I cleared the exam. I cleared the medical. Then a piece of paper stopped me.

It was 2016-17, right after my 12th. I had passed the Navy exam and cleared the medical. Then came document verification, and they rejected my Scout and Guide certificate. I had earned it over three to four years of training and camps. But it was a physical paper with no tracking, and nobody could verify it.

That dream ended in one room. I’ll come back to it, because it explains a lot about me. First, let me go back to the start.

A village, a father, and one piece of advice

I come from a small village in Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh. I finished school with limited resources, and we all know what schools in villages are like. I wanted to join the defence forces, any of them, which is why that rejection hurt so much.

After school, I moved to Lovely Professional University in Punjab. It was a sudden jump from a village to a city. Neither I nor my family knew what design was. My father asked around, and everyone told him the same thing: “Bete ko computer science padhao.” So I took Information Technology.

I made the most of it. I joined entrepreneurship activities and hackathons, and I learned something new every time. I was a boy from a village who had suddenly been given a wider world, and I wanted to learn all of it.

A job I was good at but didn’t love

I joined Virtusa in April 2020 as a technology intern, and became full time on 16 June 2021. I could write code, but I didn’t enjoy it. It felt like I was just talking to a machine.

This wasn’t the first time something hadn’t fit. I’d worked at a startup called SwiftLearn, calling parents to enroll their children, and left after three or four months because I felt I was selling a lie. I’d started a blog website but didn’t know how to write for it. Along the way, I found UI/UX design. I learned Figma and built redesign case studies because that’s what the courses told me to do.

After placement, I picked design up again, and this time it felt different. I wasn’t only making screens. I understood why a design was made a certain way and why it helped the user. I was growing every day, and I was no longer talking to a machine.

The email I’ll never forget

So I took a risk. Virtusa had an internal role-change process, and it wasn’t easy: two test rounds, then an interview with the segment head. If they liked my performance, they would start moving me from my current role into design.

Then the email came. It said congratulations, and that based on the feedback, my transition from Frontend Developer to Associate Consultant (UX Designer) was starting. That email changed everything.

Nearly five years of enterprise design

At Virtusa, I worked with many global enterprise clients, including Fortune 500 companies, across healthcare, insurance, BFSI and telecom. I was recognised as a Top Performer twice, and received the Highflyer Award and the Titans Award for Consulting Design.

The work I’m proudest of there is Velocity. Every new proof of concept started from a blank file and the same debates about buttons. So I led an initiative to fix it, and designed a system of 40+ production-ready components. Once teams could pull from one source, enterprise proof-of-concept delivery time dropped by 60%, and the system was adopted across BFSI, healthcare, telecom and insurance.

Back to the certificate

In January 2026, I started building CertPie. You can try it live at certpie.com (opens in new tab).

It wasn’t a random idea. The pain from that rejection never left me. I had cleared my exam and my medical, and lost the opportunity only because no one could verify a certificate. Years later, with a skill and some resources, I thought: why not build something for people who face the same problem?

It didn’t start smoothly. The first name was CertAura, and the domain got suspended over incorrect information. I reached out to the authority and got no reply. So I bought a new domain, renamed the whole idea CertPie, and kept going.

Today, more than 140 users have used it and over 2,000 certificates have been generated. The numbers are small, but they’re real, and I never looked back.

Building with AI as my engineering partner

CertPie wasn’t my only build. I made HeuristiCheck and a few other tools, each for a small pain point I kept noticing. You can find them all on the AI page.

Even this portfolio was built by me, directed by me, with AI as my engineering partner. I don’t enjoy sitting and writing code. I enjoy deciding what should exist, and why.

How I think about design

Design is subjective. What looks good to you may not look good to someone else. But when I say “good,” I don’t mean visual. I mean whether the product solves a real problem for a real user.

So I start with the problem. Why are these users facing it? Is there already a solution? If so, why aren’t they using it? Once I have those answers, I feel I have 80% of the work in my hands. The rest is turning those insights into design.

Creating things is cheap now. So I believe three things matter more than ever: empathy, trust and validation. Understand the user, understand the problem from its core, and keep validating your design.

What I’m doing now

Since April 2026, I’ve been a Senior UX Designer at HCL Software, working on HCL Hive, an intelligent full-stack observability platform. I work with product managers, developers, testers, a scrum master and stakeholders. Most of my day is talking to people and users, understanding requirements, and going deep until we build something that solves the problem.

Outside work

When I’m not designing, I’m usually playing cricket, building something new, or improving what I’ve already built. I also love exploring new AI models and their use cases.

If you’re working on a problem where design and building need to be one conversation, I’d like to hear about it.