Pravinraj

Acentra Health BUILD TO CARE 2026 Top 16 Teams

3-Hour Preliminary Round  ·  Acentra Health & Hackforge.ai  ·  2026

• Cleared the preliminary round to join the Top 16 teams advancing to the next round, with 350+ students participating.
• Built within a three-hour window, prioritizing what we could realistically deliver and making decisions under tight time constraints.
• Team: Harish Gautham, Caleb Devakumar, Hariharan Nandagopal, Ananya P.

Smart India Hackathon 2026 Internal Hackathon Finalist

24-Hour Hackathon  ·  Team of 6, REC Chennai  ·  September 2026

• Advanced as one of 45 finalist teams out of 550+ initial pitches in REC's SIH 2026 Internal Hackathon, working on SIH26053 (DRDO): Adaptive Variable Resolution 2.5D LiDAR Mapping for Dynamic Environment Perception.
• Built a variable-resolution mapping pipeline that allocates finer grid resolution near the sensor and coarser resolution at range, addressing sparse LiDAR returns at distance for dynamic environment perception.
• Built and presented our solution to the jury within 24 hours, balancing implementation, team decisions, and a clear explanation of our work.
• Team: Hariharan Nandagopal, Harish Gautham, Caleb Devakumar, Ananya P, Ashleena Gladice Princely.

Phoenix Hacks 2026 1st Place Winner

24-Hour Hackathon  ·  Phoenix Club, REC Chennai  ·  August 2026

• Won 1st Place in the Education & Future of Work Track at the 24-hour hackathon organized by Phoenix Club at Rajalakshmi Engineering College.
• Designed the overall system architecture and cloud backend, utilizing AWS Bedrock alongside Meta Tribe v2.

Containerized FastAPI Application & ECR Deployment

DevOps & Containerization  ·  August 2026

• Developed and containerized a Python FastAPI REST application using custom Dockerfiles, managing container lifecycle and port mapping.
• Pushed production container images to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) for repository management.
• Configured EC2 instances with IAM roles (AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryReadOnly) for secure, credential-less image pulling and execution.

Declarative Infrastructure via Terraform

Infrastructure as Code  ·  June 2026

• Provisioned AWS infrastructure (EC2 and S3) using declarative Terraform configurations instead of manual console setups.
• Configured an Amazon S3 remote backend to securely store and track state files.
• Deployed simple EC2 and S3 resources using basic workflow commands (init, plan, and apply).

Auto Scaling Under Live Load

AWS Infrastructure  ·  Load Testing  ·  May 2026

• Simulated a DoS-style load test using Apache Bench - 10,000 requests at a concurrency of 100 - against an internet-facing Application Load Balancer.
• Configured a CloudWatch Target Tracking policy capped at 50 req/target, successfully triggering the ASG to scale from 1 to 3 instances under a peak load of 594 req/target.
• Diagnosed an initial 100% connection timeout rate to a Security Group misconfiguration, and pushed the architecture to the AWS account ceiling, triggering a 16 vCPU quota limit.

Incident Sentinel

AWS Serverless Security Pipeline  ·  Dec 2025

• Architected a 100% serverless, event-driven security pipeline using S3, Lambda, and SNS - eliminating idle compute entirely and reducing costs to $0.
• Integrated Amazon Rekognition for real-time image analysis, achieving sub-second threat detection and triggering automated email alerts within <2 seconds of an S3 upload.
• Enforced strict least-privilege IAM policies across 3 separate AWS service boundaries to ensure complete secure isolation.

Why AWS Is a Hackathon Superpower

AWS Builder Center  ·  October 4, 2026

How leveraging AWS Bedrock, EC2, and serverless pipelines eliminates compute bottlenecks, reduces latency, and prevents rate-limit crashes during live hackathon demos.

Local AI Video Pipeline

Blog  ·  June 13, 2026

Built for the AI Video Generation Hackathon at REC Chennai: a deterministic, zero-GPU content pipeline running on local consumer-grade hardware.

Magic Until You Read the Spec

Blog  ·  May 3, 2026

I spent years thinking AI was something close to magic. Then I started building with it - and the curtain fell hard.