About

Who I Am

I’m Himel Nag Rana - software engineer by profession, reader by compulsion, writer by irritation, photographer by habit, and serial overthinker by what appears to be divine design.

My resume presents a reasonably coherent adult. My social bios have historically been less forgiving. Somewhere between “experienced engineer with strong product instincts” and “fat, anhedonic, mediocre, discomposed, indifferent” is the actual person: curious, functional, slightly disordered, and usually occupied with code, books, notes, cameras, or some unnecessary but deeply compelling side project.

I live in Germany, but most of the time I seem to live in systems - codebases, drafts, bookshelves, image folders, and the various small private worlds we build so life feels a little less blunt.

This site is one of those worlds.

What I Do For Money

I build software for a living, which mostly means turning ambiguity into systems that fail less dramatically.

Over the years, I’ve worked across product engineering, backend services, frontends, APIs, tooling, migrations, refactors, and the usual collection of “temporary” decisions that somehow survive long enough to become architecture.

I like work that sits in the overlap between:

  • engineering and clarity
  • systems and people
  • shipping and restraint
  • technical correctness and practical survival

In simpler terms, I enjoy problems that are part code, part communication, and part archaeology 😊.

I care about maintainability, useful abstractions, sensible defaults, and leaving behind fewer cursed artifacts for the next person. Sometimes that next person is also me, which is how software enforces moral education.

What I Believe (On Good Days)

I don’t believe life compiles cleanly.

Most meaningful things arrive unfinished: ideas, careers, books, identities, plans, codebases, people. We improvise structure, call it a system, and hope the logs are kind.

So I try to work and live by a few principles:

  • Stay curious - confusion is often the first honest sign that something interesting is nearby
  • Write things down - memory is a corrupt database with terrible indexing
  • Ship when possible - perfection is often procrastination wearing a nicer jacket
  • Leave room for craft - code can be elegant, prose can be useful, images can carry thought
  • Keep a sense of humor - if the project fails, the postmortem should at least be readable

This site exists for exactly that reason: to keep a record of what I’m learning, making, noticing, breaking, fixing, and occasionally understanding.

On bad days, of course, I believe none of this and stare at walls professionally.

Other Things I Do (Instead of Resting Properly)

When I’m not working, I tend to orbit the same few obsessions.

Nothing !!!

The most favorite of my tasks - doing nothing! Absolutely nothing! Really, trust me, this is one of my superpowers! 💪

Photography

Street scenes, quiet moments, odd geometry, accidental cinema, purely abstract clicks that only be compared with a toddler’s scrabble, and visual evidence that I was paying attention while the day tried to pass unnoticed.

Reading

Fiction, myth, essays, philosophy, psychology, history, and books that make me underline half the page and then reconsider my entire operating system.

Writing

Notes, fragments, reviews, essays, unfinished starts, over-committed ideas, and the occasional attempt to make sense of engineering, language, thought, and the general inconvenience of being alive.

Building side project

Tiny tools, strange experiments, abandoned prototypes, elegant over-engineering, and deeply unnecessary things that somehow still feel important. Should I add: mostly unfinished! 😜

Thinking too much

Not technically a hobby, but it has shown impressive long-term commitment.

Elsewhere / Other Worlds

This site is the quiet central room. The rest of me is scattered across the internet like a badly documented distributed system.

Different corners hold different versions of me:

Photography / visual work
Code / technical work
Professional façade

Each platform contains a slightly different witness statement.
Together, they form something close enough to a personality.

Get In Touch

If you’d like to say hello, collaborate, talk books, talk code, talk cameras, or compare notes on beautifully avoidable complexity, feel free to reach out.

Email: hnrana@gmail.com

Or find me in one of the other corners of the internet listed above, where I may or may not be pretending to be more organized than I actually am.