Devarsh Bagla / Waltham, MA

I build tools for problems people just live with.

Computer Science and Economics at Brandeis, Class of 2030. A Chrome extension because I leave forty tabs open instead of setting reminders. A voice assistant for my laptop because Cortana died and nothing replaced it. An app that makes my laptop vibrate through its speakers, because laptops have no haptic motor.

64,374 Records benchmarked
15 Students mentored
290% Of fundraising target
30+ Events run

Most of what I build is unfinished. The one that isn't is bees.in, a website I designed and shipped end to end for a wealth management firm in Kolkata that had spent twenty-five years on word of mouth and had nothing online. Two months, shipped feature by feature rather than as one launch.

I also published a sole-authored study benchmarking logistic regression, random forests and a deep neural network for customer churn prediction across 64,374 records. The neural network reached 94.1% accuracy against an 83.6% linear baseline.

The part I care about more than either is teaching. I mentored fifteen students for a full academic year at my school's computer club, ran it open to everyone rather than CS students only, and let people build whatever they wanted instead of teaching a syllabus. What I took from it is that people stay when they're building their own idea, and leave the moment it becomes a lecture.

Right now I'm running local language models on integrated graphics because I don't own a discrete GPU, and learning CAD so I can design the parts I print instead of downloading them.

LAST UPDATED

Learning CAD so I can design the parts I print instead of downloading them. Running local language models on integrated graphics because I do not own a discrete GPU: Qwen and Gemma through LM Studio on an Intel Arc iGPU, with remote access from my phone. Setting up local image generation on the same card. Reading about how far you can push consumer hardware before it stops being worth it.

Junior Project Manager

DeisHacks, Brandeis University

FALL 2026 TO PRESENT · CO-LEAD · 10TH ANNUAL EVENT

Co-run Brandeis's two-day social good hackathon with the Senior Project Manager. Every team reports to the two of us: Marketing, Outreach, Partnerships, Design & Web, Logistics and Hacker Experience, and we make the creative calls on what the event becomes. Nonprofits and companies bring problems they are actually stuck on; students build fixes in two days; the best win prizes. Tenth year running, first as an independent club, first with international partners. Also interview and hire for open leadership roles, pitch sponsors, and table across campus to fill the room. Steps up to Senior Project Manager in 2027.

Web Developer, freelance

BEES Network Ltd, Kolkata

2 MONTHS · SOLE DEVELOPER · LIVE IN PRODUCTION

Built and shipped the company's first website end to end: information architecture, layout, copy, build, deployment and DNS. A financial planning firm that had operated for twenty-five years entirely on in-person referrals with no web presence. Delivered iteratively, shipping features one at a time rather than as a single launch. Plain HTML and CSS, no framework, built with an AI-assisted workflow.

bees.in

Private Tutor, Computer Science

Independent, Jaipur

3 MONTHS · IGCSE · 1 STUDENT

Taught IGCSE Computer Science, focused on pseudocode and algorithmic problem solving. Took a student from no prior programming exposure to independently solving IGCSE pseudocode problems.

DeskPulse

PROTOTYPE
  • Web Audio
  • DSP
  • Accessibility

Laptops have no vibration motor, so a notification is either audible or invisible. DeskPulse fires short bass-heavy bursts below hearing range through the speakers, driving the voice coil hard enough that the chassis itself vibrates. It auto-triggers on notifications, calls, new email and errors. Usable in a silent library, and by anyone who cannot rely on audio cues.

Laptop speakers, volume at 100%. Headphones will not work, and neither will a Bluetooth speaker. Rest your palms on the deck.

There is no way for a web page to tell what you are listening on, so this is a standing warning rather than a detection.

LIZI

IN DEVELOPMENT
  • Voice UI
  • Local LLM
  • Windows

A voice assistant for my laptop. Recognises my voice, changes system settings, sends email, and routes anything complicated to language models running locally on my own machine rather than a cloud API. Built because I was used to Gemini on a tablet and Siri on a phone, and it always bothered me that my laptop could not do the same after Cortana was discontinued.

SnapBack

IN DEVELOPMENT
  • Chrome Extension
  • Context Triggers

I don't set reminders, I leave tabs open and come back to them. RAM is expensive and my laptop can only take so much. SnapBack snoozes entire tab groups and brings them back on a trigger: arriving at a location, a calendar event starting, or a date being reached.

Desktop Task Manager

IN DEVELOPMENT
  • Windows Shell
  • WorkerW
  • C#

A task list drawn directly into the Windows desktop layer, behind the icons, using WorkerW. That is undocumented Windows shell behaviour, which is most of why I wanted to build it. Includes a live countdown strip in the taskbar.

