About

In a Nutshell

I’m a hacker, writer, designer, scientist and engineer (not necessarily in that order and in varying proportions each day). I’m currently a graduate student in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. Previously I’ve worked at GrammaTech Inc on their static analysis tools and at Virginia Tech as part of the Prolangs research group.

Interests

For the last few years my interests have been centering around languages. I’m deeply fascinated by human languages and programming languages and slowly branching into mathematical and visual languages. I’m interested in the way we use them to communicate and build structures of knowledge and information.

I’ve also been experimenting with technology as an expressive tool. In between programming languages, computational art, short fiction, poetry and web design, I’m slowly figuring out just what it is we’re all trying to tell each other and how to make the process better.

I try not to keep my various interests separate. I believe the most interesting things happen at intersections and edges. Specialization is for insects, but all generalists need a specialty. If you find that condusing, don’t worry, I’m still trying to figure this all out myself. But above all, I’m trying to have a good time doing it all.

Mundane details

I graduated Magna Cum Laude from Lafayette College in 2011 with degrees in Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. That’s a fancy way of saying I may have spent too much studying in the engineering building and not enough time outdoors.

I’m trying to rectify that by going to graduate school at Cornell University, located in Ithaca, NY which seems to have an unusually high proportion of outdoorsy types.

I’m originally from Calcutta, India where I went to school at St. Xavier’s Collegiate School, a place which has changed a lot since I left. Nowadays I mostly start by telling people I’m from Pennsylvania, which is partially true. Think of it as a social experiment.

If you’re interested in anything I just said you might want to check out my resume.

Contact

If you would like to contact me, please send email to me(AT)basus.me. I generally reply within a day or two, but if you have something more involved (or I’m busy) it may take longer. You should also follow @basus on Twitter. I don’t like phones all that much.

Colophon

This website is hosted on an Arch Linux VPS by the Linode hosting service. Pages are (mostly) static HTML5 and CSS and served by the Nginx web server. The fonts used are Droid Serif for the main text and headings, Graublau Web for subheadings and the navigation bar. Droid Sans is occasionally used.

Almost all text was authored in the Emacs text editor on a Linux machine (various distributions over time). I use a combination of straight HTML and Markdown processed by Jekyll to create the final, web-ready version of the site. Some pages (especially the stories) were converted from equivalent LaTeX files.