Abhilash A.

This is the informal version. If you want a neatly formatted resume, just ask.

who

• Full-stack developer based in Trivandrum, Kerala. Freelancing since mid-2024.
• Before that, spent ~1.5 years at Vipula Software — joined as an intern, ended up as lead developer and product architect. The team was small enough that "full-stack" meant front-end, back-end, devops, DB design, architecture, and enough client-facing work to understand what people actually want when they ask for a feature. If there was a job to be done, it got done.
• Before that, IT support at RR Donnelley — hardware installs, day-to-day support, making sure things didn't break. Good grounding. You learn quickly that most problems are simpler than they look.
• B.Tech dropout (University of Kerala, IT, 2017–2021). Currently finishing a BCA at IGNOU.

what i actually do

• Take products from rough idea to something that runs in production. Not just one layer — the whole thing.
• Work best with founders and small teams who need someone who can own a product without needing to be managed across five different specialists.
• Built and launched production systems: a hospital resource management ERP (AMS), an edutech platform, a fundraising site for an NGO, a trading education platform upgrade, and a few other things that are live but not publicly linkable.
• Bring in help when the scope calls for it, but stay accountable for the whole product.

tech opinions (earned, not inherited)

• Started in Angular, moved to React and Next.js. The fundamentals are the same — components, state, data flow. The syntax changes; the thinking doesn't.
• SQL → NoSQL → SQL. Went through the full arc. Started with SQL, got convinced NoSQL was the future, used MongoDB on a few projects, slowly realised I was just fighting schema problems I'd created myself. Back on SQL and haven't looked back. PostgreSQL for most things, SQLite when it makes sense.
• Docker for almost everything that ships. Makes "it works on my machine" a non-issue.
• Switched from VS Code to Neovim as my daily driver. Not because VS Code is bad — it's genuinely excellent — but Electron is a memory hog and I wanted to actually understand my editor. Takes a few weeks to stop being annoyed. Worth it.
• Open source over proprietary tools, where practical. Right tool for the right job otherwise.
• Currently revisiting low-level C/C++, and learning Rust and Go in the gaps. Going back to basics has a way of making everything higher up the stack make more sense.

outside work

• MTB freestyle — wheelies, stoppies, manuals, nose manuals, and whatever else I can convince the bike to do. Not just riding; the trick side of it.
• Anime and manga. Japanese culture in general — language, traditions, the whole thing.
• Rubik's cubes. Several of them, to varying degrees of competence.
• Movies, film, visual storytelling. I pay attention to how things are made.
• Touch typing — learned out of necessity, now at around 70–90 wpm. Previously a look-and-type person for longer than I'd like to admit.
• If the job market keeps going the way it's going, I may seriously consider farming. The soil doesn't have breaking changes.

misc

• Languages: Malayalam (native), English (professional), Hindi and Tamil (conversational).
• GitHub: available on request
• LinkedIn: abhilash-anil
• The domain name is a nickname — 魚脳 is Japanese, means roughly what you'd expect if you looked it up. It's not the point; it's just the URL.

experience