Head of Engineering, Sagemaker Neo, AWS AI, Amazon

I am Ashish Desai (aka Mr. Doomsbuster), an Engineering Manager at Amazon, AWS. I strive for excellence and am passionate about web, Linux, machine learning, dev tools and developer productivity. I like to lose my sleep over extremely hard problems and am excited about building platforms and infrastructure that need to scale. I love programming / _tinkering_. I am building my own version of Jarvis, I call it Bageera. A super hero fan, fountain pen collector. Aspiring to play a role in enabling the next frontier for humans, _the space_. My purpose will be served when humans are able to take flights to space in iron-man like exoskeletons. The future of _work_ is the space. When I am all done, I end my purpose on earth by taking a space flight to Mars (perhaps in my own iron-man like suit)!

My passion for computing started at the age of eleven. Looking at those computer games excited me, as to how they worked. I quickly learnt that C is the mother of all programming languages and I started with this great book called Let Us C, by Yashwant Kanetkar it was an amazing experience. At college, I got knee deep into assembly language programming and I fell in love with it. I would teach assembly programming to other students, part time at college just for my love of it. Even to this day, I play with Arduino and Raspberry Pi in my home office workshop. I got campus recruited into Cognizant Technology Solutions and rapidly learnt several tools and technologies. I was put on several turn key projects including some of my first front end engineering projects using AJAX and the DOJO toolkits. That was ten years ago, since then the passion for frontend engineering has made home in my head. I have gained expertise in web technologies, frontend performance tuning and the ecosystem of tools and technologies around it. Well, during all these years there is this another thing that I cared a lot about and that was Developer Tooling & Productivity. You give me a new tool and within a few hours I would have clicked every possible menu option on the product, even if some of them would break the product to the extent of re-install. I quickly realized that having a good tool and doing things in a certain way is so important to producing output rapidly. If there is something that slowed me down consistently, I would do something about it. From as naïve as a simple cheat sheet, code snippet, plugins or tools I build things if it speeds me up. This led me to where I am today, in Amazon Web Services where I continue to explore my passion for technology, engineering and tooling. If you have a frontend engineering or tooling question I will most likely have answers for it.

Personally, driving is my passion - 0 to 60 mph in 4.3s from a stop light is more adrenaline rush than sky diving, also passionate about computing, animations and computer graphics, VFX, animated motion picture, graphics design, cartooning and game development! Who knows, a character I created might be in motion pictures someday.I love fine writing and have a collection of hundreds of _limited edition_ fountain pens and inks. Yes, they are still a thing. Spencerian script is the epitome of writing, I think :-)! Relentlessly writing with precision instruments like Shaeffer, Monteverde, TWISBI, Pilot, Nemosine with different colors and inks like Diamine and Iroshizuku Exotic Ink and more is so much fun. Rhodia dotPad - The only thing I write on.

I am actively working on lot of personal projects and am sure that I will build something amazing one day. Like the Iron Man says; I say too - I am a Mechanic, I build and I fix things.

One other thing:

I don't care about attribution. Everything I do, goes under the WTFPL License.

Stuff I do that matters

I currently head the engineering for Sagemaker Neo and lead a team of world class engineers.

Most recently, I was the Head of Engineering for JPMorgan's API Marketplace developer platform. Prior to that I headed engineering of the bank's machine learning and data platforms; solving some of the hardest AI and data problems on the planet.

Additionally, I make developers more productive. I am always thinking about eliminating inefficiencies, introducing automation and improving developer productivity. I evaluate several tools, build plugins, create content and tools that help you do more with less.

  • I am one of the go to person in the firm, for any questions or advice related to developer tooling, frontend engineering or developer productivity. Frequently you will find me engaging in meaningful conversations around tooling, productivity and frontend engineering.
  • I am a JPMorgan Chase Expert Engineer which is an elite group of high performing engineers hand picked and selected through a rigirous selection process. Yeah, there are only a handful of them. I am a winner of the Expert Engineer "Knowledge Sharing" award.
  • Creator & evangelist of the JPM Open Source Program which is the firms first "innner sourcing" initiative where innovative minds collaborate.
  • Creator of firms first ever enterprise scale, cloud based functional test automation platform.
  • I was a lead engineer solving an extremely complex problem around data de-duplication and gaining a single customer view within the bank through use of fuzzy search and application of heuristic algorithms.
  • I mentor Technology Analysts from TAP Program to help them manage their career and rapidly progress in their technology journey. I believe in bringing more women in technology and I mentor women associates from the Tech Connect Program helping them navigate their career in technology. I also mentored women at Per Scholas in one of its women in technology programs.

Can't resist to know more, here is the copy of my resume.

"Web is the biggest expression of freedom since the invention of the Internet. When you collaborate to create great content on the web - the world just gets better."
The Bottom Line
"If you want to learn a language, get your hands dirty. Books are important, but writing code is more important. At first you will stumble then walk and finally run."
"The only way to become an expert and be well known, is to do your current job really really well."
"If you see a problem, don't bitch about it, fix it."

Some of the things I think are cool pieces of work for the web and otherwise:

Expertise

I have expertise in several languages, tools and frameworks. Listing some of the major ones here.

Beginner
Familiar
Expert
Guru
Frontend
HTML 5
CSS 3
JavaScript
NodeJS
SVG
Frameworks
React
Angular
GSAP
{LESS}
Webpack
Graphics Design
Illustrator
Affinity Designer
Photoshop
Middleware
Java
Python
Cloud
Spring Cloud
Docker
AWS
Infrastructure Engineering
Others
Ubuntu
GIT

Contact Me

If you are contacting me for professional / technology mentorship, send me an email directly at a......@ashishdesai.com with your name, your gender, your background and why do you need a mentor. Before you do that, answer the following questions and include your responses in your email.

  • What do you love doing?
  • What are you passionate about?
  • Where do you see yourself in 2 years?
  • Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

If you are reaching out for a meetup or a speaking opportunity, I am only interested if the content and video are licensed under WTFPL, if you aren't probably you should.