Crease patternBird base · 22.5°
16 creases1 uncut square
Red folds awayBlue folds toward you
Fig. 00
VishalJeet
I build systems that quietly carry a lot of weight — search infrastructure, data pipelines, acquisition platforms — and I lead the teams that keep them standing.
Currently at Headway, leading the Patient Growth pod. Twelve years in, still mostly writing the layer underneath.
Fold #240 is on the table
The record
Software engineer with 12+ years building and leading at high-growth product companies. I have spent most of my career on the infrastructure that sits one layer below the thing users think they are using: the search index behind the job board, the pipeline behind the analytics dashboard, the ad platform behind the provider listing. Currently leading the Patient Growth pod at Headway.
- 2024–nowHeadwaySoftware Engineer
- 2019–2024WellfoundProduct Engineer · formerly AngelList Talent
- 2014–2019YextSoftware Engineer
- Folds
- Origami, badly at first, for years now
- Longest migration
- Solr to Elasticsearch, zero downtime
- Applications served
- 2,000,000+
- Alma mater
- Carnegie Mellon, twice
The other half
Two of these are generated from the date, so everyone in the world gets the same puzzle on the same day. Nothing needs an account. Scores stay in your browser unless you decide to put a name on the board.
- FoldA square is folded, then punched through every layer. Work out where the holes land when it opens.Daily
- Ship DateFive things from computing history. Guess the year each one shipped — closer is worth more.Daily
- QuizzesBeat the clock naming every HTTP status code, array method, or git command.Anytime
#240
Today’s fold. Puzzle one was folded the day the site went up, and there has been one every day since.
An origami model is one uncut square and a sequence of decisions.
You cannot add material and you cannot take any away. Everything the finished form does — every leg, every wing, every point — has to already be somewhere in the sheet, and getting it there is a matter of doing the folds in the right order.
That is most of what I find satisfying about systems work too. The constraints arrive first and they do not negotiate. The craft is in the sequence.
So this site is drawn rather than decorated. The rules between sections are real fold notation. The figure on the front page is a genuine crease pattern, and pressing it folds the model those creases describe — a crane, a lily or a dog, all three off the same square and none of them cut.
Most portfolios show you the finished bird. This one shows you the plan, because the plan is the part that took the thinking.
- Valley fold
- Folds toward you. Drawn dashed, in blue.
- Mountain fold
- Folds away from you. Dash-dot, in red.
- Punch
- A hole driven through every layer at once.
Open to interesting conversations
Finished form