mentoring across kerala - tink-her-hack, ksum and tinkerspace

Date : 02-2026

tinkerspace in kochi has basically become my second home. it's the maker space where a lot of my community stuff happens, and being around other people building things in the same room is a completely different energy than coding alone in my bedroom. so much of what i do now, the game jam, the teaching, the hackathons, radiates out from being plugged into that place. i keep saying it but the community half of building is as important to me as the building itself

this stretch has been heavy on mentoring, and honestly it's some of the most meaningful work i've done. i mentored at Tink-Her-Hack, which is TinkerHub's women's hackathon and genuinely one of the largest women's hackathons in the world, thousands of women building overnight across dozens of venues all over kerala. i was on the ground as a mentor across four different venues, helping teams debug, scope, and actually ship something by morning, and i ended up getting a mention for it, which meant a lot. i also mentored kids through Kerala Startup Mission, helping younger builders get from "i have an idea" to "i made a thing"

the mentoring even shows up in my repos. CraftConnect, for example, is something i built for a student i was mentoring, because sometimes the best way to teach someone is to build alongside them on a real thing they care about instead of a toy example. i've noticed the pattern in myself now, i can't just learn something and keep it, i have to turn around and hand it to someone else. maybe it's because people did exactly that for me when i was the kid on the bad laptop. either way, watching someone else get the "wait, i actually MADE that" spark is a high i don't think i'll ever get tired of