Ankush Menat joined Frappe in 2021 in the middle of COVID, I think he was looking to work for companies that also did open source work. The moment I saw Ankush’s resume, I knew I wanted to hire him. It was short and in LaTeX (before LaTeX resumes were a thing). He was a self taught programmer coming from a mechanical engineering background and I could immediately connect with his background. As someone who is also a self taught programmer, being in the intersection of core engineering (industrial / production) for me and programming, made me some how the “ideal” person to design an ERP system. Someone who is as comfortable with Bill of Materials as well as Python syntax. I immediately saw Ankush as that person who could fit the bill just like me.

Ankush started in the ERPNext team along with Rohit in the stock and manufacturing module, and some of his early projects were fixing the correctness of the module and re-factoring some of the code. While he was doing this, I was keenly aware that Ankush has a strong sense of code aesthetics as well. Early on he suggested changes in the way we implicitly import modules in the Framework code (something that bothered me as well), making code completion problematic. He also became good friends with the other “code aesthetician” in Frappe at the time, Gavin and I could see his interest move from solving ERP and manufacturing problems to deeper Framework fixes.

Along with broadening his scope, Ankush was always active in company forums, specially online calls. Being a “digital native”, he thrived during the days of remote-only work. One of the big worries for me during the time is the isolation people would have felt working from their homes, so I used to frequently ask folks in Frappe, who do you talk to regularly? and the answer unfailingly was “Ankush”. He was almost always available for people to speak no matter what time of the day. At that time we used to joke that Ankush has created clones of himself.

As you would have guessed, this kind of “over extending” led to a burnout and instead of resigning, thankfully, Ankush took a sabbatical in the middle of 2024, signing up for an online masters degree in Computer Science. After the sabbatical, he got deeper in the “science” side of engineering, and worked in deep fixes in Framework and ERPNext performance.

For the past few years, Ankush has been the “loudest voice” in Frappe. As someone with the rare combination of deep technical skills and empathy he is the perfect fit for taking up “leadership” in the team. For the longest time though, he was happy playing the perfect foil for Aditya and me, calling bluff on my “radical” ideas by proposing “common sense” ones, and also winning tons of brownie points in the bargain. I loved debating with Ankush - debating brings out the best ideas - and we have often been on opposing sides. Over time though, I feel we agree on a lot of things. Ankush sees the value that what he thought was “radical” was also “common sense”, and I accept that the world wasn’t always wrong to start with.

It was only a matter of time before he realised that he has a lot more to offer than just being an individual contributor and I am glad he decided to take up the leadership for the engineering team. Frappe’s engineering team has a great culture and we do good work, but we don’t do great work yet (at least not as per our taste). Ankush has the right taste and the influence to make it happen. He is also a great communicator, active community member and enthusiast of computer history that makes him the right choice.

The hard thing is of course to take the influence and actually make change happen. If Frappe has to be a great engineering team, we still need to have better taste for quality, reliability, documentation and there is a lot of work to be done. It will be fun to see if Ankush can pull this off. Just like me, Ankush has come a long way from his mechanical engineering days, and I have full confidence he will be able to do a great job at this.

Here’s wishing Ankush all the best!