Hi, I’m Nishil Faldu.

A friend of mine says I’m a slightly different person every year, and she’s right. So this is less a list of things I’ve built and more the story of how I got here.

I grew up barely touching computers. I used them to watch movies and play games that was about it. I’d never written a line of code. So when I got to the University of Cincinnati I picked math as my major, because it was the only thing I really liked and I wasn’t willing to fake interest in something I didn’t. I took a couple of programming courses on the side, Python and C++, just to keep the engineering doors open.

Python didn’t click at all. I passed with an A by basically memorizing my way through it. I couldn’t have told you what a for loop did. Then around week seven of C++ we got to structs, and for some reason that was the lesson where everything fell into place. The next week was classes and objects and I just got it. I ended up building a game in C++ for my final project. It was a pair project but I did most of it, because for the first time I actually wanted to.

That summer I felt behind. A lot of my friends had been coding since the eleventh grade and I’d done none of it, so I spent the months on Coursera, some Java, more C++. Then I found machine learning, this perfect mix of code and math, and fell hard for it. I was handwriting notes in a notebook to understand it, working through all the Andrew Ng courses. Around then I trained my first real model, a small thing that learned to read the mood of a review, and watching it work felt like proof I was in the right place. So I switched my major to computer science for real.

My first job came from one cold email. I wrote to the Digital Scholarship Center saying I’d taken these ML courses and wanted to work with them, and they hired me. I stayed a few years. (I still find work the same way, which is funny.)

Those years I made things constantly, most of them just for the fun of it. There was a fact checker to catch COVID misinformation at a hackathon I was competing in, and a stats dashboard for another one I was helping run. I made three campaign sites for friends running for student government, one a year. My senior project was an app for planning events, built with a partner while the two of us figured out video calls for the first time. A class assignment turned into a take on Canvas where keeping up with coursework grew a small garden. Even my old coursework is still up, kept because I liked it. None of it was meant to be important, and somehow all of it taught me the most.

After that came internships, then startups. I was the founding engineer at 7WEST, where I shipped a campus social app to 500+ students across more than fifteen universities, and a K-12 learning platform used by around 6,000 accounts, mostly as the only engineer. Before AI could do it for me, I wrote a small compiler in Go from scratch, just to see if I could.

Machine learning kept pulling me back the whole time. I trained a model to surface the hidden themes in a million news headlines. I built a way to spin up chatbots that actually know your own documents. At Tembo, working as a software engineer, I built a store where search lives entirely inside the database, the demo for a deep dive I was writing on their blog. One company’s take-home was a little news reviewer; another’s had me send an agent to crack a login puzzle.

These days I build a lot, and faster than I used to. Mostly I build to get rid of noise, because there are always too many threads in my head and I like quieting them. A tool to catch the mistakes an AI makes in code, which taught me the better fix is to guide the design while it writes instead of checking after. One place to throw every bit of inspiration I find instead of leaving it scattered across five apps. A few small servers so an agent can reach into my calendar and inbox instead of me doing it by hand. A Raycast extension for the cold emails. Small things that take a mess and make it sit still.

Plenty of it never shipped, and I’ve made peace with that. A game where everyone gets the same single quest each day. A storefront for a patisserie. Half-finished, most of them, and I built them to find out whether I could. That was enough.

Outside of all this: I love stories, any kind, books, shows, short films, or someone just telling me about their day. And music gets me the most, whenever I put something on, I feel it all the way down. I write poetry sometimes. I’d play sports every single day if I could, any sport, I’m not picky. I think most plans should just be a spontaneous hang instead of a calendar invite. And I love love.

If any of that resonates, say hi.

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