Aravind Mehta
Engineer & maker Building software that respects your attention Bengaluru, IN
I make small, careful things at the seam of engineering and design. Currently shipping tools for creative teams at a four-person studio in Bengaluru.
Previously: a long stretch at a search company, a shorter one at a hardware startup, and a handful of side projects that quietly took on lives of their own.
More about me- Years building
- 11
- Side projects shipped
- 27
- Coffee this week
- 14
- Words in the queue
- 6
A few things I've made.
Four projects from the last three years. The list is short on purpose — I'd rather talk about three things well than ten things vaguely.
-
Lattice
A writing environment for people who think in long form. Custom editor, a slow-sync engine, and a quiet obsession with where the cursor sits.
-
Quill
A small command-line companion for keeping notes without leaving the terminal.
-
Sift
A tiny utility for diffing JSON without the noise. About 600 bytes gzipped.
-
Field Notes Printer
A pocket-sized thermal printer that prints your day as a single receipt — a year-long experiment in deliberate, physical journaling.
A short version.
I grew up drawing buildings and taking them apart. I still do both, just on a screen now. I'm most useful in the messy middle of a project — the part where the prototype exists but the product hasn't quite shown up yet.
Outside of work I make small things for the joy of it: a font, a mechanical keyboard, a half-finished zine. I read more than I code. I run slowly and badly, mostly on the weekends.
If you're working on something that takes craft seriously and has the patience to ship slowly, I'd love to hear about it.
How I try to work.
Three things I keep coming back to. None of them are original. All of them are easy to forget on a Tuesday afternoon.
-
Small over big.
I'd rather ship one thing a person loves than five things a person tolerates. Small surfaces force you to pick. Picking is the work.
-
Slow over fast.
Most software is built too quickly to be good and too slowly to admit it. I'd rather take a week longer and know the answer, than ship a guess.
-
Care over scale.
Craft compounds quietly. A well-named variable, a generous error message, a blank line where it belongs — these are the things people remember.
Working on
- Lattice 2.0 — moving the editor onto a custom CRDT
- A long-overdue rewrite of this very site
- Type design studies, slowly, in Devanagari
- A zine about cursor design, no kidding
Reading
Listening
Tools I reach for.
- Languages TypeScript, Rust, Python, Go, a little Elixir
- Frontend Vanilla, Svelte, the occasional Tailwind
- Backend Postgres, SQLite, Cloudflare Workers, FastAPI
- Design Figma, Glyphs, paper notebooks, fountain pens
- Hardware Raspberry Pi, mechanical keyboards, a battered oscilloscope
- Editor Neovim, four panes, no mice on weekdays
Selected essays.
I write about once a month. Mostly slow takes on software and craft.
Want to work together,
or just say hello?
I read everything. I reply to most things. I'm a little slow on weekends.