Viraj Nalbalwar

Started with a diploma, somehow ended up with a gold medal and Maharashtra Rank 2, and that journey brought me to COEP. Since then, I’ve gone from building slick web experiences to working with cloud infrastructure, enterprise systems, and Kubernetes research. I guess I’ve never really stuck to one lane—I just keep following whatever makes me curious enough to build. 🚀

Because a resume can tell you what I’ve done, but not really who I am. This is my little corner of the internet where projects, experiments, milestones, questionable design obsessions, and everything I learn along the way get to live together. Basically, less of a portfolio... more of a timeline of me figuring things out. ✨

Why choose? 😭 I’ve built frontends with Next.js, worked hands-on with OpenStack and OpenShift at Jio, explored enterprise software engineering at Mastercard, and somehow ended up researching Kubernetes schedulers too. I like understanding the whole journey—from the interface someone clicks to the infrastructure quietly keeping everything alive underneath.

Working on things outside tutorials. Real infrastructure, real codebases, research problems, deadlines, presentations—basically situations where there isn’t a neat 'Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.' That taught me something important: knowing a technology is useful, but learning how to figure things out when you don’t know the answer is probably the bigger skill. ⚡

Probably the trajectory more than any single achievement. From a diploma classroom to COEP, internships at places like Jio and Mastercard, and taking our Kubernetes research all the way to an international HPC workshop—it sometimes feels wild when I connect the dots. Every chapter felt like a huge jump at the time. Looking back, they somehow became one continuous story. 🌍

The ones where I initially have no idea how I’m going to solve them. 😭 Whether it’s debugging infrastructure, understanding a massive codebase, designing a system, or turning an idea into something people can actually experience—I love that phase where everything looks confusing... until the pieces slowly start connecting.

Unfortunately... yes. 😂 If something works but doesn’t feel right, I’ll probably keep touching it. Code structure, animations, tiny spacing, presentation flow—I care a lot about how things come together. I’ve learned that 'done' matters too, but if I’m putting my name on something, I want it to feel intentional.

Speedcubing is still my favorite reset button. There’s something satisfying about turning complete chaos into a solved cube one algorithm at a time—which, now that I think about it, is suspiciously similar to debugging. 😭 Add some music, random tech rabbit holes, and occasionally doing absolutely nothing... system reboot complete.

You don’t have to feel ready before starting something difficult. Most of the things that taught me the most started with me thinking, 'I have absolutely no clue how to do this.' You start anyway, break things, ask stupid questions, read way too much documentation, and eventually yesterday’s impossible thing becomes something you just... know how to do. 🔁

No perfectly scripted five-year answer here. 😭 I want to keep getting deeper into systems, cloud, distributed infrastructure, and software engineering while building things that are actually useful—and occasionally unnecessarily beautiful. Wherever that takes me, I just want future-me to look back and think: damn, we really kept leveling up. ⚡