Hello — नमस्ते — வணக்கம்
I'm Sidharth, welcome to my corner of the interwebs 👋
I'm fascinated by computers, and I've been lucky enough to make a career out of tinkering with them.
Currently I live in the SF Bay Area, and work on Speech @ Google. In my spare time, you can usually find
me either doodling on a page or noodling on a guitar.
I occasionally write stuff on my blog, but more frequently on
Twitter (@sidharth_raja) and Threads (@raja.sidharth).
A timeline of fun projects and life events along the way:
Jul 2023
Pixel
Tablet hits the stores (Hardware launches really hit different!). I helped build the
on-device speech recognition for your Google Assistant queries.
Aug 2022
I started a part-time Master's degree in Computer Science at
Georgia Tech. It's kinda great to be
back to
school again.
Jul 2022
Built
Crafty,
a copywriting assistant right inside Figma. Helps you quickly find "just" the right words for
your product copy.
Jul 2021
Built
PokerX [defunct], a
realtime multiplayer web poker game with video chat. Also, picked up some poker skills while
building this out :) .
Apr 2021
Got 2x COVID vaccines. Thank you Moderna, and thank you science!
Feb 2020
Got word at work that we'd work from home for 2 weeks to wait out this new COVID-19 thingie. Was probably nothing to worry about though...
Jan 2019
Moved to the Bay Area. Go Dubs! 🟦 🟨
Jun 2018
Launched Uber Lite, a lightweight version of the Uber Android app for high latency, low
bandwidth environments and low-end devices. It got more than 10M downloads.
It got covered on
TheVerge,
TechCrunch.
Jan 2018
Had a blast visiting as an "industry collaborator" at iSTEM's hackathon at IIIT-Bangalore. Our
team built out a currency note identification app for INR (which won 3rd place). More
importantly, the experience was a personal eye opener in
designing with accessibility in
mind..
Jan 2018
Worked with Dr. Jeffrey Valla at the National Brain Research Center to build speech therapy
tools for children on the autism spectrum.
Sep 2015
Worked with the Indian Prime Minister's Office, the National Informatics Center and Google to
build a concept mobile app for the PMO.
Our proposals were one of the
top 5 shortlisted across
the country from over 9000 entries.
Jun 2015
Researched patterns in crowd movement at IIIT Delhi.
Feb 2014
Created DTU Maps, a mobile app to map out the entire college campus. Part crowdsourced, part painstaking manual data entry and annotation. (I've been told the OG dataset still lives on in other apps!)
pre
A whirlwind of a time with (school, video games, computers, music, cricket, football,
food, travels) with my wonderful family and friends in my amazing, bustling home city of New
Delhi, India 🇮🇳