Agentic Workflow

SHIPPED
  • Methodology
  • Cursor
  • Context Design

Not software, a method. Every project I run carries three files: one recording where the work actually stands, one telling an agent how this specific project is structured and what not to touch, and a scoped rules file. A session that dies at 2am gets picked up cold the next morning without re-explaining the codebase. I built it because my problem was never writing code, it was abandoning things at sixty percent, and the cost was all in rebuilding context.

Chess Coach

IN DEVELOPMENT
  • IndexedDB
  • Web Workers

A browser chess coach that plays you, reviews your moves and tracks improvement. Rebuilt the storage layer so games survive a refresh, and moved the engine's move search onto a background thread so the board stopped freezing while it calculated.

From Dust to Zenith

SHIPPED
  • Vercel
  • DNS

An editorial publication site, built and deployed on Vercel with DNS configured through GoDaddy, followed by a full UI audit and fixes.

fromdusttozenith.in

Casio fx-CG50 Replica

PROTOTYPE
  • Spec to App

A working replica of a graphing calculator, rebuilt from its specification.

RapidRead

IN DEVELOPMENT
  • RSVP
  • React Native
  • Expo
  • Android

A speed reading app built on RSVP, rapid serial visual presentation, where words are flashed one at a time at a fixed point so your eyes never move. Eliminating saccades is most of what makes reading slow. Android first, because that is what I own. It is the one thing I am building in public.

github.com/devarshbagla/Rapidread

FluentFlyout

CONTRIBUTING
  • Open Source
  • C#
  • WPF
  • Windows 11

An open-source media and volume flyout for Windows 11 built on Fluent 2 design. I forked it to add scroll and gesture control for volume. First time working inside a codebase I did not write, to someone else's conventions, which is a completely different skill from starting from an empty folder.

github.com/devarshbagla/FluentFlyout

Minecraft Progression Mod

IN DEVELOPMENT
  • Java
  • Game Design
  • Systems

Most players quit Minecraft in the first few hours because nothing tells them what to do next. A mod with a 331-entry adaptive goal system that reads your world seed and current progress and suggests the next thing worth doing, so the open world stops being paralysing.

Homelab

IN DEVELOPMENT
  • Ubuntu
  • Docker
  • Tailscale
  • Self-hosting

A self-hosted stack in Kolkata: Ubuntu Server, Tailscale for mesh networking, Immich for photo backup, AdGuard Home for DNS filtering, Home Assistant, Portainer, Uptime Kuma. Built so I can reach my own data from another continent without paying anyone a subscription for the privilege.

Local Inference

SHIPPED
  • LM Studio
  • Intel Arc
  • Quantisation

Running language models locally on an Intel Arc integrated GPU, because I do not own a discrete card. Qwen 3.5 9B and Gemma 4 12B Instruct through LM Studio, with LM Link and the Locally iOS app so I can reach them from my phone. Currently adding SD.Next on the IPEX backend for local image generation on the same chip. The constraint is the interesting part: everyone doing this has a 4090.

Deep Learning Approaches for Churn Prediction: An Empirical Evaluation on Real-World Business Datasets

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC ENGINEERING AND RESEARCH · VOL 13, ISSUE 10 · OCTOBER 2025

Benchmarked three approaches to customer churn prediction on a 64,374-record dataset with 12 attributes. Built the full preprocessing pipeline: mean and mode imputation, one-hot encoding, min-max normalisation, IQR-based outlier handling, and SMOTE oversampling to correct class imbalance. Ran three independent feature selection methods in WEKA, which converged on the same ten-attribute subset. Hyperparameters tuned by grid search under ten-fold cross-validation.

Axis begins at 70 to make the differences legible.

RANDOM FOREST: 200 TREES · DNN: 3 HIDDEN LAYERS, RELU, 0.3 DROPOUT, ADAM · TUNING: GRID SEARCH, 10-FOLD CV · TOOLING: WEKA

Illustrative model with representative coefficients, not the trained weights from the paper. It runs logistic regression in your browser so the shape of the decision is explorable; the published results came from WEKA on the real 64,374-record dataset.

24 mo
4
12 d
600
12 d
16 /mo

Contribution to log-odds, largest first

    1. 2025–2026 · MENTOR, BYTEBUILDERS

      My school's computer club, open to any student rather than only those taking CS. Mentored 15 students for two hours a week across a full academic year, roughly 72 contact hours, working from whatever each person actually wanted to build instead of a syllabus. Several of them had never written a line of code.

