A Developer’s Story – Kunal Bhagawati

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Dev Story: Kunal Bhagawati, Senior SDE @ Zomato, Traveller, Biker, Problem Solver
Kunal Bhagawati, Senior SDE @ Zomato, Traveller, Biker, Problem Solver

Kunal is this curious engineer who finds great joy in solving problems. His story has many mini-stories inside, about how solutions are found by connecting the dots and looking for the big picture.

Kunal’s first tryst with technology

As a kid, he was better at exploring than academics. He loved tinkering with things, looking into how machines worked and repairing everything he could lay his hands on. He loved science fiction and dreamt of playing games on a computer.

One day when he was in 4th standard, his dad bought a desktop PC. The seller had loudly announced, “There are passwords on this and it can’t be hacked”. Kunal knew he had to find a way. He looked for it and found the piece of information that if you take out the battery, all passwords will be reset. He proceeded to accomplish said task and it worked to his extreme delight. He could finally play all the games he wanted. What happened when dad came home makes for another story and his mother just said, “this means that he will do something in tech when he grows up, so let him be”.

Over to him:-

How did you start coding and what do you like about it?

After my battery-changing incident, I didn’t really go into computers besides gaming. My first brush with real code was in high school, building a website using DreamWeaver, seeing the code and playing with it in the editor. Later we studied C++ in 11th standard and we had coding competitions. While it was only one language and not the most welcoming one at that (I know people who have left coding thanks to C++), the exposure was enough to make me understand this is what I want to do in life.

What I love about it is that coding is a way to solve a puzzle. It’s what you do at a micro level or an organisation’s level to solve much bigger, macro puzzles. A way to chart out what you know and what you don’t know, then connecting the dots and solving problems. Coding makes you a habitual puzzle solver. Even managing people, managing a project are all puzzles.

A bit about your coding experience so far?

I studied more coding during my college days, some of it on my own. Our education system doesn’t exactly teach practical coding. So I had stints of dropping out and getting back in.

My first job was at an ops driven startup. There wasn’t much high level development, but eventually I got some learning in databases and scaling.

My second job was the exact opposite. It was at Recruiterbox. I don’t know what ThoughtWorks does to produce great people, but this company had a lot of ex ThoughtWorkers and everything was done the right way. The product was built, the architecture was resilient and immune to failure. The development to be done was over such strong foundations and I felt I was young and now is the time to get thrown in deep waters.

I found THE opportunity with Myra Medicines, which had just started operations and was practically working out of a sofa. The CTO was fixing stuff during the interview, so I knew I had to join here. As the sole backend engineer during the early days, I learnt a lot about what should ideally happen as per the tech we build vs. what really happens on-ground. After 2.5 years at Myra, I moved to Zomato recently, where the challenges are different, and I hope to learn and do something with my learnings so far.

The most interesting tech challenge you have faced

At Myra, the speed of iteration far exceeded the speed of development on any given day for any feature. The challenge was to build or design such that you know something will change by Friday. Here I learnt how to build for flexibility without incurring the cost of flexibility – by assuming that if a feature is frozen, the details are not frozen, by assuming you can never control what happens on the ground and you have to have parallel plans, fail-safes and so on.

Tech you like and dislike

I am biased towards Python. When you use a tool, the more edge cases you have, the more you have to keep in mind when it will work and when it won’t. Edge Cases are handled well in Python. You don’t have to remember a lot – what you think is right, is what Python will most likely have. And if the ultimate goal is simplicity, it’s hard but achievable and will be done well with Python.

I don’t dislike any particular tech, but I dislike using the wrong tool for the job. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of ever-changing tech.

Advice to your younger self

Reverse engineer and build a small prototype instead of building the whole ship. If you already know what exactly you’re building, you can build the big thing right from the start. Otherwise, build small components.

Learn the basic building blocks and not shortcuts.

Read other people’s source code – the only way to know how the world codes.

Don’t get stuck in minute details. Seek the big picture and you’ll suddenly see how to connect the dots and voila, you’ve solved the whole puzzle!

Startup or MNC?

When I was in college, I saw seniors and people I respected succeeding in the startup world. I thought it was the right fit for me from the start. It has been a great experience.

Once you get to a certain level of experience, I believe MNCs are really sensible too – when both you and the company can add real value to each other.

Thoughts on Indian tech industry

India’s capability in tech is super strong. However, while in the West they try to achieve perfection, at one point, development here was mostly ‘jugaad’. We became polished at jugaad. This is both good and bad – we learned to push fast and fail fast. Not chasing perfection right at the start gave us the advantages of it. But jugaad being the default approach and not caring about perfection is dangerous for growth and maturing of the industry. We should practice our way, but with better planning.

Other interests

I have 3 great loves in life – tech, bikes and exploring. The ideal life is when I go on months-long bike ride and remotely work out of cafes and different places the entire trip.


We say he’s got the perfect interests that complement each other. We at Geektrust, thank him for a great story and wish him all the best.

About Geektrust

Geektrust is a platform for technologists to connect with interesting opportunities. We meet inspiring people and companies every day, and we see some great code written by our users. So we started the Dev Stories blog post series recently, to bring stories of different developers to the world. 

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