Hey there 👋 I'm

AdeenShukla

I build products and teams, and write about what I learn along the way.

Building technology, leading engineers, navigating careers, and figuring out what changes when AI enters the room.

CTO @ Metafic · Founder, Leadnics · Writing about technology, products & careers

Read my writing See what I'm building

Working on something interesting? [email protected]

Adeen pointing at code on a laptop at a hackathon

Adeen at his desk with his team working behind him

Right now

LeadingMetaficCTO. We run AI-accelerated engineering pods that ship production software.
BuildingLeadnicsA CRM for sellers who meet their prospects in person.
Open-sourcingmcp-gateway & promptslayOpen-source developer tools I build when nobody is paying me to.
PublishingEssays on building, working & thinkingProducts, engineering and careers, from someone who builds them.

Writing

What I think about

Essays from someone who builds things. Mostly about how technology changes the way we build and work.

All essays

Working4 min read

The career roadmap I never followed

Students keep asking me what they should learn. I never had an answer at 19, and I'm not sure I have one now. What I do have is a different question.

Sep 30, 2026

Thinking5 min read

Painting an owl (or why "creating" matters)

Try creating something with your hands, without distractions. It might unblock you and show you a completely different side of things.

Jun 29, 2026

Working8 min read

Education in the Age of LLMs: Stop Grading the Robot's Homework

Every essay your school assigns tonight will be written by a machine in eleven seconds. We can keep pretending otherwise, or we can rebuild education for the world that actually exists.

Jun 10, 2026

Building

What I'm building now

A product, and the open-source tools I build when nobody is paying me to.

Everything I've built

Founder2024 – now

Leadnics

Trade-show leads die in business-card piles and spreadsheets. Leadnics is a CRM for people who meet prospects in person: scan a badge or card, AI enriches and scores the contact, and follow-ups fire before you leave the booth.

CRM
Mobile
OCR
Sales

Visit

Author2026

MCP Gateway

Connecting N agents to M MCP servers turns into an N×M mess of auth, limits and failures. One secure, observable endpoint in front of all of them: auth, RBAC, rate limiting, caching, OpenTelemetry and circuit breakers.

TypeScript
MCP
Infrastructure
Observability

Engineering notes Code

Author2026

promptslay

Prompts are code, so why don't we test them like code? Unit tests for prompts: deterministic and LLM-as-judge graders, snapshot baselines, cost tracking, and a CI gate that fails the build on drift.

TypeScript
LLM Evals
Testing
CI

Engineering notes Code

Speaking

Talks & workshops

23 developer events organized and taught in 2018–19, with 3,600+ attendees, then talks at DevFest, Google Cloud Community Day and universities. These days I talk about building careers, AI in production, and leading engineers.

Speaking page

Adeen on stage at Metameet 2022 — Metameet 2022: on stage at Metafic's own meetup

01
Build first, the roadmap appears later
Students & early-career engineers
Why "what should I learn?" is the wrong question, and what to build instead.
02
AI in production, beyond the demo
Engineering teams
Evals, gateways, and the boring distributed-systems engineering AI products still need.
03
From developer to CTO
Engineers moving into leadership
What changes when your job stops being writing the code.
04
Building developer communities
Organizers & DevRel
Lessons from starting codeIndore() and co-organizing GDG Indore.

Invite me to speak See past events

About

The non-linear version

I've been on both sides of the room. At 19 I was the student asking what I should learn, organizing hackathons, porting operating systems to phones that didn't need them, and teaching Git to anyone who'd sit still. Now I'm the one students ask.

In between: a GitHub Campus Expert badge, co-organizing GDG Indore, becoming CTO at Metafic in 2020, building Leadnics, and somehow ending up in ISB Hyderabad's IVI venture program.

I didn't follow a roadmap. I built things, and the roadmap appeared afterwards.

When I'm not in the code, I'm mixing beats, documenting my cold brew obsession, or reading whatever my book club picked this month.

Shipping code since: 2016; Shipping code since
Events organized & workshops taught, 2018–19: 23; Events organized & workshops taught, 2018–19
Attendees at those events: 3,600+; Attendees at those events
Hyderabad, IVI venture program (2025): ISB; Hyderabad, IVI venture program (2025)

How I got here

Way back
Where it started
A kid, a desktop computer, and a chair much too big for me.
2016
Ported Sailfish OS to a Redmi 2
Android kernels, device trees and vendor blobs, before I knew what any of it was for.
2018
Started codeIndore()
Organized my first hackathon at 19, became a GitHub Campus Expert, and taught Git to anyone who'd sit still.
2019
Co-organized GDG Indore
DevFest'19 for 400 developers, plus hackathons, study jams and meetups across the city.
2020
CTO at Metafic
September 2020. I lead engineering at Metafic, which builds production software for other companies.
2023
Helped scale Metafic past 300 people
Three years in, Metafic had grown past 300 people, with engineering scaling alongside it.
2024
Started building Leadnics
A CRM for people who close deals with a handshake. Built from time on trade-show floors like Canton Fair.
2025
ISB Hyderabad, IVI
A six-month venture program from October 2025. Went back to school to learn the business side of what I build.
2025
Joined the board at Thinqzo
A seat at the table where company decisions get made, not just engineering ones.
Now
Building, writing, speaking
Open-source developer tools, essays here, and back in rooms full of students.