Not an agency. A practice.

run by one builder, for builders

こんにちは。

I'm Aditya Vivek Thota. Most of the internet knows me as XQ: staff SWE at Visa by day, builder of CLI tools and agentic workflows after hours, writing online since 2018. This page is the story, not the pitch.

First, the name

XQ is a username I came up with back in the day. Everyone has one, right? Short, easy to remember, and mine never got retired.

It stuck for over a decade: Eden of XQ, GitHub, this site. The through-line is simple. I write things down, then build around the writing.

A digital home

Over the years I built so many random things: CLIs, feeds, publications, experiments that went nowhere. I wrote all over the internet: essays, explainers, diaries, poetry. It all lived scattered across platforms I do not own.

XQBuilds is my answer to that scatter. A digital home for everything I do, build and have to offer: the tools, the writing, the services. One address, under a name I have carried for over a decade.

Words as leverage

I write to think. An idea that survives a paragraph is an idea I actually hold; the rest was fog. Any concept is learnable if approached with the right mindset.

I also write to remember. Every essay is a note to a future me who will face the same problem having forgotten the answer. And I write to return the favor: most of what I know came from strangers who wrote things down, so I leave my notes where strangers can find them.

Build in public, always

I build in public because hidden work teaches nobody, least of all me. A demo with ten users finds more flaws than a month of polishing in private, and the notes I publish along the way become the documentation I would otherwise never write.

It also keeps me honest. When the process is visible, shortcuts show. So the repos, the essays, the half-finished experiments: they stay out where anyone can inspect them.

The person behind the keyboard

Off the keyboard: I write diaries and poetry at Eden of XQ.

I read more than I publish: papers, essays, manuals, the occasional novel. Most weekends hold a long walk and a longer backlog of ideas that will never all get built. The list is the point; it means curiosity still outruns capacity.