Hi, I'm Harsh Sahu

I’m an engineering student at BITS Pilani interested in software engineering, systems, algorithms, and machine learning.

I like understanding how things work underneath the abstractions, then building something with that understanding. My projects have taken me from backend APIs and databases to web applications, data pipelines, APIs, automation, machine learning, and open source.

I’m still figuring out exactly which corner of software engineering I want to live in, so I tend to explore a lot. Backend development, systems, algorithms, infrastructure, developer tooling, and machine learning all catch my attention. What matters most to me is getting past the surface level and understanding why something works.

What I'm interested in

"The shortest path leaves the longest adventure."

I’m particularly interested in backend and systems engineering, where software has to deal with real data, multiple users, failures, performance constraints, and the wonderfully annoying reality of everything not going according to plan.

I enjoy designing APIs, working with databases, figuring out how systems communicate, automating repetitive work, and understanding what happens underneath the tools I use.

I’m also interested in machine learning and algorithms. I’ve been working through the mathematical foundations behind ML while experimenting with models and data driven projects of my own.

What I've been building

A lot of my learning happens by building things.

I’ve built backend systems using Python and Go, REST APIs with authentication and role based authorization, applications backed by PostgreSQL, containerized services with Docker, and projects deployed on AWS.

Some of my projects have been more experimental. I’ve built a football match prediction system, a pixel based collaborative canvas inspired by r/place, data collection and scraping tools, small automation projects, and various smaller experiments while learning new technologies.

I also like building things that interact with existing systems. I’ve worked with APIs such as GitHub, Google People, and Gmail, explored OAuth and authentication flows, and experimented with scraping and data pipelines.

Open source

I’m increasingly interested in open source because it forces me to do something that tutorials don't: understand someone else's code.

I’ve started contributing to existing projects and learning how real repositories work, from finding issues and understanding unfamiliar codebases to making changes, dealing with tests and formatting, and communicating with maintainers.

It has also made me much more interested in software engineering beyond simply making my own projects work.

How I learn

I tend to learn by taking things apart.

If I use a library, API, framework, or system, sooner or later I want to know what is happening underneath it. That usually leads to reading documentation, looking through source code, building a smaller version myself, or accidentally spending three hours investigating something that was supposed to take twenty minutes.

That habit has led to a fairly broad set of interests, but it has also taught me that knowing how to use something and actually understanding it are very different things. I’m trying to close that gap.

Outside the code

I’m currently studying Electrical and Electronics Engineering alongside Physics at BITS Pilani.

I spend an unreasonable amount of time asking questions that begin with "but how does this actually work?"

Sometimes that leads to a useful project. Sometimes it leads to a completely unnecessary investigation into networking, operating systems, APIs, or some obscure implementation detail. Usually it is worth it.