# About

Background, work, and life outside software.

Source: https://www.harxit.com/about

I'm Harshit Sharma, a software engineer based in India.

![Harshit sitting in a cafe wearing sunglasses, looking away from the camera](https://www.harxit.com/about/portrait.jpg)

## How I started

In sixth class, my school had two extra periods every Thursday called WorkX, short for work experience. Everyone picked an activity: making things from waste, DIY, gardening, basketball, Scout and Guides, web development. I wanted Scout and Guides because that's where all my friends were going. By the time my turn came, the slots were full.

I picked web development instead. I already loved computers. I had an HP laptop at home that I mostly used for games, and I had once opened it up to upgrade the RAM myself.

In one of the first classes, we wrote a few lines of code and a web page showed up in the browser. Being able to make something and share it with anyone in the world was incredible to me. It took me a while to understand how hosting worked, but I kept at it.

I kept building after that. I made websites for family and friends first, and later found freelance work through Reddit and word of mouth. What started as a school period slowly turned into real work.

![Harshit pointing at Arduino and Node.js code projected on a whiteboard during a workshop](https://www.harxit.com/about/workshop-arduino-code.jpg)

![Harshit at a podium with a sticker-covered laptop, projected code behind him](https://www.harxit.com/about/workshop-podium.jpg)

![Harshit smiling at the camera from behind the podium during a workshop](https://www.harxit.com/about/workshop-smile.jpg)

## Teaching

In my second year of college, I ran five technical workshop sessions, teaching students how software talks to hardware and how projects go from a laptop to the internet. In one session, we built a car rear sensor with an Arduino and an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor and streamed its distance readings into a Node.js server. Teaching the thing I had stumbled into as a kid was a lot of fun.

![A full computer lab of students watching Harshit explain code on the projector](https://www.harxit.com/about/workshop-classroom.jpg)

![Students in a lab watching a GitHub repository projected on the wall](https://www.harxit.com/about/workshop-deploy.jpg)

## Work today

These days I work as a Product Engineer at [YBM](https://yourbrandmate.agency/?utm_source=harshit_portfolio), where I build [MatchroomOS](https://matchroomos.com/), a community matchmaking platform used by more than 6,000 people, and [Zeenovo](https://zeenovo.com/), a healthcare platform used by 50+ pharmacies. I like building products end to end, staying close to both the product decisions and the implementation details.

The desk I work from was built with money from those freelance projects. Outside of work, I spend a lot of time keeping up with AI. I have my own frontend bench, test new models as they show up, and usually end up telling my friends which ones are actually worth paying attention to.

![Harshit's desk setup with two monitors, a mechanical keyboard, and an RGB PC](https://www.harxit.com/about/desk.jpg)

## Outside work

I also play piano, which helps me slow down. Outside of that, I love hiking and driving.

![Harshit standing on a mountain trail with a backpack, snow-capped peaks behind him](https://www.harxit.com/about/hiking.jpg)

![Harshit and friends fallen over laughing in the snow on a trek](https://www.harxit.com/about/snow.jpg)

![Harshit driving a car, trees blurring past the windows and sunroof](https://www.harxit.com/about/driving.jpg)

If you want the formal version of all this, see my [resume](https://www.harxit.com/resume), or say hi on [Twitter](https://x.com/itsharxit).