About me
Skills
Projects
Contact
Blog
Credits

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Hi, I'm Himanshu.

I'm a native New Yorker and the founder of Real Bizarre Software, where I'm making independent games. Before this, I was a senior software engineer at Google. I spent four years in Learning & Education, mostly working on YouTube, and two years on Google Cloud Logging.

I value rigorous engineering, creative problem solving, and helping others become the best they can be.

When I’m not building, I enjoy weight training, poi spinning, and making videos. I also spend a lot of time enjoying single-player games. You can check out my list of games here.

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Skills

What I use, next to what I shipped with it.

Frontend & UI

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Angular
  • CSS & animation
  • Android / iOS

Web and mobile UI for YouTube's Ask button and Ask YouTube search. Also, this site, which I built from scratch.

AI products

  • Gemini
  • Prompt design
  • Evals
  • Streaming UX
  • Genkit

LLM features from prototype to production at YouTube — plus QuizBot and Gaming Wrapped on my own time.

Backend & data

  • Node.js
  • Java
  • Serving infra
  • Firestore
  • Data pipelines

Data pipelines for YouTube Courses and Quizzes; log streaming for Google Cloud's Logs Explorer.

Reliability

  • Monitoring & SLOs
  • Incident response
  • Feature flags
  • Staged rollouts

On-call for YouTube Ask and Search. Led the response to more than ten severe incidents.

Leading

  • Team lead
  • Mentoring
  • Roadmaps
  • PM & design collab

Led work on Quiz posts, YouTube's Ask button, and Ask YouTube prototypes, from design docs through launch.

Off the clock

  • CrossFit
  • Poi spinning
  • Video making
  • Game design
  • Testing out coffee shops

Currently playing through my backlog of old games on my TrimUI Brick.

and to navigate

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  • YouTube Ask Button

    The YouTube Ask button lets people ask questions about the video they're watching.

    I worked on this from the first designs through launch, as both a tech lead and an individual contributor. My work included the web and mobile UI, privacy-compliant logging, serving infrastructure, and model quality.

    The feature reached over 30 million monthly active users.

  • Ask YouTube

    Ask YouTube improves YouTube search quality for queries that do not have one right video answer.

    I was a lead prototyping engineer on the feature and supported the team delivering it. I owned large parts of the client experience, worked on answer quality, and helped make the new search experience reliable enough to launch at YouTube's scale.

    I also built the telemetry infrastructure and launch playbook.

  • YouTube Quiz posts

    The YouTube Quiz Posts feature allows content creators to add interactive quizzes to their videos (like this one!), so viewers can check what they understood.

    I led a team to deliver the complete creator and viewer experience across the creator studio and YouTube apps, as well as the website.

  • GCP Logging UI

    Making application logs easier to work with

    Google Cloud Logs Explorer lets developers search, filter, and monitor application logs.

    I worked on designing and implementing large parts of the UI to improve performance and build features customers had been asking for:

    • Logs histograms
    • Live log streaming, like tail -f
    • Time-based filtering
    • AngularJS Angular 9 migration

    A lot of the work was figuring out what customers were trying to debug, then making those workflows less painful.

    I also took part in the on-call rotation and worked on reliability and performance.

    That included virtualizing long lists, fetching logs in chunks, and caching repeated calculations to keep the interface responsive.

  • YouTube Learning Journeys

    Helping people follow a learning path on YouTube

    The YouTube Learning platform provides users with tools to construct a dedicated learning journey on YouTube. I supported the team across the entire stack, from the data pipeline to the serving infrastructure to the front-end UI.

    A significant aspect of this project was getting buy-in from leadership for a more "out there" experience on YouTube, which I helped through prototyping, and many, many meetings.

  • QuizBot.games

    A 20‑Questions game that guesses the video game you’re thinking of

    Think of a game; the bot asks smart yes/no questions and tries to guess it. I built it with React and an API that keeps track of the questions and answers.

  • Gaming Wrapped

    Upload your play history → get a shareable, AI‑generated year‑in‑review

    Drop in a CSV (e.g., HowLongToBeat/PlayTracker exports) and get a personalized slideshow with your highlights, narrative, and stats.

    • Next.js + Genkit (Gemini) server flows; React UI; Tailwind
    • Includes a public link for sharing your results

  • Synapse Video Editor

    Timeline editing, Remotion‑powered rendering, and a smooth creator workflow

    A web‑first video editor with desktop packaging that blends precise timeline interactions with programmatic rendering. Built for creators to stitch clips, integrate animated code snippets, and export polished videos.

    I built Synapse because I wanted a better way to edit my game devlogs.

Let's Connect!

Want to talk about games, software, or something you're making? Send me an email or find me on LinkedIn.

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Sharing My Journey

I like to share my experiences and learnings from the world. While my blog is currently on hiatus, you can explore my previous posts covering topics such as:

Check out more on my blog here

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