I’m Shobhit, also known as @Sinister_Light on Twitter. I write about software, management and life. I would love to hear from you at me[at]sinisterlight.com.

Currently, I am the co-founder and CEO of shovel.company - building tools for internet infrastructure. We are solving problems around Digital identity and working towards building a new protocols necessary for the modern world.

I started my first company in 2013, building a product called “Vocall”, a WebRTC based video conferencing software, which went bust quickly within a year. I consequently started “CodeIgnition”, a frontier DevOps startup with cofounders Ajey, Mehak, Sumit & Shraddha.

In 2015, we exited CodeIgnition to Gojek - where I was SVP Product Engineering, running the Transport vertical and managing the CTO office. Gojek eventually IPOed at $28B. Shovel is my third startup, one I started after leaving Gojek in September 2020 with Rishi and Prashant.

I am deeply passionate about the future and technology. Complex networks and distributed systems are favourite topics I am constantly learning about. I love to work on data primitives and designed databases like GossipDB - a gossip replication based embedded key-value store. While at Gojek, I architected Ziggurat - stream processing engine in clojure - which runs 100s applications within Gojek. I have been a co-author of the CNCF Observability white-paper and organise DevOpsDays India.

I care a lot about education as it empowers us to change our place in the world. Formal education is a place where kids get their first exposure to this shovel as a first-class system. I am involved in education through various initiatives - as a board member of Marudhara Foundation, IIT Jodhpur (my alma mater) and designing curriculum for 21st century schools for the state government of New Delhi, India.

Small video about me while I was at Gojek.