Forem: Athul Muralidhar

My Tech Journey So Far

Athul Muralidhar — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 07:09:26 +0000

Hi everyone,

I’m Athul Muralidhar, and I’d like to share the story behind my career—a journey that spans my passion for understanding the universe, unexpected detours, and the path that has brought me to where I am today.

A Cosmic Calling

Before diving deep into software and hardware, my eyes were set on the stars. I once aspired to be an astro-particle physicist, driven by the urge to understand the universe. My MS thesis even focused on primordial black holes—a subject that captured the mysteries of our cosmos. While our theories about the universe are vast, we’ve barely stepped outside our own planet. I started pondering these big questions as early as 2018, even though, as an immigrant Indian student in Amsterdam, I had to take whatever work came my way to support myself.

Unplanned Detours and Personal Triumphs

I had plans to transition into a role aligned with my passion by 2020. But then, COVID hit—layoffs, lost savings, and more than a few setbacks. During this turbulent time, I started making games for fun using Rust. Soon, I realized that while Rust is fantastic, its tooling for space and embedded systems was still in its early days. This led me to dive into C, invest in a bunch of STM32 boards, and experiment with side projects that blended C/Rust game development with embedded systems.

In the midst of this mess, I was fortunate enough to find someone who would love me—a pediatrician who is not only smart and beautiful but truly too good to be true. She pushed me toward my goals at a time when I needed it most. Although we were initially separated by thousands of miles—she was in Kerala, India and I was in Amsterdam, NL—her unwavering support inspired me to take a bold step and emigrate back to my Chennai hometown. This personal turn of events eventually led me to apply to Aiden Medical, a company located very close to my new home in Chennai.

Professional Evolution: From Go to Embedded Systems

My career took off when I joined Keana as a Go developer, where I contributed to developing sustainable logistics solutions. This role laid the foundation for my technical growth. Later, I transitioned to Print.com as a Golang/C developer, further honing my skills and tackling real-world challenges with scalable code.

Yet, despite these exciting experiences, my heart was always set on embedded systems. I immersed myself in online courses—learning everything from FreeRTOS to various board support packages and ESP32 programming. This passion culminated in my role at Aiden Medicals, a ventilator manufacturing company where I now get to work on what I love most.

At Aiden Medical: Bringing It All Together

At Aiden Medical, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a range of cutting-edge projects:

Embedded Development: Hands-on work with FreeRTOS, multiple board support packages, and ESP32 programming.
Remote Monitoring Systems: Bringing my web expertise to the table and playing an instrumental role in designing our remote monitoring systems.

I’m excited to share that my probation period is ending on February 26th—a milestone marking the start of an incredible new chapter.

Gratitude and a Message to Dreamers

This year has been nothing short of transformative. Amid the challenges and detours, I’m truly thankful for the happy accidents in life. My journey has taught me that no matter how hard the road gets, chasing your dreams is worth every step. It’s been a tough ride, but I have no regrets. Remember: the universe is our oyster. Chase your dreams, and you'll live a fulfilling life.

If you’d like to follow along or connect, feel free to check out my LinkedIn profile.

Thanks for reading, and here’s to the next chapter!

NOTE edited and updated by chatGPT

To the centre of the galaxy, and beyond...

Athul Muralidhar — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 20:34:28 +0000

I started to make a landing page on one of my outta the world ideas lately. It was so out of the world that I felt that I needed to put it out there in some form or the other. So here is my article on what the project represents, where I want to go with it and eventually be the next iteration of human innovation.

Sagittarus A*

Well this is the name of the Super massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy and it is essentially the end game destination for the project. Imagine if we could send a spacecraft / satellite to this supremely amazing phenomenon. We could for sure learn something or the other about the universe and the nature of reality.

The project is subdivided into various stages which will essentially build towards our end goal. They are:

SpaceCraft
SatCraft
SpaceMarket
Trading guilds
SpaceYards

SpaceCraft

Imagine Minecraft in space, this is essentially SpaceCraft. Being the low threshold first step, we want to use VR to bring human minds to space. Developing a VR game in which people can easily mine objects in the solar system. With this we aim to build a computational equivalent for our solar system.

