Kailash Nadh

Kailash Nadh is a hobbyist software developer and a relentless tinkerer. He began his journey with programming in 2000 after unexpectedly acquiring a personal computer, diving into Perl and VB6. Since then, he has continued to explore and build, eventually releasing his first major FOSS project in 2002, a blogging platform called bMachine. These days, he primarily writes programs in Go, and some of his personal projects are publicly available.

For a brief time, Kailash was in academia. He earned a BSc in Computer Science in 2008 and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics in 2011, both from Middlesex University, London.

In 2013, he started the technology team at Zerodha, which has grown to become India’s largest stock broker. He has served as the CTO since then, leading a small, unconventional team focused on building meaningful financial technology.

Kailash is also an active volunteer and co-founder at several non-profit organizations. He helped launch FOSS United Foundation in 2020 to promote Free and Open Source Software in India. In the same year, he co-founded Rainmatter Foundation to support ecological and climate change initiatives. In 2022, he co-founded Indic Digital Archive Foundation to advance Indic language computing and preserve cultural artifacts. In 2023, he helped establish Samagata Foundation to support projects at the intersection of science, culture, art, technology, and education with a focus on public commons and community spaces.

His worldview is shaped by absurdism. Though he holds a bleak perspective on the future due to climate change, ecological destruction, and social divisions, he remains engaged and productive. He does not view himself as a pessimist but rather as someone grounded in reality, guided by curiosity and a deep sense of purpose.

Kailash’s personal website, which has existed since 2001, is a tribute to his early days on the web. It has migrated across F2S, Angelfire, Geocities, Netfirms, and other now-defunct free hosts. He keeps it online as a nostalgic marker of his formative years spent learning, connecting, and experimenting online.

He considers himself fortunate to spend each day doing what he has unconditionally loved for over 25 years—writing software and pursuing the joy of experimentation.