Md Hishaam Akhtar

I’m an engineer who loves to build: not just systems that scale, but ideas that question norms and tools that quietly empower.

What I care about most is where code meets compassion. I’m drawn to how technology shapes the way people think and feel, how it might support mental health, and how it can make learning fairer for everyone.

Lately a lot of that has gone into Urdu. I found it through Nusrat and the Sabris and never quite left, and Harf is my way of holding that door open for other people.

Above all, I believe engineering should be inclusive by design: thoughtful, humane, and built to serve those most often left out.

• Hatch

  An email scheduler that doesn’t lose mail

  Schedule an email for an hour from now or years from now, with at-least-once delivery. A timer-wheel scheduler sharded across replicas drops each email onto Kafka when it falls due. Failed sends climb three retry tiers, and a reconciliation job recovers anything a crash left behind.

  Go, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes Code

• Hermes

  Live quizzes, run like a broadcast

  A real-time quiz and polling platform. Organisers build quizzes and run sessions question by question; players join with a code, and the lobby, answers and results update live over WebSockets.

  Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Next.js Website Code

• Nexia

  A digital slambook for your people

  Keep the details about friends and family you’d otherwise forget, like favourite songs, food quirks and old memories, then ask things like “who hates mushrooms?”. The assistant answers from your own notes, and asks before it changes anything.

  Next.js, Hono, pgvector, Vercel AI SDK Website Code

• Stochastick

  Flappy Bird, played on real stock charts

  Pick an NSE stock and a timeframe, and its real price history becomes the level: every candle is a pair of pipes. Crash, and it tells you the date and price that got you. Fully static, with the market data shipped alongside.

  TypeScript, Canvas, Vite Website Code

• Iris

  The shortest path between two Wikipedia pages

  Give it two pages, say Banana and Shah Rukh Khan, and it finds the trail of links between them. A bidirectional search meets in the middle, Redis holds the state, and the path is drawn as a graph you can drag around.

  Python, Flask, Celery, Redis, D3.js Website Code

• Jury Duty

  Many hands, one dataset, no collisions

  A labelling engine for teams annotating one dataset with several raters. It hands out items without collisions and stores every label in Postgres, ready for inter-rater reliability and bias analysis.

  SvelteKit, Supabase, PostgreSQL Website Code

• java2go

  Go, explained in Java

  A guide to Go for people who already know Java. Thirty-one sections, each starting from the Java you know, with idiomatic Go beside it and why Go made a different choice.

  Go, Java Website Code

• Sociocredz

  Give away the points you’ll never spend

  Donate unused loyalty points to NGOs. Built in 24 hours at Access Denied 2.0, where it won.

  Node.js Code

• Keats

  A reading club in your pocket

  An Android app for reading together: clubs, shared annotations, and discussions pinned to the page you’re on.

  Kotlin, Android, Firebase Code

Real-Time Captioning of Sign Language Gestures in Video Meetings

With Sharanya Mukherjee and Dr. R. Kannadasan · Presented at ICCMDE 2021 · arXiv:2507.14543

A browser extension that turns American Sign Language into live captions everyone in a video call can read. A local model, fine-tuned from MobileNetV2 on the WLASL dataset, streams its guesses over a WebSocket to the extension, which draws the subtitles. It reached 63% word-level accuracy with an ordinary webcam: no gloves, no depth sensor.

• What Revisiting a College Project Taught Me About Growth as an Engineer Going back to old code and finding that the bigger change was in how I think. Medium
• Building a Data Lake on Google Cloud Platform How we set up Groww’s data lake on GCP, and why it’s shaped the way it is. Groww Engineering
• Which Backend Stack Should You Learn? A friendly way to choose your first backend stack. GDG VIT

• Hackcraft at Groww, People’s Choice Live translation for Groww’s support chat, so people can ask for help in their own language.
• Access Denied 2.0, winner Sociocredz, built in a 24-hour sprint.
• VIT Hack, finalist A healthcare assistant for Flippr’s sponsored track.
• Udemy instructor A hands-on Node.js course that more than 15,000 people have taken.
• Backend developer, GDSC VIT Core team at Google Developer Student Clubs, VIT. I built backends for Hermes, Iris, Akina and Keats, co-organised WomenTechies and DevJams, co-hosted DevTalks 2021, and helped build the club’s own recruitment platform during the pandemic. Apr 2020 to Dec 2022

• Vellore Institute of Technology B.Tech, Computer Science and Engineering, 2023 · CGPA 9.01 / 10
• Machine Learning Specialization DeepLearning.AI, 2025
• Architecting with Google Compute Engine Google Cloud, 2020
• Graph Search, Shortest Paths & Data Structures Stanford Online, 2020
• Divide & Conquer, Sorting & Randomized Algorithms Stanford Online, 2020
• IELTS Academic, band 8.5 2025 · Listening 9, Reading 9, Writing 7.5, Speaking 8

Email is the best way to reach me. I’m always happy to talk about backend systems, Urdu, or something you’re building for the people who usually get left out.

hishaamakhtar2001.mha@gmail.com