
You landed here somehow.

Maybe I sent you this [portfolio link](https://www.rohankokkula.dev/) directly and asked for feedback. Maybe you found it through [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohankokkula/) after seeing one talk or one random post. Maybe you're a recruiter trying to decide whether I'd be a good fit for your team.

Either way, thanks for spending a few minutes here.

Most portfolio websites try very hard to look linear. Mine probably does too in other sections. Talks organized neatly. Work history in order. Nice event photos. Logos. Metrics. The version of a career that makes sense after everything has already happened.

Real life did not feel that organized while I was living it.

For a long time, I thought all my interests were completely disconnected from each other.

Design. Machine learning. Writing. Community work. Public speaking. Developer tools.

None of it looked like a career plan.

I was mostly just following things that genuinely kept me curious.

Back in college at [VIT](https://vit.ac.in/), that curiosity looked like spending nights making posters for events instead of studying properly. In 2017, I joined the student council at VIT as a graphic designer, working on [VERVE](https://www.instagram.com/vervevit/), the college cultural festival. Most of my time went into concert creatives, fest branding, social media posts, and the small details people remember without realizing they remember them.

Later, at [ACM-VIT](https://acmvit.in/), I became Creative Head. That role taught me something bigger than design itself. Creative work is rarely just about creativity. It's about handling people, pressure, deadlines, disagreements, burnout, and still trying to make something good together.

I didn't realize it then, but a lot of that would later become useful in community work.

My first internship outside college was at [Bengage Brand Services](https://bengage.in/) in Ghatkopar, Mumbai in 2018. Small office. Real clients. Real deadlines. The first time someone paid me for work that started as "I just enjoy making things."

That changes how seriously you take your craft.

Then 2020 happened, and like everyone else, life suddenly became strange.

That year pulled me deep into machine learning and AI.

I joined [Listnr](https://listnr.tech/) as a machine learning intern and spent months experimenting with speech synthesis, voice cloning, Tacotron2, FastSpeech2, WaveNet, and audio models that felt almost unreal when they worked correctly. Around the same time, I was also part of an analytics program at [IIT Guwahati](https://www.iitg.ac.in/), where most days were spent around neural networks, visualizations, competitions, and trying to keep up with people much smarter than me.

I became obsessed with understanding how these systems worked.

But somewhere during lockdowns and endless hours online, I also started teaching publicly through my YouTube channel, [Rohanalytics](https://www.youtube.com/@rohanalytics).

Mostly because explaining things helped me understand them better myself.

The videos were simple. Deep learning concepts, ML basics, visualizations, small tutorials. Nothing polished. But that phase taught me how much I enjoyed making technical things feel less intimidating to people.

That became a pattern in my life without me noticing.

Later at [iNeuron.ai](https://ineuron.ai/), I worked on data annotation and object detection projects using [YOLO v5](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5). A lot of repetitive work. A lot of labeling. A lot of learning how messy real-world AI actually is behind all the shiny demos people post online.

Honestly, I'm glad I experienced that side early.

In 2021, I joined [Nactus](https://www.nactus.com/) as a data scientist focused on NLP systems. T5 question generation, BERT-based MCQs, [Rasa](https://rasa.com/) chatbots, semantic search experiments, and a bunch of small product problems hidden inside technical systems.

For the first time, I felt like I was building things other people might genuinely use.

But over time, I noticed something interesting about myself.

The technical work excited me, but helping people understand the technical work excited me even more.

That realization slowly pushed me toward developer relations.

I joined [Botpress](https://botpress.com/) in 2021 and spent the next few years across growth, solutions engineering, advocacy, and community roles around conversational AI. Looking back, that was probably the first place where all my interests stopped feeling separate from each other.

The design background helped with communication.

The ML background helped with technical depth.

The YouTube phase helped with teaching.

And community work somehow tied everything together.

A huge part of my time there involved talking to developers, troubleshooting real problems, creating educational content, running community initiatives, and understanding how products behave once they leave the clean environment of internal demos.

That experience shaped how I think about DevRel even now.

Developers don't really care about polished marketing language. They care about whether you're useful. Whether you understand their frustrations. Whether you're honest when something breaks.

After Botpress, I joined [Bito.ai](https://bito.ai/) for a short but intense phase focused on developer community growth and engagement. Then came [Contentstack](https://www.contentstack.com/), where the scale became much bigger. Meetups, [DevFest](https://developers.google.com/community/devfest) talks, [TechX](https://www.contentstack.com/events), [Techsurf](https://www.contentstack.com/techsurf), workshops, Discord communities, and a lot more public-facing work.

Somewhere during all of that, speaking on stage stopped feeling scary and started feeling fun.

Today, I work at [Freshworks](https://www.freshworks.com/) in [developer relations](https://developers.freshworks.com/).

Most of my work now sits somewhere between developers, product teams, support, documentation, integrations, marketplaces, and community conversations. Some days it's deeply technical. Some days it's strategy. Some days it's helping someone debug an issue at an odd hour because I know how frustrating it feels to be stuck.

But underneath all the titles and responsibilities, the motivation has stayed surprisingly consistent through every phase of my career.

I like making complicated things feel approachable.

I like helping people feel included instead of intimidated.

And I still think the internet is at its best when people are openly building, learning, and sharing what they know.

If you made it this far, thanks again for reading.


Rohan KokkulaMy journey