2025 | Wrapped — A Build Log

Posted on Dec 31, 2025 • 2 min read
tl;dr: A build log for 2025.

[This piece is unfinished.]

January

Mostly buried in 1st semester finals.
No big builds.

February

Participated in 1 hackathon and finished Top 10.
Good experience.

March

Spent most of the month learning Python frameworks and the basics of ML.

Built small predictive projects:

  • Crop prediction
  • Stroke prediction

Got into NeuralHive, the AIML club at PESU EC Campus.

Tried getting into Web3, realized it didn’t fit alongside academics, and dropped it early.

April

Applied to many state level hackathons. Got rejected from all of them.

May

Went deeper into NLP.

Learned:

  • GloVe embeddings
  • Cosine similarity
  • Vector-based matching

Built an Activity Recommender CLI using these concepts.

June

End-sem exams.
Low-output month. That was expected.

July

Holidays. Finally time to build.

Built PESXchange, a C2C platform with friends to exchange items within the college campus.

Also got in touch with an early-stage startup idea.

July–November

Worked on an agentic AI desktop app ( like Cluely).

  • Shipped a working product
  • Reached 350+ waitlist signups
  • Got traction on X and Instagram

August

3rd semester started.
Kept upskilling alongside classes — no stopping from here.

September

Balanced startup work with college.

Went to a college hackathon with an ambitious idea:
an AI-powered dashboard for PESU Academy (think Cursor for VS Code, but for the student portal).

The idea was too big for 24 hours. Couldn’t ship it. Lesson learned.

October

Applied to ACM and HSP clubs at PESU EC.
Got into both — something I’d looked up to since first year :)

November

A messy month.

  • Multiple projects
  • Exams and assignments
  • Heavy context switching

Still kept building, but learned where my limits actually are.

December

End-sem exams, (and I have no clue how all the best ideas come during exams itself)

Started documenting my learnings here -> What I’m Learning

Notion Journal

  • Went on a project streak
  • Built a site using Zola SSG with a custom theme
  • Open-sourced it under MIT
  • Applied to the Netlify OSS Program → approved

Other builds :

Kept posting small wins on X.

Also got on a call with:

  • an Aussie founder
  • a VPN SaaS founder from Russia
  • a Bussiness School student from Masters’ Union