SatCraft

This is the next step after SpaceCraft and the "hardware" part of the project. After having a computational replica of the solar system within our pockets, we can launch nanosats into our space neighbourhood. We then link the real world sats to our computational solar world and the users can interact in real time with those nanosats. They can mine, explore and actually affect our space, all without taking a journey to space itself.

SpaceMarket, Trading Guilds and SpaceYards

The space market can be the place where miners can trade their goods for money. They can mine some iron from Mars and trade it virtually in the SpaceMarket. They can then be delivered to the buyer, here on Earth.

Sending 3D printers to space, we can in theory create spaceships and other manufacturing tools to space and have shops to sell new models of satellites to miners and maybe also prepare for the eventual exploration of our solar system

Once the SpaceYards program is in place, we can have Trading guilds operate trade routs and markets.

With these three, we would have established an economy in space as well as brought the human mind to space.

check out the project here

The Universal Compiler for Markdown proposal

Athul Muralidhar — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 11:11:38 +0000

we see an increase in markdown as a standard for documentation all over the internet
we already have transpilers, compilers that compile between languages
The leap from existing transpilers to a transpiler from markdown to whatever target language is a matter of time.

Some examples of current use in Markdown can have a computer language like syntax, for ex:

Bash

echo "deadly command"
rm -rf *

you actually type:
backtick backtick backtick bash
your code
backtick backtick backtick

or python

Python

print("have you tried importing this?")
import this

same with python:
backtick backtic backtick python
your code
backtick backtick backtick

So the backticks can actuly identify the target language that the code snippet points to. In that way we can have a meta program that chooses what compiler / interpreter the code snippet should go to

So with such back-ticks followed by language name, we can make one MD file with multiple languages in it. What do you guys think?

The age of Digital Grammar

Athul Muralidhar — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 14:35:50 +0000

With the invention of the internet, one thing became common, the interaction between computers and thereby people increased. These days there is a growing trend of using APIs to interact with computers running different kinds of software to seamlessly deliver a service. It is becoming more of an orchestration between computers rather than a single point service delivery.

Let's take it a step further, what if we codify API response codes into hex values? And these values are specific to every computer? What I mean is this: while the major API methods remain the same, every computer or rather the IP has its little hex digit for itself. This can be random or generated, but remains unchanged and non-transferable. Now imagine again that a group of computers talk to each other with this quirk. We have now successfully invented what in the land of linguistics is called a Pidgin language where all the computers in the group know exactly what this special character means and tries to perform / retrieve the certain action within the group.

Taking it a step further, let us now also have RNNs that are pre-programmed into the group of computers that are interacting with each other. The more a computer uses its specific hex code and the more "attention" it has to using this code to perform a certain operation, the more likely it is to be picked up with the other members of the group. In this way digital language takes shape. One major disadvantage of this way of networking / communication is the loss of control to us, programmers. These networks will essentially become black boxes, albeit faster and perhaps better.

Afterthoughts

the RNNs can be the same number of parameters / variables but with a random distribution of attention for the RNNs in the initial phase.
attention could also be used to reinforce memory much like the human experience, the more successful the codes are, the more likely it is used, and has more attention to it.
the GPT-3 computerphile video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8yVOC4ciXc
as with human beings, there is communication and then action based on the communication. i.e information and action on that information. These are two distinct things. While a computer can memorise (GPT-3 esp.) addition in the memorisation sense, it does not link that with the binary operation, this therefore calls for another approach on top of the GPT to translate from NLP type models or "action" based models. These actions are inherently internal communications and therefore are not needed to be communicated with the outside world, while the results can be.

Developer Responsibility

Athul Muralidhar — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 15:50:07 +0000

I can't believe that I am writing this article, but yes this is happening. I believe that everybody in my community, the dev community is accountable for their code. So we have to have this conversation. Read on

Developers by definition, develop and create products. It is up to us to design new, innovative and sometimes provocative digital products that make the human experience bearable. It all begins with us and eventually ends with us. It is true that we have to have business considerations, but wait, mindless, selfish products from developers can wreck more havoc than the wall street. The grim example of this in our era is Facebook (of course) among many others.

It can coerce people and ultimately have the opposite effect. It can make us hate software. So developers beware, you have the ultimate responsibility. You are in-fact the guardians of the internet and all things digital.

