Hi, I'm Shivani. I'm a backend developer and a vagabond on the internet. I play basketball for the love of the game. I am always sidequestmaxxing in my own ways! I started doing digital art recently. Eureka moments are my favourite! and i want to spread them to others too!
After I got my own laptop, here are the things I've been doing -
April 2025 — school ended, got my first laptop. built Beasty: custom HTTP server from raw TCP sockets.
July 2025 — ran Intro to Backend with Express and How to deploy websites at Hack Club's Athena event.
Aug – Sept 2025 — moved to Pune alone for two months. hiked. figured things out. did adventure.
Oct 2025 — shipped a freeCodeCamp course. 200k+ views.
Nov – Jan 2026 — first hackathon. Co-hosted this AMA on Athenaeum. then OSS all winter — PostHog, Grafana.
Feb – Apr 2026 — led 9 devs through freecodecamp's spring cohort, shipping teal-iris. became CFG's India ambassador.
robots fascinate me.
In the end, it's all just warm sunlight.
Airly
A full-stack social media platform built with React, Node.js, and MongoDB.
Building Airly taught me how to design scalable APIs, implement real-time social features, and balance user experience with backend performance. My main focus in this project was to build a smooth and fast backend.
My course on freeCodeCamp!
I created a full-length video tutorial on “Intro to Backend Web Development” which got uploaded on the world’s largest coding YouTube channel, freeCodeCamp!
Secure Edge Device Manager
This project was made during a Hackathon on their problem statement!
A lightweight web platform to remotely monitor and manage simulated edge devices (like Raspberry Pis, Linux Alpine VM) over SSH.
Track real-time system metrics through WebSocket-to-SSH bridge, online/offline health, network speeds, error logs, and enable live SSH sessions — all in one secure dashboard.
beasty
A custom HTTP server written from scratch using raw TCP sockets.
building beasty taught me low-level networking, rate-limiting at multiple levels, gzip compression, and the art of connecting multiple backends. Some projects really wake you up in the morning to work on them all day!
ku-lang
A one-dimensional esoteric programming language.
building ku-lang taught me the process of designing syntax, implementing a parser, and creating an interpreter. It's one thing to use a language, but quite another to understand how it thinks.
Some days back I bought a stylus for the first time and started to draw dragons and backgrounds for my first illustrated website. I have had an iPad for over two years now, but I never thought I'd be able to do this kind of thing.
When I was prototyping the website from the first page to the last I got a Eureka. On the last page I had to draw a dragon with fire coming out of his mouth. I picked red for the fire, then orange, and slid the orange alongside the red, just below it, so they would blend and a good effect would come up.
I was totally mesmerised watching how the two colors mixed, like some kind of ASMR. I'll be honest: in the real world I could never mix colors so neatly; there would always be a hard line between them. This time I could finally feel that yeah, they do mix, and they look good.
It may be a simple thing for some people, but that was the moment I truly fell in love with the fact that I should try everything in this world. Who knows what I'd love and what would make me feel alive.
That experience changed my life, because now I can say that yes, I can do art not mainly for the final piece turning out “good,” but for the love of it. It made me feel something: at 3 AM this happened, and I was so into it.
This page is under construction, guys! I'll be writing this piece with more detail and backstory, plus other eureka moments. This one is the most recent. I had to start somewhere, so I started writing, because if I wait for perfection, I'll forget the real me and my experiences with time :)