Aditya Vivek Thota | Full-stack & Applied AI Engineer

πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Aditya's Digital Portfolio

Kon'nichiwa πŸ‘‹

I'm Aditya Vivek Thota, though most people online know me as XQ. I've spent about 7 years building software, mostly on the frontend: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, and whatever else the problem calls for.

I write to think and build to test the thinking. So far that's meant 200+ articles on AI and engineering, and a handful of tools I actually use.

Prefer a terminal to a page? Try the terminal view. Otherwise, here's the rest.

πŸš€ Projects

  • TechFlix [Live Demo]: A tech content aggregation platform summarizing 150+ engineering blogs, research journals and news sources on a single feed. Tech: Python, Svelte, SvelteKit, MongoDB

  • PicToWebP [Live Demo] [GitHub]: A blazingly fast, lightweight bulk image to WebP converter that can help you save over 90% of disk space. Tech: Python, Flask, Image Processing, Rust

  • Q [Live Demo] [Edge Add-on] [GitHub]: A browser extension that turns every new tab into a focused productivity hub with quick todos, projects, distraction-free writer mode, quick links and a weather widget. Tech: Svelte, SvelteKit, TypeScript

  • AutoProject [GitHub]: Your ultimate BYOK tool to automate product and project management with AI-powered workflows. Tech: Svelte, SvelteKit, TailwindCSS, Vercel's AI SDK

  • PromptGPT Pro [Live Demo] [README]: A custom GPT designed to craft creative, concise prompts with self-improving feedback loops. Tech: Prompt Engineering, ChatGPT

πŸ“‘ Articles

  1. Explained: Transformers for Everyone [Medium] 22K+ views

  2. Explained: Tokens and Embeddings in LLMs [Medium] 19K+ views

  3. Explained: Attention Mechanism in AI [Medium] 6.5K+ views

  4. Creating a Real-time Data Stream Using Apache Kafka [Medium] 12.4K+ views

  5. Optimizing Memory Usage in Python [Medium] 5.5K+ views

  6. Explained: Hyperparameters in Deep Learning [Medium] 3.7K+ views

πŸ“ˆ My Profile in Numbers

πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» A little more about my work


  • At Visa I lead the frontend for a large internal platform: a form builder, renderer, shared component library and SDK, plus RBAC and IAM. It runs on React 18 and Next.js (app router) with Visa's design system.
  • I also helped move the VDCS UI to React 18 with functional components and Redux Toolkit, across 110+ screens. The payoff was code that's easier to test and maintain.
  • Beyond the frontend, I moved VDCS batch jobs to Visa's internal Hadoop platform, which dropped third-party dependencies and their licensing costs, and simplified the data pipeline.
  • Earlier, as a full-stack engineer, I shipped features like DAF and Apple Pay configuration, improved WCAG accessibility, and tightened alerting for those batch jobs.
  • I build small tools I wish existed. Q turns the browser's new tab into a quiet place to write and plan: todos, projects, and a distraction-free editor.
  • AutoProject takes a short brief and turns it into a PRD plus Linear tasks, so planning stops being a separate job.
  • TechFlix pulls 150+ engineering blogs and papers into a single summarized feed.
  • AltCSS is the class-less CSS library this page runs on. PicToWebP is a Python and Rust converter that cuts image folders by 90%+.
  • Alongside engineering, I run The Research Nest, a Medium publication on STEM research and education. It reached ~1K followers on its own.
  • In 2020 I was among India's first LinkedIn Top Voices and the youngest that year. That audience is 53K+ today.
  • Before that I led the writing program at Qrius, running editorial for a 12M+ reader base.
  • Earlier still, at Probe, NIT Trichy, I built the campus magazine's blog from scratch and started series like Alumni Corner and Probe Interviews.

πŸ“§ Contact

Feel free to reach out to me at adityavivek.xq@gmail.com.

You can also find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, and X (Twitter).