I started out with hardware, microcontrollers, sensors, writing Assembly on paper in exams. Somehow ended up here, writing software that runs on thousands of trucks across North America. The journey in between involved a startup, a lot of learning things the hard way, and picking up more technologies than I can list without sounding like I'm lying. These days I work across Android apps, JavaScript, Python, and occasionally LISP. Somewhere along the way the bar became: does it hold up when a truck driver is doing 100mph with a bad signal. That's just how I think about it now.
Kathan Patel
I like to build products and hack hardware
Bio
Experience
Jun 2024 to Present
Senior Software Engineer at Fleetworthy (formerly Drivewyze)
Joined when it was Drivewyze, stayed through the acquisition by Fleetworthy, and still here. This is the place that made me a senior engineer. Thousands of trucks across North America running my code right now, and that thrill genuinely hasn't worn off. The stack is all over the place in the best way: Python, Android apps, JavaScript, LISP. But what really changed me here is the nature of the product. Your users are truck drivers at 100 miles per hour with flaky networks and devices that never turn off. You can't ask them to restart the app. So you get really good at thinking through every edge case before you write a single line. And when something does go wrong, you play detective: piecing together what happened from logs, events, and dashboards, sometimes for a driver who's already 300 miles further down the road. That kind of environment makes you careful in a way nothing else does. Working alongside some genuinely great engineers here only made all of that sharper.
Dec 2021 to Jun 2024
Software Engineer at Omnee Technologies Corp.
A LinkedIn message from Dave (the founder) and one short meeting later, I had my first job in Canada and my first startup. I joined to build a Flutter app. Simple enough, right? Well. What followed was a masterclass in startup chaos: pivots, ownership, and wearing every hat in the closet. ML pipelines, a GLTF 3D viewer inside Flutter, Meta's Segment Anything, a geo-location system, and at one point I even did video editing for a demo. You do what needs to be done. Omnee also got into Techstars Toronto, which put me in a room with people who had built real companies from scratch. That changes how you think about product, about speed, about what actually matters. Probably the most compressed learning I've ever done.
Oct 2019 to May 2021
Software Engineer at Ecosmob Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
My first job. Joined as a junior developer and got promoted within months. I jumped on everything: WebRTC, WebSockets, BLE, TensorFlow Lite, IoT integrations. Real-time stuff became my niche pretty quickly, and I ended up leading a few projects that had realtime at the core despite being one of the most junior people there. Also laid the groundwork for something that became a significant product for the company after I left. Still proud of that one. Also got awarded Shining Star by the company, which was a nice way to cap it off.
Education
Aug 2021 to Jun 2022
Saskatchewan Polytechnic
By this point I'd already been coding for years, mostly by googling, breaking things, and figuring it out the hard way. This program was my chance to finally learn computer science properly, from scratch. Data structures, algorithms, all the fundamentals. Turns out learning things the "right" way after learning them the hard way is actually kind of great. Everything clicked so fast that I finished at the top of my class. Best grades I've ever gotten in my life. This also got me into Canada and landed me my first job here.
Aug 2015 to May 2019
Government Engineering College, Gandhinagar
My degree was in instrumentation and control engineering, so way more hardware than software. Microcontrollers (shoutout to the 8051 and 8085, the absolute legends), PLCs, Assembly, C. And yes, we wrote Assembly code by hand on plain paper in theoretical exams. No compiler, no linter, no autocomplete. Just a pen and whatever you had in your head. Somewhere between wiring up sensors and reading datasheets at 2am, I got completely obsessed with IoT and making hardware do cool things. That's also where my interest in mobile apps started. Oh, and this is where I met Meet Prajapati, my co-founder for life.
Pet Projects
Pager
Got tired of every PDF tool wanting a subscription or an internet connection. Built my own. Offline, no accounts, no paywalls. Just open and edit.
Raspberry Pi Native Camera API
C++ Node.js addon for direct frame capture from Pi camera modules via memory-mapped I/O, cutting capture latency compared to shell-spawned alternatives.
Physics Olympiad Portal
Client-side web app to catalog and solve competitive physics problems. Built as a shareable reference tool for olympiad prep.