Choosing a name for this blog was no easy task—every option seemed to capture a different piece of who Raj was. After much thought, 'Code to Curiosity' felt like the perfect reflection of Raj's work: the brilliant coder whose boundless curiosity kept us all on our toes. Though his passing was one of the saddest moments in our lives, I want this to be a highlights package of the remarkable journey we shared with him. Raj's life was filled with brilliant work and infectious curiosity, and I hope to leave behind lasting memories of our time together.
The first time we knew this boy was special was when he contributed to this paper - https://worldcomp-proceedings.com/proc/p2015/SAM9762.pdf. At Cognizant we had what was called the Global Technology Office, that came up with these 'paper ideas' and those of us running respective Businesses (we ran Information Security as a service to clients) had to align with their recommendations to make the idea more customer relevant. Raj was hardly 3+ years in his job role and typically - developers at that level are not a part of such initiatives. He understood the relevance of statistical variables in anonymity, diversity and closeness better than most of us, so much so that he ended up wiring this to a data masking/ encryption solution that we were selling to the Customer, quite immediately.
Consequently, he was on fast-track to be running a productized solution (we called it Data Obscure), that too from a Services organization, but with the rigor of having a release cycle, handling multiple clients, moving this to the Cloud and finding added value through papers such as these!
He was a very difficult person to be kept quiet... or with unary tasks. For every task given to him, he will come back with 10 more on ways he can improve and improvise. Honestly, I had to learn about Entropy offline - only to be more informed and educated in handling his queries on this topic. Every morning he will walk into either my desk or that of Vignesh (one of our other leads) and just like GPT has a "stop sequence"- we literally have to send him back to his desk with a lot of effort to focus on one single task - with some stop sequence or the other :-)
Naturally, someone with this sort of technical acumen grew fast and stayed close to pretty much every other new initiative we began in the last 7+ years. Splunk was becoming popular and Raj took to it like fish to water. Great coders are most times great with queries as well. Raj was no exception. He mastered Lucene sooner than anyone else and that got him a head start in not just completing his own Architect and other certifications in Splunk but also in supporting others to get there.
Fast forward to the Covid period - he was already the owner and custodian of the product architecture, extensions and was now an accomplished engineer on the Cloud as well. He had this lined up to be taken into the AWS marketplace, with all the clarity and depth required for it to be a clear and modular solution in that ecosystem. All this happened in the middle of his learning more on Security Analytics, Cloud Security, database activity monitoring and some Web Access Management as well (Imperva if am not wrong was reviewed for this purpose for one of his clients at that time!)
And by the way, Covid gave him that much more airtime to think, by his standards - am told he built his own 3-D printer as well! He had a mechanical keyboard and was always thrilled at anything that could transcended from his logical output / outcome to a more physical outcome such as the 3-D printed slab or plastic!
And then came LLM! Some of us had some NLP background - with the likes of NLTK, SpaCy etc. but then I honestly don't know if Raj learned those. Open AI basically changed the world by saying how you can have a meaningful, semantic "chat" with your own data! At least for the engineering community, that was the romance that was unbelievable to start with! It was around November '22 (if am not wrong) that GPT became a sensation and in possibly less than 3 months, Raj knew LangChain and Llama Index better than any of us in the team! We had a tough customer in Google where we had to desperately demonstrate some value in the middle of an escalation, and once again - it was his demo on finding LLM relevance to a complicated code review/ human intervention led process - that saved the day for us with Google! He soon became the pillar of all things 'Security Agents' on LLM, that soon made way for others in the team to building Sailpoint Agents, CyberArk agents, Okta agents, and so on!
And now it hurts! That small little WhatsApp window is now quiet! There are no more - unending stream of ideas on what more we can do with LLM! what more can be 3-d printed! He put up a strong and positive face with us, even a week ago, when we met him at his place! It's hard to believe that we've seen the start to end of an amazing little career, right in front of our eyes, and that it's over!
He was a bundle of curiosity, kindness and brilliance, that has enriched our lives, in more ways than we can capture in this blog! To Raj’s family, we are profoundly grateful for the gift of his presence in our lives. His brilliance, kindness, and insatiable curiosity were a testament to the love and values you instilled in him. His light will continue to shine through us who had the privilege of knowing and working closely with him.
