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My First Flight Was to Let Strangers Try a Prototype We Built

Oct 22, 2023 · 2 min read

Open Source India 2023 was my first flight. I flew to Bengaluru to represent Waterdip AI at the NIMHANS Convention Center, and the prototype we demoed over those two days didn't stay a side project for long.

View from the plane window on the way to Bengaluru

We pitched and demoed dcs-core over two days, letting people run it themselves on my laptop against sample datasets. The idea was simple: AI and company growth both run on data quality, and most teams only find out something's wrong after it's already cost them. dcs-core sets metrics teams can monitor and act on before that happens.

Most of the questions were technical: what integrations we supported, how the metrics actually worked, where the infrastructure would sit once someone deployed it for real.

Visitors gathered around the Datachecks booth at Open Source India 2023

Engineering managers and open source leaders stopped by between talks. Getting to pitch to people like Suguru Kawashima and Sanil Kumar D felt like a big deal.

I kept refreshing the repo page on my phone between conversations, watching the star count climb. By the time the booth closed, dcs-core had crossed 100 stars on GitHub, most of them from people who'd tried it at that table an hour earlier. It kept climbing, crossing 150+ within the month. Waterdip AI, the company behind that pitch, is now called Datachecks.

At one point, I overheard our CEO tell someone, "So much passion from these guys." That felt good to hear. It also happened to be my first flight.

Standing at the Open Source India backdrop

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