I'm Dhanay Patil, an electronics and communication engineering undergraduate at BIT Mesra, now in my final year. This site is my engineering journal: a dated record of the systems I build and of working my way down the stack — software today, silicon ahead.
Where it started
I started where many developers start: by cloning Airbnb. Not because the world needed another one — I wanted to see how a frontend talks to a backend. The project taught me routing, databases, and authentication, and then it did something more useful: it produced a question I couldn't answer. What happens when two people book the same room at the same instant? I didn't know. Finding out pulled me into transactions, concurrency, and system design, and I never really came back.
Freelancing made it real. I built the backend of an educational platform with realtime multiplayer games — chess, a multiplayer snake, a memory game — and for the first time my code had users I would never meet and teammates whose work broke when mine did. Git stopped being a formality. WebSockets stopped being a tutorial topic. Somewhere in that project I learned the difference between writing programs and doing engineering.
Systems of people
At BIT Mesra I kept ending up where software meets people. In my second year I led a team of five juniors in the aeronautical society: we built a forward-swept-wing drone from foam, ESP boards, and ESCs, and ours was the first of seven teams that season to fly. Later, as Technical Director of 180 Degrees Consulting, I worked with real clients running real organizations, and learned that delivering clearly is a harder skill than coding well. Teaching workshops — backend development, Arduino, ESP32 — taught me the fastest test of understanding a system: try explaining it.
Down the stack
I kept hardware deliberately for my pre-final year, and it became the year that changed my direction. Under a professor, I worked on the electrical front end of an emergency SOS wearable for miners in remote regions — an A2D converter bridge and booster circuit for a piezoelectric harvester that turns the motion of working hands into power. That work is now a paper under review. In parallel I'm building an ESP32-based safety wearable (GSR, heart rate, SpO₂), and as a research intern at COEP I'm writing verification IP for the AMBA CHI Home Node — my first real step into digital design.
Where this is going
Today I'm digitizing Vrajatiyans, a travel business that runs almost entirely on WhatsApp, phone calls, and trust — in three deliberate stages, so the technology improves the business without disrupting the people it depends on.
Tomorrow, further down: embedded systems, digital design, computer architecture, and eventually silicon. I don't see these as different careers — they're different layers of the same system. This journal is the dated record of moving through them.