Abhinav is the crust of the litter, you know? Old school JVM hacker. Loves log files. Wishes he was programming Haskell. The usual.

Big data projects were his thing, but we ripped him from his comfortable Cave of Analysis and shoved him into a world of Clojure and Emacs. He's never stopped thanking us.

He would love it if you'd go for a long bicycle ride to Mysore with him tomorrow. Bring some of those little bananas.

Kitty started writing code with Borland Turbo C++ and Visual Basic in high-school, but then quickly moved to Ruby when he discovered _why's poignant guide. He was a part of GSOC'2011, and contributed to GNOME.

Since then, he has hacked a fair bit of Ruby, consulted on a variety of Ruby on Rails projects, and helped build RubyMonk.

He loves cycling, listening to noise rock, and has recently re-discovered his fondness for Snakeboarding.

Like a rock. Which is to say, she has tenacity. Not the way a Ford is "like a rock". Deepa drives. One supposes a Ford drives, too. But Deepa will outlast even a gas guzzler from the 60's. So she's more like a rock than a ford. In both ways.

Deepa's got a rainbow-coloured past. Starting startups, running businesses, crunching big numbers, building robots, and tearing up backroads in a cloud of dust that implies the closing credits will scroll by soon with a really kickin' outtro. At nilenso, she's tasked with figuring out how to turn us from a cute little boutique software consultancy into a dominant multinational co-operative corporation. No big deal.

Deepa is a stealth semi-luddite, so don't be surprised if she convinces you your smartphone is not the future of your life -- or that data expiry and encryption should be an everyday concern. Oh, she also speaks half a dozen languages and knows everyone you know but she is almost definitely probably not a secret agent.

Govind will never assault you with words, but he is always listening intently to what you have to say... which is often a pleasant counterbalance to the rest of us. One doesn't usually consider thoughtful and considered commentary an essential skill, but he has a way of making it appear so.

Govind is actually a Biologist in disguise. He's spent most of his career in BioTech and found his way into hardcore software development through an inherent love of Category Theory and Haskell.

If you see Govind riding his bicycle around town to get to a local classical music performance, we suggest you follow him.

Nivedita joined nilenso straight after finishing her engineering in computer science. She learned programming by building a school project in C++. Fortunately, C++ didn't have as adverse an impact on her as one would imagine. She has been dabbling with code ever since, and is now firmly in the Ruby camp. In the last one and half years, she worked on a suite of three open source applications built in Rails and wrote code for a product: a Twitter client app for groups. She loves learning new stuff, and can these days be seen writing AngularJS with great happiness.

Noopur is a recent National Institute of Design graduate. She'll tell you what's wrong with your wood grains, straighten your kerning, balance the colour palette of your lunch, and generally make you a better person.

Neena has worked on a rails application that pander to competitive programmers, on libraries that help developers control anonymity software, on backend systems written in Lisp that enables efficient spamming.

Sandy interned at Cisco and Zopper before joining nilenso. An early riser and a straight shooter, Sandy loves writing Clojure, riding his bicycle, breakfasting at MTR, and fixing his bicycle (in that order). He only uses editors that were created after he was born.

Shafeeq's quiet confidence and smiling demeanor belie an ember of passion searing just beneath the surface. When he first joined us, he was loath to engage the ethically treacherous Java ecosystem and longed for the purity of Python. He is no fan of Oracle, no fan of yesteryear's software meatgrinder, and no fan of ignorance. Neither are we.

To that end, we traded him an unlimited library, which he chews through like an industrial tree harvester, for a tempered approach to Free Software. He now builds software with Clojure and ClojureScript with the same passion we first saw in him.

Srihari is a FOSS enthusiast, Gnome, and Gimp lover. He contributed to eclipse in GSoC'2011, made a spotlight-like tool for gimp, and contributes occasionally to diaspora. He practices minimalistic and user centric design for the web. He loves products and seeks the thrill in solving people's problems. He blogs, plays basketball, and performs carnatic music ocassionally.

Steven spent the last decade working for DRW Trading, ThoughtWorks, Adxstudio, The Canadian Department of National Defence, THE MAN, and some other people. Also himself. Not in that order. Whatever, you don't care -- he's obviously just an ineffective old man.

Steven will drink you under the table at the conference of your choosing.

I have heard eggs help when you “WFH”😜

In the life of human beings, there is dissatisfaction on the right and gratitude on the left. Frustration and discontent cannot last and will, given enough time, always give way to gentleness and purpose. Unni, like all of us, is forever traversing this bridge. Coarse and sharp is the boredom of working for multinational corporations, building Yet Another CRM for an unknown customer to who-knows-what-end. Finer and softer come the challenges halfway across the bridge: Can I find the same joy in GoLang that I find in LISP? If the bridge is rigid and swaying, how soft and light on my feet must I be to maintain my balance? Is it true that the smoothest loop drawn on the surface of the Earth by my motorcycle contains every secret to the Universe? If I am grateful now for this slice of pizza, what possible discontent could disturb me from an unlived future? Have I crossed the bridge or have I become the bridge?

Varun is a front-end developer and designer who embraces creativity in all its forms. A dancer, boxer and prolific note-taker, he also co-runs 'Creative Mornings Bangalore'.