Hi, I’m Abhishek. I’ve been arguing with browsers for 16 years.
Not literally every day — but close enough. I’m currently a Vice President at Morgan Stanley, which sounds a lot more serious than it feels from the inside, where I’m mostly still the guy who gets a little too excited about a clean component API.
Here’s how I got here.
The postback years (2010–2013, TCS)
I cut my teeth on ASP.NET Web Forms, which — if you’re too young to have suffered through it — was basically the web pretending to be a desktop app. Viewstate, postbacks, Crystal Reports for anything that needed to look official. It wasn’t glamorous, but it forced me to actually understand what happens between a click and a rendered page, instead of trusting a framework to hide it from me. I also picked up the unglamorous backend plumbing here — C#, dependency injection, a rotating cast of ORMs (Massive, Fluent NHibernate) — the stuff nobody puts on a highlight reel but that holds enterprise software together.
The “wait, this is for people” years (2013–2016, Deloitte)
Then I moved to Deloitte and started building government systems — eligibility platforms for health benefits, child welfare case tracking, retirement systems for state employees. This is where “ship it and see” stopped being an option. When your bug means someone’s benefits get miscalculated, you learn to care about correctness in a very different way. I was gluing together WCF services, a business rules engine called Corticon, SQL Server, and more SSRS reports than I’d like to admit — but the real lesson was that boring, reliable code is a feature, not a compromise.
Falling for the browser (also around here)
Somewhere in the Deloitte years I got properly obsessed with HTML and CSS — like, “why does this div do that” obsessed. jQuery and AJAX first, then the pull toward single-page apps got too strong to ignore. Angular came next, then NgRx for state management once “just a service and some RxJS” stopped cutting it. React followed, and it clicked in a way Angular never quite did — probably because by then I’d already made most of the mistakes once.
Money, at scale (2016–now, Morgan Stanley)
I joined Morgan Stanley in 2016 as a developer and I’m now a VP, which happened via Manager and Senior Manager in between — nobody skips that queue. Along the way the problems got bigger and weirder:
- A platform serving up close to 400 different data points across equities, mutual funds, ETFs, annuities, and more — all needing to look consistent even though the underlying data very much was not.
- A service that had to return security pricing data in under 400 milliseconds, reliably, while handling 500,000 transactions a day. Turns out “fast” and “correct” fight each other more than you’d think.
- A quick-search micro-frontend, built in StencilJS, designed to be dropped into any app across the firm without anyone needing to know or care what it’s built in. That’s the kind of problem I like now — not “can I build this feature” but “can I build this so ten other teams don’t have to.”
These days I spend as much time in planning meetings and 1:1s as I do in a codebase — which past-me would’ve found suspicious, and current-me has made peace with. Leading a squad well turns out to be its own kind of hard problem, and I like hard problems.
The stack, if you’re into that sort of thing
ASP.NET (Web Forms → MVC → Web API → Core) · C# · WCF · SQL Server · Entity Framework / LINQ · HTML/CSS/JS · jQuery · Angular + NgRx · React · Node.js · StencilJS · Crystal Reports / SSRS
Why I still show up
If you’d told 2010-me that “the web” would go from Viewstate to Web Components in sixteen years, I’d have believed you and been mildly terrified. That’s the whole appeal, honestly. The stack changes, the constraints change, and every few years I get to feel like a beginner again on purpose. Sailors don’t complain about the ocean moving — that’s kind of the point.
