About - Milan Salvi

Who I Am

I’m Milan Salvi, a software engineer in Ambernath, India, and I’ve been shipping software for 27 years.

I started in 1999 as a commerce student at St. Xavier’s in Mumbai, teaching myself how machines learn. The eight little AI programs I hand-coded in 2000 are still on this site, running exactly as they did then. The Y2K Lab is the oldest thing here and quietly my favourite.

The road since has not been the usual one. I spent years in audit and accounting systems: SAP implementations, financial reporting, the world of ledgers. Then software pulled me back for good. It turned out to be the useful kind of detour, because I read a balance sheet as comfortably as a stack trace, and most of what clients ask me to build sits exactly between the two.

Since 2014 the work has been AI and automation full-time: models, pipelines, and the unglamorous integration work that decides whether any of it survives contact with a real business. Three hundred and some projects on, the pattern holds. The hard part is rarely the algorithm.

How I Work

Plain speech

If a project is going badly, you hear it from me on a Friday, not from a missed deadline in a month. And if the thing you want built should not be built at all, I say that too, before it costs you anything.

Working software early

Short cycles, something you can open at the end of each one. A URL beats a slide deck, and if an idea turns out to be the wrong one, we find out while it is still cheap to change.

Built to outlast me

The oldest code on this site has run untouched since 2000. Every handover comes with the code, the credentials and a runbook in plain English. Things should keep working long after my involvement ends.

One engineer

No account managers, no hand-off to a junior you have never met. The person you talk to is the person who builds it, which also means I take a small number of projects at a time, on purpose.

The Rest Does the Proving

The formal version, with dates, employers and certifications, is on the resume. The evidence is on the projects page, and the things you can actually hire me for are under services. And if you want to see what my code looked like in 2000, the Y2K Lab will not let me delete it.