About
I'm Akash Vaghela, a full-stack engineer based in Jamnagar, Gujarat.
I started with a Chemical Engineering degree, a strong academic record, and a final-year project that received funding from the Gujarat government's Student Startup and Innovation Policy (SSIP). But I realized early that it wasn't the direction I wanted my career to go. So I trusted that instinct, switched paths after graduation, and joined Masai School to learn software development.
That decision led to five years of building things across startups and enterprises. I started at Capgemini, working with a global team on internal tools for P&G. Then came a run of startup roles, founding engineer stints, zero-to-one builds, direct customer interaction, each one pushing me into unfamiliar territory and making me a better engineer for it. Along the way I've tripled product activation rates with AI-powered onboarding, shipped real-time WebSocket dashboards, and independently launched two monetized products that are live today.
Most of that work has been in the MERN stack. But I'm now deliberately expanding into Rust and the Solana ecosystem. It's early days. I'm learning, getting involved in communities, and building toward a longer-term interest in systems programming and on-chain development. The transition feels right, for the same reason the original career switch did.
Outside of work, I read a lot. Tech, fiction, philosophy, no particular loyalty to genre. A few books that have genuinely shaped how I think: Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, and Animal Farm by George Orwell. I also watch a lot of films, particularly science fiction, and find myself paying attention to the craft, the shot selection, the sound design, how a story is constructed.