ash1794About
Who I am as a person. The work is here, and so is everything around it that explains why I do the work.
Beliefs
- Chase excellence, not accolades. The ratings follow.
- Earn your breaks. Put in the work so the rest is yours, because the breaks are what keep you running.
- Wait for the obsession. Don’t take on a hobby until it grabs you. If nothing does yet, keep trying things.
- College is for failing. Fail cheaply and often there, so the real world isn’t where you fail first.
- People are good. Look at the potential a student holds, not what they’re doing today.
- Zero-sum ended at JEE. The world is competitive; you can choose not to be. Compare against yourself.
- If you’re not learning, it isn’t worth it yet. Learning never stops.
Chapters
Short bio
Ashwin Krish is an engineer with nearly a decade building scalable systems in AdTech and FinTech. As Director of Academics at Newton School of Technology, Bangalore, he leads curriculum design, pedagogy and student outcomes for an undergraduate computer science programme. He approaches education as an engineering problem: measure, iterate, ship and compound. His work focuses on how instructors teach and what computer science education needs to become as AI changes what it means to know how to code.
Ashwin Krish is Director of Academics at Newton School of Technology, Bangalore, where he leads curriculum design, pedagogy and student outcomes for an undergraduate computer science programme. An engineer with nearly a decade building scalable systems in AdTech and FinTech, he approaches education as an engineering problem: measure, iterate, ship and compound. His work focuses on how instructors teach and what computer science education needs to become as AI changes what it means to know how to code.
Now
Work
Director of Academics at Newton School of Technology, Bangalore.
A public Claude Code plugin whose skills make coding agents show evidence before they claim “done”.
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Peter C. Brown; The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, Daniel Coyle
The work
About a decade building scalable systems in AdTech and FinTech (latency-sensitive APIs, ML pipelines, queue-based microservices). Then I asked a harder question: what happens when the people building these systems aren’t taught to think like engineers in the first place?
Now I design interventions the way you’d design systems: measure, iterate, ship, compound.
That means building evidence-based pedagogy into how instructors teach, not just what they teach. It means designing academic interventions with the same rigor you’d bring to debugging a production system. And it means asking what CS education needs to become when AI is reshaping what “knowing how to code” even means.
Still an engineer. Just building a different kind of system now.
Beyond the work, and the work
Engineering
- About a decade in industry, from a 2015 internship to July 2024.
- At CRED I led the engineering team behind the communications platform.
- At Media.net I also designed the data-structures interview rounds.
Teaching
- At Newton School of Technology in Bangalore since January 2025.
- Beyond the campus: a trainer at an IOI bootcamp alongside six ICPC World Finalists, and coordinator of India’s first official OCPC mirror camp.
- A video on the maximum-sum sub-array for mycodeschool, recorded during a college internship. People still comment on it.
Competitive programming
- ICPC World Finals 2015, Marrakech, for Amrita.
- How to start: a guide in five phases, for the next kid.
- Every contest from 2012 to 2016, on the record.
Poems and writing
- Poems since the 2011 blog, the last cluster written through the 2021 lockdown.
- From 2016 they lived in a Notion notebook.
- The first blog, “The Kid with the Blue T-Shirt”, from 2011 to 2015.
May these pages help you jump down the rabbit hole,
Getting lost in a time so old, so different.
Reading
Favourites: 1984, The Algorithm Design Manual, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage, The A.B.C. Murders.
- 53 books read and rated on Goodreads.
- General Magic, film. The one film I logged and rated. Finished, five stars.
- Conquering the Mind, Kapil Gupta, essay. Finished, five stars. My note to myself: “Come back to it when you want to know how to think.”
Games
- Gaming is how I started: Road Rash in 2004, then coaxing an old graphics card to work, then my own gaming PC and a PS5.
Learning
- Games, and Linux, since 7th grade.
- Following AI since GPT-2 in 2019; building with agents since December 2025.
And more
- Born in Mumbai, raised in Thrissur. College at Amritapuri in Kerala, the Media.net years in Mumbai, a COVID year back in Kerala, and Bangalore since 2021. I speak Malayalam, English, Tamil and Hindi; my old profile also lists Japanese.
- Treks in Kerala and Himachal Pradesh, from 2016 to 2022.
- “Mallu. Traveller. Tamil. Coder. Cook. Geek. Maybe a Wierdo. Definitely Crazy. :) Happy.” My Facebook bio.
1994 to 2026
Six threads across the same years. On a phone, the chart scrolls sideways.
Teaching ran beside every other lane from 2013, more than a decade before it was the job.
Roots & Linux
Competitive programming
Industry
Teaching
Writing
Agents
at once
Six lanes across the same years: roots and Linux, competitive programming, industry, teaching and coaching, writing, and agents. Teaching runs from 2013; industry from 2015 to 2024; agents from late 2025.
Talks and sessions
3 more
Training new joiners at Media.net