Hi, I'm Ketan Damle

I grew up building Lego and folding paper. Animal origami first, then tessellations, then kinetic structures. I knew I didn't want to study medical, so I followed the herd and got into IIT Kharagpur for mechanical engineering. But even there, I spent more time on tessellations than thermodynamics, which should have been a sign.

Did a design internship at IIT Guwahati after third year, and I thought that was it. Got my M.Des in Industrial Design, but kept drifting toward understanding users rather than building industrial products. Physical products ship once. Digital ones you can keep making better. So I switched to product design. Then last year I stumbled into coding. Google AI Studio had just come out, and my mom tracks her stock portfolio in Excel with manual entries after market close. So I built her a tool. Auth, Groww API, Gemini for insights. In college I'd loudly declared "I'm a mechanical engineer, I don't need to learn coding." Look at me now.

That project broke something open. I've since shipped freelance products from research to deployed code, with Claude as my copilot for the messy parts. I'm a designer who codes, or a coder who designs, depending on who's asking. I still fold paper when I need to think.