migrations i actually finished
old layouts retired in stages, legacy bridges removed slowly, and newer language features adopted only where they helped. nothing here was a rewrite.
~/aravind $ whoami
aravind p unnithan
ios engineer in thiruvananthapuram. i build software for a living and read older philosophy because i cannot help it.
[00] about
i grew up in kerala and still live here. the place i come from is mostly paddy and palm, with backwaters on one side and the arabian sea on the other. now i live a few hours south. malayalam is my first language; english is the one i work in.
software at work, mostly mobile. ieee for what i can give back. a slow interest in what technology is doing to the lives it touches.
i am wary of efficiency that has forgotten what it is for.
[01] practice
the paid work is mostly swift, with the long tail of platform changes that arrives every september. several years on the same codebase teach you patience with how slowly real systems change.
i try to pay attention to what is in front of me, write things down so other people do not have to guess, and avoid shipping fixes i do not understand.
[02] community
vice chair, ieee ssit kerala chapter. organizing secretary for istas 2026, the ieee international symposium on technology and society, which we are bringing to kovalam. ssit (the society on social implications of technology) is the corner of ieee i find most alive, because it insists on asking what for and at what cost before it asks how.
i mentor and judge for student programs, run occasional sessions on prompt engineering and ai literacy for undergraduates, and help organize hackathons when someone with energy and a venue appears.
[03] now
last updated · may 2026
- shipping a small release at work; the focus this cycle is reliability
- drafting the istas 2026 call for papers and shortlisting keynotes
- learning a little rust on weekends, with no commercial reason for it
- trying to keep three plants alive on a balcony in trivandrum
now reading
- mitch albom, tuesdays with morrie
- balachandran chullikkad, chidambarasmarana
- arundhati roy, mother mary comes to me
the format of this page comes from derek sivers, who has been making the case for a long time that personal sites should have one.
[04] work, in notes
notes from inside the work, not a portfolio.
small things i return to
a few git hooks, a script that finds the slow tests in a target, and a markdown notebook in vim i have kept up for years.
small tools online
browser tools i made for myself and left running.
[05] writing
what i write, in whatever form it takes. some lives here, some elsewhere.
may 2026 · inapp blog
when the app touches vulnerable people: what developers must understand before writing the first line of code
[06] elsewhere
i prefer conversations to meetings. write if you would like to. i answer most letters.