Three case studies

Case 1 - A Dev's story:

The first one (in the near past) to trigger me as a developer was an article by a fellow dev here. He wrote an article about this. Unfortunately, this is not a one-off thing. I do not understand why most of us, despite relying heavily on open source software are less emphatic and tend to move towards logic that is less transparent and complicated. We give more importance to generating revenue, keeping users "in the funnel" and make decisions enforcing this ideology.

I do understand the need to generate revenue, trust me - I did have a failed startup, now an NGO. But I assure you that user trust is a key factor in UX. You have to be as transparent as possible, look at Gitlab for example. All their design decisions are almost available online. In this way, users tend to stay longer, use your products longer and even participate in surveys which will all lead to your product becoming better.

Do not make a product for a year, make it for eternity.

I recently had a similar experience with Stripe. Good luck finding the Delete button or the Disable button for one of my connections. I use Stripe to link to my Medium profile. It took me around 10 mins to figure it out. Yes, I may be dumb or blind or both, but I believe that dumb designs always work. Remind me, how many buttons did the first iPhone have? This again links back to UX, my experience here was less than optimal.

Case 2: Even the big guys do it

I understand why small companies and startups tend to have designs that keep users in by bad (or convoluted) design, but even the big guys do it! why?

Audible

The audible community usually hangs out in reddit. The thread is here. This clearly points out the issues that we as developers must face. This is just us not being responsible enough, even with huge amount of resources that Amazon has.

Google Chrome

Remember how Google got sued for tracking users while using incognito mode? Yes, you promise something and deliver something else. This again leads to loss of trust. The link to the full article from vice here

VS Code

Yes! One of our most favourite editors actually track our behaviours when we code. This link from YCombinator underlines the issue. We are using a product that is "free" but not really

Case 3 - The ML game:

Guys come on! If you are using a data set to train your models, please always assume as a precaution that your data set maybe biased. Technology is not proportionally distributed all over the world. What is normal to you may not be the normal to somebody else.

Define clear limits for your models and be wary of results that are generalised. Further sophistication can be brought about by assuming a very narrow set of things that your model is trying to solve. It is up-to us a developers to do this. The more the generalisation of something, the more likely that the result is biased.

Again, the trend has been to use a single network to solve all the problems of humanity, but we can't have a Hitler AI doing that. Let us then approach the problem as a hierarchy of sub problems. Build up a model which consists of smaller models which in turn focus on parts of the problem. For example, take the problem of facial recognition using an ImageNet. If using the model in the US, divide the problem into a set of ImageNets that cater to each demographic of the population separately. We can then combine them with a weighing mechanism (or NN) to make a more concrete model based on the population that it operates. Let us not over simply our NP problems in the real world and have racist algorithms

John Oliver explains facial recognition its is misuse here

TL;DR

So please, please, please be mindful of the design decisions regarding the super awesome stuff you make and when in doubt almost always choose the more transparent one, as it will last longer (as code), be more usable and even scalable.

This is most definitely a note to self as well

Antai - Anti AI

Athul Muralidhar — Tue, 10 Mar 2020 14:11:48 +0000

Introduction

Welcome to Antai, which is a word that I conveniently made up by mashing Anti and AI. What it is, is basically just that, Anti-AI.

The story begins in the final years of my study. I had moved to Amsterdam and was pursuing an MS in Particle Physics and Cosmology. I was working on my graduate thesis (using python and Golang) when I was introduced into machine learning and the associated problems with it. Suffice to say, mathematics was not one of them.

Many of my classmates were integrating their physics based knowledge to the new kid on the block, ML and designing generative models for neural networks. Thankfully, I got drawn into their discussions with these systems. Most of these discussions had moral and ethical undertones. Some of the questions that came up during those times were:

1) The NN is a black box. We do not really understand each and every aspect of the model, then how can we be sure that things do not go wrong ?
2) If most of the technologies that we use (Pytorch, Tensorflow etc.) are maintained by giant corporations with a profit motive, how can we bring accountability to such technologies?
3) AI and ML is here to stay. How can we make it future proof? and also pave the way for next generation state-of-the-art NN models?
4) How to make ML accessible (safely) to the general public?

My answer to all the above was Antai. The only way we could even think about safely going forward with AI systems is to have a centralised, open source entity to regulate, check and even break AI systems.

Being Open-source brings trust from the users, the ability to break AI systems brings accountability to such systems with the added benefit of knowledge.

