If food, shelter and clothes were not already the bare bones of living, having a social media presence seems like the fourth necessity of our times. Internet today has pressed itself into our skin to a point that not having a social profile is met with so much disbelief. Revant is one from the anti-social club. Outside of his super active Github and forum accounts, you might need some luck finding him on the internet. Being one of the first contributors to Frappe, he grew his roots early in the world of open-source. He’s been tinkering for more than two decades now. But did all work and no play make hacking through life even fun?

Being a civil engineer, Revant’s dad brought home a computer to design buildings using CAD. This was back in 1992, when having a computer at home was only slowly getting common. One glance at that shiny beige box is all it took for 8-year old Revant to fall head over heels. He was in 2nd grade when he started playing around with his dad’s computer. “We were learning Logo at school. It was a game where a little turtle drew shapes just by you telling it where to go. I'd rush back home to my computer and draw hundreds of other designs and my own patterns. Then I also played Prince of Persia through DOS commands. I loved messing around and installing programs just because I could. I also got my first taste of C++ Turbo C and tried good stuff for fun.”

They say “what begins in wonder doesn’t fade away.” Revant’s childlike curiosity had already dragged him into the beauty of programming. With computers always within arm's reach, he became a hobbyist programmer by sixteen. The boy who chained himself to keyboards early in his life, soon got stuck into a narrow tunnel with walls closing in. After his 12th boards, part of him was torn between choices. “If I can’t make a living out of my skill, what is the use?” He laid his options on the table and decided to go ahead with bachelors in management studies (BMS). “Coding is my fallback hobby. Computer and tech are always going to be around. I’ll atleast learn to make something out of it with this degree.” For him, studying business meant stealing ideas for operations and marketing, which he could later tie into his coding to give it legs. “Even while doing BMS, I kept getting good at coding”. You might spot him cramming ROI and supply chains stuffs by the day, but he’d often be lost in his little (Hello) world at night.

All of what Revant did, ever since he could walk, came from his instincts. He started on windows using proprietary software. At one instance, his uncle introduced him to free and open-source software. “I browsed OS software across the net and that’s how I first found Frappe Framework in its early days.” When his dad upgraded to a new computer, he finally installed Linux and poked every corner of it. Later or soon, his knack for coding began to surface. People started asking him for little tech favours. What he built was useful to others, which pushed him to keep experimenting and “hacking” for fun. He once even planted MRP and ERP into his Linux machine, and when they worked, he was wide-eyed at his own magical creations and the hacker life inching closer to him. "I guess people started calling me hacker-techy" he giggles.

Coming from a family of civil engineers running a business, Revant saw his parents work with ERPs day to day. “They were not able to track labor wages and attendance properly because the system was clunky.” Curious as ever, he built a small system on Frappe Framework that handled advances, weekly or fortnightly payments and covered labor attendance. It gave him a different kick this time. A guy from Frappe Forum reached out to Revant with some hope. “Check out Kubernetes. Containers will help us scale,” At that time, Revant barely knew Frappe’s internals at the container level; so for him it was a mystery to solve. No one at the company was working on it, and neither was it a high demand project. But does that stop Revant? You wish.

For the next 12 months he lived in the guts of the Framework and containers. “There had been an earlier Docker repository,” he recalls, “but somehow I just started clean, from scratch.” When he was ready, he sent a large pull request to the guy from Frappe. It took him some back and forth with testing and feedback when finally his PR was merged. His work caught more than just a few set of eyeballs on the forum. That’s how he earned his spot in Frappe codebase. Nothing finds Revant faster than his own stream of issues. “I am a user, first of all.” He explains. “So for the OAuth, the REST API, the Webhook, I wanted to integrate something for myself first. And I did that. Then I gave it to the community and then it was merged. As long as I have that pain area, I am going to come back because that's my thing.” He was once thrown an innocent question about his secret sauce. “Well, the recipe won’t be the same tomorrow. You cannot copy me or anyone and that’s the beauty. You do you and that will be greater for you. If it’s valuable, it’s valuable, no one can deny that.”

When you sit with code, sleep and eat with it every day, it gets easy to see it branch out. “I had a cold email resting in my DMs for 6 months. The sender, let’s call him Moris, knew me from forum. I wasn’t aware of him, until one day, he managed to hunt down my contacts and called me up. Moris needed help with writing a script. I had never cashed in on my coding skills before, so I quoted him a random high amount. He was in, and we both came out happy with the deal.” And so, Castlecraft was born. “It might be someone’s pain that guided me. I bootstrapped in partnership. I also grew a small team of 4 with my brother.” Unlike any usual implementers, Castlecraft rescues business that choke under massive data, scales startups to enterprise levels, and faces the heat of problems which other implementers shy away from.

“If coding was destined, I don’t know why I lost years to another degree.” his afterthought is fair. Nothing can hold Revant back from contributing to opensource. To test his limits, he has taken up perhaps his most ambitious project, yet: rewriting Frappe Framework from scratch. If you were to tell 8-year-old Revant that his nascent interest would one day make him money, he'd be the last one to buy it. And if Revant wants you to take anything out of his story, it is “Log kehte hai ‘Karo na’, mai kehta hu ‘Kar lo.’” Translation: Don’t wait for it, just do it.