About Me
My name is Nagarjun Palavalli but most people call me Nag. I'm a full-stack web developer and currently work as an Engineering Manager at Nightfall, where I lead a team of talented front-end engineers. I grew up in Bangalore, India and live in New York City.
My programming journey began in middle school with an introductory QBasic course in the early 2000s. While QBasic was fascinating, I only fell in love with programming when I discovered HTML, CSS, and JavaScript a year later. I spent my early teens delving into the source code of GeoCities websites and worked my way up from there.
At Nightfall, I primarily focus on front-end technologies. However, I also have extensive experience with server-side development using Node, Go, and Rust. I occasionally contribute to back-end projects at Nightfall and enjoy working on personal projects in my free time.
As a former startup founder, I am deeply passionate about designing and developing user-centric products. I find as much joy in crafting user interfaces in Figma as I do in writing code.
Beyond web development, I am interested in aviation, travel, photography, history, science, and sports. These interests drive me to learn something new every day and fuel my creativity.
Notable achievements
In the 9th grade, I entered an international Microsoft hackathon using my father's name since I was underage. To my surprise, I won! Microsoft kindly allowed me to keep my prize - a Hewlett-Packard business server (pre-cloud era).
Ranked top 4 in a nation-level Microsoft hackathon. I was awarded a copy of Windows Vista, Office, and an HTC Windows Mobile phone.
Teamed up with experts across the indsutry to create the Bangalore chapter of the Google Technology User Group (precursor to Google Developer Days). I organised and ran multiple events at the Google Bangalore office.
I dropped out of college to start Eduora - a modern Learning Management System for colleges and universities. Eduora was the first international startup to be accepted into Alchemist Accelerator in Silicon Valley.
Teamed up with my friend and won 3rd place at the 2014 Salesforce $1 Million Hackathon. We built an SMS-based customer support app in 48 hours using Salesforce and Heroku. I wrote about my experience here.
TripCloud is an integrated travel and expense management platform for small-to-mid-sized companies in the United States. TripCloud was accepted into Acceleprise (now Forum Ventures), an enterprise startup accelerator in San Francisco.
Colophon
This website was built with a number of incredible open-source and free-to-use resources. Here are a few honorable mentions:
- Website: Built with Gatsby and styled with Tailwind. Blog posts are written in MDX.
- Hosting: Hosted on Vercel's lightening fast CDN. DNS provided by Cloudflare
- Fonts: Bakbak One and PT Sans, delivered via Google Fonts
- Icons: IconFinder and Lucide
- Code editor: Visual Studio Code