Nitesh Shantha Kumar

Hi, I’m Nitesh.

I’m a curious engineer who’s in love with the process of building. By day I build high-traffic systems at Nordstrom. The rest of the time I’m building Hushy, a dictation and voice assistant app, writing One More Layer, or making coffee.

Resume → CV · PDF ↓

X ↗Substack ↗GitHub ↗

Explore this site

❯_ Terminalpress ~ anywhere
Poke around from the command line
Try help, cat story or coffee.
▶ Game8 levels, 24 stars
☕ Coffee run Steer my robot to every coffee bean. Play ▶

right now

what fills my days at the moment

Building ◆ AppHushyA dictation and voice assistant app.Visit tryhushy.com ↗ Writing ✉ NewsletterOne More LayerAI, systems, infrastructure and hardware, one layer below where most writing stops.Subscribe on Substack ↗ Reading ▥ BookHamnetHoping to finish it soon.See my bookshelf ↓
DrinkingCoffeeGrinding the beans is one of the best moments of my day.
At homeA 5-month-oldSo, pretty busy. Happily.
Posting @ Profile@nitesh_aradhyaTrying to be more vocal on X.Follow on X ↗

my story

from soldering robots in Bangalore to building agents in Seattle

  1. Bangalore · the robot years

    It started with electronics

    Built a color-sorting robot, line followers and Bug2 bots, and fell into embedded systems.

    I loved electronics, but I always wanted to write the software and build the robots too. I built a color-sorting robot, line followers, and obstacle-avoiding robots running the Bug2 algorithm (you can play with one below). That pulled me into embedded systems.

  2. 2016 – 2019 · Avionics

    Software for airplane engines

    Wrote software for an aircraft engine controller. Loved the rigor, not the pace.

    I worked on software for an electronic engine controller, the computer that runs an aircraft engine. I was curious how safety-critical software gets built, and I learned a lot from that rigor. Eventually, though, the pace wasn’t for me.

    “I feel the need — the need for speed!”— Top Gun, and roughly my reasoning
  3. 2017 · The spark

    Andrej Karpathy’s lectures

    Andrej Karpathy’s lectures got me hooked on machine learning.

    I came across Andrej Karpathy’s machine learning lectures and got hooked on machine learning. That curiosity is still driving most of what I build.

  4. 2019 – 2021 · Buffalo, NY

    A master’s in robotics

    An M.S. in Robotics: self-driving cars, perception and sensor fusion.

    I went to the University at Buffalo for an M.S. in Robotics. I loved autonomous systems and worked on self-driving cars: perception and sensor fusion in the LANDR lab. The part I loved most was building the software.

  5. 2021 – now · Nordstrom

    Systems for millions of people

    High-traffic systems for millions of customers. This made me the engineer I am.

    I moved into building software at Nordstrom. Working on high-traffic, business-critical systems that serve millions of customers made me the engineer I am today.

  6. 2025 · Agents

    Early to the new stuff

    MCP servers from scratch, and long-running agents before they were a thing.

    I like new systems the moment they come out. When MCP arrived, I built a bunch of MCP servers from scratch. In June 2025, before long-running agents were a thing people talked about, I built a framework for them at work: multiple agents running autonomous workflows defined in Jinja templates. It wasn’t adopted, but I learned a lot. A skill set I built for on-call engineering workflows is used by several teams today.

  7. Now

    Building Hushy

    A dictation and voice assistant app, built with love.

    Hushy is a dictation and voice assistant app, built with as much love as I can put into it.

coffee run

A tiny puzzle built on Bug2, one of the first robot algorithms I wrote. Place a few walls and pick which side the robot hugs, so it grabs every coffee bean on its way to the flag. 8 levels, 24 stars

Level 1

Beans 0/1Walls 0/3Par 1Stars 0/24
coffee beanyour wallfixed wallhugging a wall

Leaderboard · most stars

    Loading…

    How Bug2 works
    1. Head straight for the goal along the line from start to finish (the dashed m-line).
    2. Hit a wall? Remember that spot, then follow the wall’s edge, keeping it on your right (over the top) or your left (underneath).
    3. Back on the m-line and closer to the goal than where you hit? Leave the wall and head for the goal again.
    4. Back where you hit the wall? Then there’s no way through, and Bug2 knows to stop.

    likes & dislikes

    a few things that make me, me

    Recently readTheo of GoldenThe quote below is from this one.
    Reading nowHamnetHope I finish it soon.

    why I build

    the quote I keep coming back to

    For anything to be good, truly good, there must be love in it. There must be love for the gift itself, love for the subject being depicted or the story being told, and love for the audience.

    — Theo of Golden

    I’m in love with the process of building, and I hope you’ll love what I make.

    writing

    latest from One More Layer, my Substack on AI, systems, infrastructure and hardware

    projects

    highlights from my repositories on GitHub

    Say hello.

    I’m always happy to talk about building things, agents, robots, or coffee.

    X@nitesh_aradhya↗ One More Layermy Substack↗ GitHub@nshantha↗