  • • "The Psychology of Money" - Morgan Housel
  • • "Zero to One" - Peter Thiel
  • • "Poor Charlie's Almanack" - Charlie Munger
  • • "The Unpublished David Ogilvy" - David Ogilvy

Creative & Personal

  • • "Let My People Go Surfing" - Yvon Chouinard
  • • "The Fish That Ate the Whale" - Rich Cohen
  • • "Stranger in a Strange Land" - Robert Heinlein
  • • "Foundation Series" - Isaac Asimov

cs, finance & stats: isn't that just indecision with extra steps?

it looks like i couldn't pick one, and honestly for a while i couldn't. but the three keep answering each other's questions. stats tells you whether the thing you built actually works or you just got lucky on one dataset. finance is where i learned latency is a number someone pays for, not a vanity metric. cs is how any of it gets built. most of the problems i've actually enjoyed needed at least two of the three, and the people who only had one kept getting surprised.

what's the hardest part of building for healthcare specifically?

that you can't move fast and break things when the thing is a person. in most software a bad edge case is a bug report. here it's someone's drug interaction. so you spend more time on what happens when the data is missing or wrong than on the happy path, and you have to accept that the right answer is sometimes "i don't know, ask a human." i find that constraint clarifying rather than annoying — it's the rare case where being careful is also the fast path.

ask me anything else

an ai assistant i trained on my own answers!

want to make something great together?

i'm always up to chat: krrishapatel26@gmail.com

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