How I got from a site for NBA 2K locker codes to building infrastructure at koderAI, plus life outside of code and what I'm up to now.
I took Telugu classes for years and still couldn’t understand it. Every time the teacher called on me, I’d just stare at the ceiling and hope an answer would show up.
Then I went to India, heard it all day, and picked it up way faster. That always stuck with me. Sometimes when someone is struggling to learn something, it is really just the way it is being taught.
During COVID, a friend and I started building websites for random problems we saw around us. One of the first was nba2k.glitch.me, a site for NBA 2K locker codes.
We posted it on Twitter, made YouTube videos, and it spread by word of mouth. Over a thousand people used it, it got more than 15,000 views, and it even made a little money. That was cool, but what I really liked was seeing random people find something I made and actually use it.
Glitch shut down since then, so the site is gone now, but I still remember how cool it was seeing people actually use it.
My first big competition was FBLA’s state coding and programming event. I’d spent months coding alone and barely practiced presenting. On stage, I froze. The timer kept ticking until the judge finally said, “Dheeraj? Hello?”
The next time, I practiced in front of my friends a lot more until I got comfortable with it, and I ended up winning first at state. Later, I became VP of Competitions and set up study groups and mock presentations so other people in the club would have a way to practice too.
During my district’s internship program, I realized a lot of students had Chromebooks but no internet at home. There were low-cost internet programs out there, but almost nobody knew they existed.
So with a small team and a lot of help from my teacher, Mr. Manning, I built AUHSD Tech Equity: one site with every program on it, in multiple languages. After a year of emails and meetings with the superintendent and CTO, it ended up on all 27,000 district Chromebooks.
When my district rolled out Skrappy, an AI tutor, I got to test it during my internship. It could walk you through an algebra problem, then confidently make stuff up about your own classes and assignments.
I wanted to understand what was actually happening underneath. That is what got me way more interested in computer science.
Around the same time, I was teaching AI basics to kids who were honestly scared of it, and running an AI literacy study in my district. It felt like the same problem from a few different sides. AI tools were showing up really fast, but a lot of people still did not understand how to use them.
I started EC-AI so students without someone showing them where to look could still find extracurriculars. I honestly didn’t know what I was doing. I was scared to even use Git, and I almost gave up more than once.
It ended up getting over 8 million impressions, and once more people started using it, things started breaking. Rebuilding it taught me to think about what happens if 10x more people use something before I choose how to build it.
At UCLA, I co-led a six-person team building Hive, a housing app for students. It was my first time leading a software team, and I realized a lot of it was just communication: making sure everyone knew what we were building, planning around midterms, and letting people work on things they were actually interested in.
At koderAI, I started more on the AI and product side, but I kept wanting to understand how everything worked underneath. None of my projects had ever dealt with real scale, so I moved into infrastructure. Now I work on the systems that deploy and run everything our agents build.
Looking back, a lot of what I’ve done started with noticing something that was not really working for the people using it, whether that was a class, a district, an app, or a codebase. I like figuring out why it is happening and trying to fix it.
And what I care about most is education. It’s everyone’s best shot at changing their world, and as AI becomes part of how people learn, I want to make sure it actually reaches every student.
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