Utkarsh Chourasia

My Journey

I grew up as a hardcore gamer, glued to racing games like Need for Speed, shooting up pixels in Call of Duty, and occasionally causing chaos in Vice City or Little Fighter 2. My trusty old PC, however, aged like milk—it became the biggest bottleneck to my gaming glory. Naturally, I started tinkering with it, squeezing out every ounce of FPS I could.

Once I had maxed out my Windows machine, I switched to Linux, purely because I wanted to hack Wi-Fi. (Hey, don’t judge—it was the era when internet data packs were stupidly expensive.) Big shoutout to my school computer teacher—an absolute genius—who casually introduced me to Kali Linux and hacking. That’s also when I realized: I freaking love Linux. It was frictionless, commands could do anything, and chaining them felt like building magic spells. A few late nights later, I had successfully hacked my neighbor’s Wi-Fi. That was my first taste of real power.

Then came the dreaded JEE era—1.5 years of prep to crack IIT (India’s engineering Olympus). I may not have gone to IIT, but that didn’t stop me from becoming a pretty decent engineer with plenty of room to grow. But even in those days, I found new obsessions: torrenting and digital hoarding. With the help of a torrenting wizard (and a great friend), I stacked up a jaw-dropping 1.2TB of movies, TV shows, courses—basically the entire internet on a hard drive.

By the time college started, I bought a Mac (mainly because professors occasionally needed to use my laptop, and I didn’t want to scare them with my Linux-only machine). I turned my old PC into a Linux server. A self-hosting geek friend introduced me to Docker, and I went wild—setting up my own Netflix, backup server, torrent search engine, remote coding machine, and more. Docker was my “aha!” moment—suddenly, even on my Mac, I could spin up multiple Linux versions and apps without banging my head against compatibility issues. It felt like superpowers.

By the end of freshman year, I decided: I’ll contribute to Docker. That meant learning Go, taking a non-traditional path instead of building websites with JS/TS. Over the next 3 years, I built (what I think are) cool projects and contributed to open source.

“Knowledge and code should be open and free for everyone to use.” is my philosophy. Even though I’m now in the corporate world, I continue to support open source whenever I can—because that’s where I started, and that’s what shaped me.