Akshay Mestry
Educator, software engineer and storyteller.
Hello, hello!!
I'm Akshay, an educator, engineer and currently an Assistant Professor at National Louis University. Before getting into academia, I worked at consulting firms, corporate product companies and startups. This cheeky corner of the internet is where I dump all that: the wins, the mistakes and everything messy in between, one story at a time.
I currently live in Chicago. I got my Master's in AI from DePaul University in 2025. I also have a special interest in natural language processing and reinforcement learning.
No socials, but let's connect.
Build and share
Love for open source.
I Open source!
I accidentally got started on it and I don't know why; I bloody loved it. Doing open source was and still is, a personal reminder to share my struggles and achievements/learnings with everyone and invite collaboration across various disciplines.
Fortunately, this naive belief in sharing has led me to contribute to and work at some amazing research labs and projects under the guidance of some super-duper talented people in the industry.
Contributed at
- Accenture
- Django
- National Louis University
- Microsoft
- AWS Boto3
- TensorIoT
In these labs, I worked on a different kinds of projects, from building performant machine learning models to eventually crafting numerical computing libraries. These projects and sometimes our clients (big and small) helped me reflect on both my technical depth and my knowledge gaps.
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A subset of core PyTorch features re-built in pure Python.
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An experimental re-implementation of a few NumPy features in Python.
Beyond these, I've also ended up speaking at a few tech meetups and conferences, rambling about my projects, my half-baked (somewhat condemning) thoughts on AI and how some frameworks actually work under the hood.
It wouldn't be possible if I hadn't explored this; in doing so, I realised I had a passion for teaching.
My teaching philosophy.
I believe that "true" mastery of something comes from sharing learnings from mistakes and past experiences. I love taking something dense, be it some hi-fi machine learning algorithm or some software design pattern nobody can be arsed to explain properly and making it click for someone who's never touched it before.
Early in my software engineering career, I came across a quote:
If you want to master something, teach it.
—Dr Richard Feynman
And I absolutely fell in love with this idea. Soon, I realised you can't really call yourself an SME until you can teach a concept to someone who knows next to bugger all about it and still put up with their questions without getting cocky about how much you know.
Thus began my journey into teaching. So far, I've taught...
My approach to mentoring's changed loads over the years, mind. It shifts depending on who's actually in front of me, what they need and, if I'm being honest, what kind of mood I'm in that day when they come asking for help.