stultus
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Hrishikesh Bhaskaran

Developer / Flâneur / Storyteller

Hrishikesh Bhaskaran

I’m Hrishikesh Bhaskaran. I work as the Vice President of Engineering at Entri, a Kochi-based ed-tech startup. I joined as a product engineer and grew with the company over the years. These days my work sits at the intersection of engineering strategy, system architecture, and team building: deciding what to build, how to build it, and making sure the right people are working on the right problems.

Most of my energy goes into organizational design, matching team boundaries to system boundaries so people can move fast without stepping on each other. I think a lot about build-vs-buy tradeoffs, managing technical debt as a portfolio rather than a backlog, and integrating AI into products without chasing hype. The goal is always the same: create conditions where good engineering decisions happen without me in the room.

Before the meetings took over, I was writing code full-time. I still do when I can.

Free software & language computing

I’ve been involved with the free and open source software community for over a decade. I currently contribute to the PeARS Project, a community effort to build a distributed search engine that respects user privacy. Decentralized systems, language computing, and privacy are the threads that keep pulling me back to FOSS.

I got my start through Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, a community that builds language computing tools for Malayalam (input methods, fonts, spell checkers, and more) used by millions of people today. I was an active member and served as Secretary at one point. Through SMC, I got to collaborate with Mozilla, Wikimedia, KITE, SCERT, and ICFOSS on open source adoption and digital literacy in Kerala.

Screenwriting

I contributed the additional screenplay for the 2023 Malayalam film Neelavelicham, directed by Aashiq Abu. An adaptation of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s classic story that I grew up with.

Other things

I was one of the architects of the ICU movement, a socio-cultural expression platform of Kerala’s youth.

I occasionally do college sessions and TV discussions on technology and its societal impact.

Find me

The handle “stultus” is Latin for stupid. I liked the sound of it.