Shaurya
Dwivedi.

Built a working CPU from scratch using only discrete logic components. No microcontrollers. No simulator.

• A CPU implemented on several breadboards. It has 5 basic instructions: Bitwise AND, OR and XOR Addition Conditional Jump (8 selectable conditions; some based on the Carry and Zero flags and two "always" and "never" jumps) 8 addressable RAM locations (none implemented) 16 addressable ROM locations (for program storage; only one implemented in DIP switches)
• Project Partner - My Dad

Writing a bootloader by hand — from BIOS handoff in real mode to loading a kernel into memory. No GRUB. No abstractions.

• MBR layout, BIOS interrupt calls, and disk I/O at the sector level
• Understanding what actually runs before the kernel does
• Why bootloaders are the most unforgiving environment to debug

Running decision-making AI on hardware that wasn't designed for it.

• Built a fully local, internet-free voice AI assistant that listens, thinks, and speaks in real-time on a Raspberry Pi.
• Integrated Whisper for speech-to-text (STT), Ollama for local LLM reasoning, and Piper for text-to-speech (TTS).
• Learned practical edge AI concepts like model quantization, resource management, and offline inference.
• This video helped me build it btw, peak - YouTube

This site. Self-hosted Debian server with layered security — no port forwarding, no managed hosting.

• Nginx, HTTPS enforcement, custom security headers
• Cloudflare Tunnel — no home IP exposed
• UFW firewall + Cloudflare DNS
• Debugged 523 errors :sob:, systemd failures, root/user permission splits
• Learned DNS, reverse proxy, and tunnels by breaking them

Privacy-first isolated network with a Tor hidden service and self-hosted mail server.

• Multiple services in an isolated network, no public exposure
• Clearnet vs. Tor networking differences learned practically
• Real-world mail delivery edge cases navigated
• Service hardening in a no-cloud, no-VPS environment

Locally hosted, hobby setup.

• Was live for only 4 days lmao
• Handled server setup, performance optimization, and maintenance.
• Understood how plugins work and tried to create some while learning Java

I still have no idea. Would probably build a source-to-source translator instead of a full compiler.

Building a minimal Linux distribution the LFS way, every component chosen, compiled, and wired together by hand. No installer. No defaults.

• Toolchain bootstrap from scratch — cross-compiling glibc and binutils
• Custom init system and service supervision structure
• Minimal package set: only what's understood and intentionally included
• Why distros make the decisions they do — learned by making the same ones

Writing an AUR helper from scratch to understand what yay and paru actually do under the hood — PKGBUILD parsing, dependency resolution, and pacman integration.

• PKGBUILD parsing and makepkg workflow automated in shell
• Dependency graph traversal and AUR vs official repo resolution
• How pacman's sync database and alpm work at a low level
• Why package managers are harder than they look

An AI assistant trained on sfsdelhi.com's web pages to answer student and parent queries — admissions, fees, academics, events, facilities — accurately and instantly, without calling the office.

• School website scraped and structured as a knowledge base
• Handles admissions, academics, events, procedures, and facilities queries
• Redirects to official pages for time-sensitive details like fee schedules
• Designed for two distinct user types: parents and students

Reusable math abstraction library built to understand matrix operations at a fundamental level.

• Reusable abstractions, not single-use functions
• Real computational cost of matrix operations understood
• Learnt why optimised libraries need vectorisation and C backends