About

I am Toby Kurien, an electronics engineer who does software development for fun (and hopefully profit). I am a South African citizen of Indian origin.

What do I do? Well, the simple answer is that I am a freelance software engineer, and I work on my business Nextcloud Hosting. My Resumé has more details. I occasionally blog and micro-blog about technology and other interests.

The long answer regarding what I do is that I am experimenting with an alternate lifestyle. In late 2008 I decided to live a more anti-consumerist lifestyle. So I left the rat race, sold my shares in the company I co-founded, and started working on potentially fulfilling ventures. This is how I started creating web startups, mobile applications, and embedded hardware solutions – technologies that I am really passionate about. These technologies also help me in my quest to use first-world technology to solve third-world problems.

I am inspired by the "four hour work week" lifestyle as described in the book by Timothy Ferriss. I engineer my life by focussing on three things: Health, Time, and Finance. Since 2021, I started reducing my digital footprint, and adopted the philosophy of digital minimalism.

Gemini

I have a Gemini capsule, which can be reached using a Gemini browser, at gemini://tobykurien.com, or via a web proxy. I could've just linked you directly to my capsule via a web proxy, but that kind of defeats the point of Gemini, which is to create a new space on the internet, away from the attention- and surveillance-economy of BigTech, free of trackers and data mining, with a manaical focus on simplicity and pure textual content such as blogs.

If this …