Hi, my name is
Ashok Bijoy Debnath.
I build for web and mobile.
I'm a software engineer specializing in building and occasionally designing web and mobile products. Currently, I'm focused on creating reliable, performant, and accessible digital experiences.
Get In TouchAbout Me
Hello! My name is Ashok and I enjoy building useful web and mobile apps. My interest in software development grew early in my career, when I worked on MobileTV features like program guides, scheduled recording, and picture-in-picture for Galaxy devices in Japan and Korea.
Fast-forward to today, and I've had the privilege of working at startups and large product companies like Microsoft, PayPal, Motorola, and Samsung, building across consumer devices, productivity tools, fintech, healthcare, and developer-facing platforms. My focus these days is building reliable, performant, and accessible products and digital experiences.
Here are a few technologies I've been working with recently:
- Java
- JavaScript (ES6+)
- Python
- Kotlin
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- Android
- React
- AWS
Experience Highlights
Software Engineer @ Microsoft
- Java
- C++
- Kotlin
- React
- Accessibility
- Fluent
- Delivered features for the Samsung Note 10 pre-install partnership (POP3 support, Bixby deep links, Email Compose V2 rollout, boot ANR fix), reaching 5.3M device activations with 87% active-user retention rate, beating the 43% deal model target by 44 points.
- Redesigned search for ~7M large-screen Android users with a two-pane adaptive layout, persistent navigation rail, consolidated search bar, and a zero-query surface with proactive contacts, upcoming events, and recent files.
- Shipped S/MIME for Android, #1 enterprise feature request, unblocking 6.4M seats across 49 customers. Rollouts include MDM certificate auto-delivery, compose-time signing and encryption, reading-pane decryption, and pre-send validation against the corporate directory.
- Led early Kotlin Coroutines adoption, bridging Bolt Tasks with suspend functions that ran on the existing Java executor pools. Enforced via a custom lint rule at ERROR severity that failed builds missing an explicit dispatcher.
- Contributed to Microsoft’s Fluent UI design system, the open-source subset of the team’s internal Office UI framework. Adopted by Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and external developers.
- Authored the keyboard navigation and screen reader accessibility layer for Office’s shared UI framework: focus management with F6/Ctrl+F6 region cycling, cross-surface hardware-key dispatch, and per-control accessibility API coverage.
Software Engineer @ PayPal
- Java
- Microservices
- React
- Node.js
- WebView
- Server-Driven UI
- Delivered Wallet feature parity (bank funding, balance, withdrawal) to French overseas-territory users as part of a cross-team regulatory program migrating ~675k accounts to mainland France’s legal framework ahead of a March 2022 anti-discrimination deadline.
- Built the in-app WebView layer of the tax and statements hub and inner-sourced React-Redux and Node.js changes across 4 web repos when the IRS lowered its 1099-K threshold from $20k and 200 transactions to $600.
- Designed a JSON-driven cross-platform native compliance halfsheet with version-based caching. Users saw escalating urgency as they approached the $600 1099-K reporting threshold, and the modular design allowed reuse across future compliance flows.
- Shipped the Digital Wallet 2.0 landing page on a server-driven UI pipeline, with progressive 150ms skeleton loading and bank funding, withdrawal, and 3DS card-confirmation flows. Extended the rendering framework with reusable components.
Software Engineer @ Motorola
- Java
- Python
- Android
- Wearables
- Google Cloud
- Developed Motobody, the fitness companion for Moto 360 smartwatches and their paired phones. Accelerometer, heart-rate, and GPS samples (on Moto 360 Sport) flowed from the watch to phone (over BLE) and Google Cloud backend.
- Integrated Google Maps to render workout routes from Moto 360 sensor data. The route screen was picked as one of the app’s Play Store hero screenshots.
- Rolled out a battery-efficient nightly sync using the newly released JobScheduler API, which batched the upload into a system-coalesced wake-up instead of waking the device on a fixed schedule.
- Introduced custom step and calorie goals, enabling users to pursue increasingly ambitious health objectives. Leveraged streaks and milestones to drive daily consistency and foster long-term habit formation.
- Added trend charts on the phone using MPAndroidChart that displayed fitness data over varied time frames.
Software Engineer @ Samsung
- Java
- C++
- NDK
- Chord SDK
- Developed Samsung MobileTV for Japan (1seg) and Korea (T-DMB). The app paired a standard-agnostic core (channel model, EPG, recording scheduler, playback state machine, copy-flag enforcement) with two thin adapters, one per standard, sitting over Samsung’s middleware layer.
- Implemented scheduled recording across EPG, a foreground service, and a persistent notification surfacing progress and stop controls. The service also re-read the EPG just before each scheduled start to absorb any last-minute broadcaster changes to the program schedule.
- Authored the playback UI, with tap-gesture channel switching, on-screen controls (scrub, channel labels, aspect-ratio toggle), and a Picture-in-Picture mode.
- Collaborated on Group Play P2P built on Samsung’s Chord SDK, which ran ZeroMQ-backed messaging channels over WiFi Direct. The native NDK layer handled low-latency media synchronization across the group.
Some Things I've Built
Featured Project
CRDT Engine
A real-time sync engine where every client holds a full local copy of the document and applies edits instantly - no network round-trips. When multiple clients edit concurrently, even while offline, their changes converge automatically through mathematically guaranteed merge semantics. No central server arbitrates conflicts.
- TypeScript
- WebSockets
- IndexedDB
- Fugue CRDT
Featured Project
Canvas Editor
A vector graphics editor that bypasses the DOM entirely, using WebGL 2 for GPU-accelerated rendering with instanced draw calls, a Quadtree spatial index for efficient hit testing, and multi-channel signed distance fields (MSDF) for resolution-independent text at arbitrary zoom levels. Geometry operations run in Rust compiled to WebAssembly.
- TypeScript
- React
- WebGL 2
- Rust/WASM
Featured Project
Code Archaeologist
A semantic search engine that parses code into syntax trees using Tree-sitter, indexes structural relationships in a Neo4j property graph, and answers queries via template-based and LLM-assisted Cypher translation with vector similarity search. Ask structural questions like “what calls processPayment within 3 hops?” instead of grepping for strings.
- Python
- TypeScript
- Neo4j
- Tree-sitter
Other Noteworthy Projects
view all projectsLite Raft
A distributed key-value store built on the Raft consensus algorithm in Go.
Vexel
An Android spatial memory game where players memorize and recall country flag positions.
Marquee
An Android movie search and personal library app built with Jetpack Compose.
MarkDone
A local-first, markdown-based project management desktop app for developers.
* Links for select projects will be added shortly.
What's Next?
Get In Touch
If you have a question or would just like to get in touch, please send me an email. My inbox is open, and I'll reply as soon as I can.
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