      15 STUDENTS · 72 HOURS

    2. 2024–2025 · CAMPAIGN LEAD, FUELADREAM x GO GIRL FOUNDATION

      Founded and ran a crowdfunding campaign distributing reusable sanitary pads to girls and women in rural Rajasthan. No institutional backing, no mailing list, no existing audience. Most gifts came in at a few dollars each, so it was 52 separate conversations and follow-ups rather than a handful of large donations. I travelled to the schools and handed the products over myself.

      290% OF TARGET · 52 FUNDERS

      fueladream.com
    3. 2021–2024 · SECRETARY, AUDIO-VISUAL SQUAD, THE SCINDIA SCHOOL

      Three years from member to Joint Secretary to Secretary. Led a five-person technical team running sound, lighting and projection for daily assemblies and more than thirty major events, including inter-school festivals with outside performers and audiences of several hundred. Most of what I learned was about failure: late vendors, microphones dying mid-performance, cues changing during the show.

      30+ EVENTS · TEAM OF 5

    4. 2023 · SCHOOL RENOVATION, BHIND, MADHYA PRADESH

      One week with roughly a hundred classmates rebuilding a rural government primary school serving around a thousand children. Hand-mixed cement, bricklaying, foundations and painting, in temperatures near 45°C.

    Two years, six subjects, three at Higher Level. Mine were Computer Science, Economics and Mathematics Analysis and Approaches AI, with English, Business Management and French ab initio at Standard Level.

    The Mathematics internal assessment was a used-car resale pricing model built with polynomial regression: collecting the data myself, choosing the degree, and then spending most of the write-up on why a higher-degree fit that looked better was actually worse. That was the first time overfitting stopped being a word in a textbook.

    Computer Science HL is what got me eight credits of advanced standing at Brandeis, so I started a year ahead of the standard sequence.

    HL COMPUTER SCIENCE · HL ECONOMICS · HL MATHEMATICS AI · 8 CREDITS OF ADVANCED STANDING

    Most CS students cannot draw. Most designers cannot program. This is the loop I am trying to close.

    Hover, drag or focus a node. Enter opens its detail.

    What I actually use, grouped honestly. Hover or focus a chip for depth. Nothing here is claimed beyond what I have done with it.

    LANGUAGES

    • Pythonprimary language, research pipeline and scripting
    • Javain progress, first semester
    • JavaScriptthis site and browser tools, no framework
    • HTML/CSSbees.in and this site, written by hand

    AI TOOLING

    • Claude Codedaily driver for long agent sessions
    • Cursorwhere this site is being written
    • Claude Projectsstanding context for papers and briefs
    • Antigravitytried, not a daily tool
    • LM Studiolocal Qwen and Gemma on an Intel Arc iGPU

    ML AND DATA

    • WEKAfull churn pipeline, the published paper
    • SMOTEclass imbalance on the 64,374-record set
    • grid searchhyperparameters under ten-fold CV
    • k-fold CVten-fold, same evaluation

    WEB

    • VercelFrom Dust to Zenith, deployed and DNS-wired
    • DNSbees.in and fromdusttozenith.in
    • browser extensionsSnapBack, still in development

    HARDWARE

    • ESP32anything that needs to light up, move or sense
    • WLEDsame boards, lighting firmware
    • solderingrepair under time pressure more than assembly
    • FDM 3D printingother people's models, for now
    • Prusa Mini+certified at the Brandeis MakerLab
    • AV systemsthree years, thirty-plus events

    SYSTEMS

    • Ubuntu Serverhome lab, the box that runs the models
    • Dockerlocal services, not a production fleet
    • Tailscalephone access to the iGPU box

    SWIMMING

    Calcutta Swimming Club, now the Brandeis Swim Club. The only thing I do that has nothing to do with a screen.

    GAMES

    Call of Duty Mobile, ranked multiplayer, top 2% globally. Also Minecraft, Valorant, Frostpunk, Overcooked 2, Clash Royale and actual chess. The range is deliberate: competitive FPS, survival strategy, sandbox, forced co-op and real-time strategy all break in different ways. I am taking Designing and Analyzing Games this semester, which is the first time anyone has asked me to write down why.

    DRAWING

    Observational sketching, drawing objects from life, plus light digital work. It is the front end of the loop in the Workbench section: if you can record a form accurately you can model it, and if you can model it you can print it.

    LANGUAGES

    English, Hindi and Bengali fluently. French badly but improving. Kolkata and Jaipur growing up, Waltham now.

    Building something, teaching something, or arguing about something?

    I'm most interested in hardware-adjacent software, AI tooling, and anything that involves teaching people to build. Email is the fastest way to reach me.