Outlook

Currently, the main repo of the project is hosted on Gitlab and the website is on Github. There I explain the various goals of this project.

To make this project viable, usable and accountable, we need more people to work on it, contribute and or complain about our ideals and help us grow into one of the standards of the internet.

To contribute:

the Antai website repo: https://github.com/antai-nl-base/antai-web update the website is down due to lack of usage and resources 😓
the Antai core repo: https://gitlab.com/athulmul/antai

Towards language agnostic programing

Athul Muralidhar — Sun, 09 Feb 2020 20:38:27 +0000

Have you every wondered about the increasing lines of code in everything that we do as developers? This is one such random musings from a fellow developer.

The actual info graphic about the number of lines of code in various everyday products is here.

It is fairly obvious that we will be hitting a critical point sometime in the future.

Handling Complexity

As any of you here know, everything starts off as a single code file with simple model structures, providing the most basic functionality imaginable. With increasing usage, assuming that the product really solves something, we might wanna start adding new features and optimizations to our app. Thus begins the journey of the downward spiral towards increasing complexity.

The are two major problems here. Increasing dependencies in proportion to increasing features and deprecation of all these dependencies.

There is no such thing as "static" code and Static Code == dead code. So it is an inevitable thing these days to build an app with less or no dependencies on external libraries. This sort of "inflation" as time passes is again the problem with current form of development.

There is also a human aspect to this as developers are at the end of the day, humans. And humans change, humans move and humans grow. Apps shift between hands, they move between companies and between use cases.
How to account for all of this?

The solution to all of this maybe be the problem itself. Change and diversity.

Ask yourself how many programming languages do you know at least by name and this number, mind you is mostly greater than the number of actual human languages that we know. Why is this?

It is imperative to state the obvious here. Certain languages were developed for certain reasons. C for instance was developed for running the most basic of programs in the most basic of hardware systems while python is not. C obviously beats python in performance, while python has the lead in readability and usability.

This may also be due to the fact that there are many more developers today than during the Unix days, when a bunch of people were dishing out computer software from a single office or their garages. We have now clearly moved to a community level phase of programming.

With more and more people involved in making one piece of code, readability takes more precedence than performance.

The future of programming

The two most popular languages of the 21st century has to be clearly Python and JavaScript. Two very similar languages, both dynamically typed with ample flexibility and huge community support, built somehow on parallel with the advent of the internet.

What would the successor of these two languages be?

Increasing human interactions with digital technology, the conversation that began in the early 1960s is only going to get much better. The AI aspect of things will also make its way into the realm of hardcore programming.

I predict a language with a neural network as its interpreter which compiles to machine code at its very lowest level. For the embedded people reading this, I mean the Intermediate Representation level. Starting from the base syntax of python or JavaScript or any language of our choosing, the interpreter will modify its behavior as to how you as a programmer will code.

Are you a fan of fat arrow functions from JavaScript? Or are you dunder fanatic who likes to mangle their variables in Python, the new interpreter will optimize your machine code accordingly. This will suite or rather convert code to your personal coding style, so that all the optimization complexity will be taken from your backlog and you can just continue developing or writing code as you please. The more you use this interpreter, the more it will adapt to your style of code.

A simple use case

Let's take JS as an example. Every engine that your JS code uses has an optimization step in it. So for example, when declaring an object with a certain set of attributes, the JS engines (V8, SpiderMonkey etc.) compiles this into a specific object type in machine code. The more you access or call this object, the compiler marks this object as "hot" and tries to optimize on this. So as Franziska points out here it is always best to declare a type and use it consistently.

My question is but why?

If there is a neural network attached to the engine, that records and monitors my coding style, then the compiler can safely optimize based on my coding style.

Maybe I like random object declarations, but do not like function in function calls, or having tons of event listeners. The compiler could take advantage of this and make better, or faster code.

Combined with Web Assembly we could try to make this function all across the web irrespective of computer architecture.

Dev 2020

With the advent of the new decade, I personally as a programmer can't wait to see how the next ten years will unfold. Programming has been exhilarating, empowering and most of all, really fun.

Ever improving hardware prowess and super brainy software developers will surely be taking the torch forward and reaching new heights with digital technology.

And maybe one day the whole world would be just made up of programmers! :)