Over 48+ hours in December 2025, my team worked through system design, dashboards and flows, UI and logic, and pitch prep to bring STROT — a hackathon project aimed at breaking the cycle of generational poverty through what we called "BAL. BUDDHI. VIDYA." — to life.
What building in public actually captures
Not a demo, not a pitch — code flying, designs changing, logic breaking and getting fixed, all while the clock keeps ticking. The moments worth sharing are the grind, not the polished five-minute version of it.
The reminder that stuck
Products aren't born in slides. They're forged in late nights, debates and lines of code — and that's true whether the hackathon ends in a trophy or, as this one did, in a lesson about pitching instead.
Where this started
GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).
Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.
