Builder, Breaker, Maintainer
VP Engineering at Freemius, product-focused engineer working across web platforms, system architecture, developer tooling, and practical AI systems.
I’m Swas, a product-focused engineer who likes building useful things with calm systems behind them.
I’ve been tinkering, building, and breaking things on the web for more than 15 years — from creating my own WordPress products to now leading engineering at Freemius. What still drives me is not just code, but helping makers turn ideas into something real, sustainable, and used by people every day.
I started deep in the WordPress ecosystem, building themes, plugins, and commercial products. I founded WPQuark WebTech Private Limited, built products like eForm, and spent years working with PHP, MySQL, jQuery, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, WordPress APIs, and the many edge cases that come with software running on real customer sites.
That background still shapes how I think about engineering. Software should be understandable, extensible, operationally boring, and friendly to the people who need to use it, support it, and change it later.
These days my work sits across product engineering, system architecture, web platforms, developer experience, and engineering leadership. At Freemius, I help build and scale systems for makers who sell software products — balancing correctness, maintainability, customer needs, and business constraints.
I still enjoy being close to the code, but I no longer think engineering is only about writing code. A lot of the work is deciding what not to build, simplifying the shape of a system, creating better defaults, and making product decisions that age well.
Lately, I’ve also been exploring advanced AI systems — especially tool-calling, MCPs, RAG, and AI-assisted workflows that go beyond simple API wrappers. I’m interested in AI when it becomes a useful product capability, not just a demo.
This site is my personal notebook for ideas that deserve more than a thread and less than a book.
What I’m Good At
- Product engineering and architecture.
- Engineering leadership and execution.
- Web platforms and frontend systems.
- Developer tooling and build workflows.
- WordPress product development.
- Practical AI systems and AI-assisted engineering.
- Maker-focused software businesses.
Technology Stack
I am not strongly bound to any particular technology stack. Over the years I have worked with PHP, Node.js, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, React, Astro, WordPress, and a fair amount of glue code between all of them.
I do have a few favorites:
- TypeScript — my preferred language for both frontend and backend work.
- React — my usual choice for building interactive UIs.
- PHP — still close to home, especially because of my WordPress background.
- PostgreSQL — the database I tend to reach for when I get to choose.
But at this stage, I care less about the logo on the stack and more about whether the system is understandable, maintainable, and fit for the product.
Languages and frameworks change. The core work stays mostly the same: model the problem well, make sensible trade-offs, keep the system easy to reason about, and ship something useful.
As long as it can talk to computers, I can probably find my way around it.