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Spark Lab
Spark Lab Meetup

The Hacking Habits

From cracking captchas to commanding AI agents

Varunkumar Nagarajan

Agenda

"By the end of this talk, I want you to go home and hack something."
01 About Me 18 years of building things
02 The Early Days Blogging, captchas, hackathons, robots
03 Life Hacks When hacking meets parenting
04 The Covid Era Mute buttons and hackathon highlights
05 The AI Era Hacking my kids' school experience
06 Enter the Agents From scripts to autonomous AI teammates
07 Closing The four hacking habits

/me

Career Timeline

2008 Joined D. E. Shaw India, Recon team
2008-15 Backoffice systems - Prism, GLO, MEWB
2015 Arcesium spinoff, started UI/UX team, built Report Manager & Iris
2019 Started Trinity
Today 18 years and counting

Personal

  • Married, two kids
  • Wildlife photographer
  • Loves Hackathon
Varunkumar Nagarajan
Chapter 1
The Early Days
2008 – 2012
SPOT & SOLVE

The Early Days

2008 - 2014

Blogging & IRCTC Captcha

Started a tech blog. Featured as a top tech blogger. Cracked the IRCTC captcha for faster bookings.

PlanMan

SMS/missed-call based workflow management. Won Yahoo! Hackathon.

github.com/varunkumar/plan-man

filter-fb & filter-twitter

Userscripts to clean up social media feeds. Filter keywords, hide likes. Before apps were a thing.

github.com/varunkumar/filter-fb

VBot & WebUSB Snake

A quadbot that walks and dances. Snake game on Arduino via WebUSB from Chrome.

github.com/varunkumar/vbot

TrackR

Hack at Sequoia::Hack 2014. One of many hackathon entries over the years.

github.com/varunkumar/TrackR

70+ Open Source Repos

Chrome extensions, VS Code plugins, web experiments. Contributing and learning in public.

github.com/varunkumar
Blog Yahoo! Hackathon win IRCTC captcha VBot quadbot WebUSB Snake Blog Yahoo! Hackathon win IRCTC captcha VBot quadbot WebUSB Snake
Chapter 2
Life Hacks
When hacking meets parenting
SPOT & SOLVE

Family Life, Hacked

2013 - 2018
$ whois adhiyan.in
Domain available. Registering...
$ whois aganvee.in
Domain available. Two for two.
Aganvee
aganvee.in
Adhiyan
adhiyan.in
Wedding Invite
divvy.varunkumar.me
Baby Track
Raspberry Pi + AWS IoT
Chapter 3
The Covid Era
Lockdowns, online school, and a burst of creativity
SPOT & SOLVE

Pup Pad

2020

School went virtual overnight. My son was struggling with mute/unmute on video calls.

Built Pup Pad: an Arduino Leonardo with physical buttons for mute, video toggle, and posting attendance in chat.

Works with Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, BlueJeans. The Arduino acts as a USB keyboard sending shortcuts.

Problem solved. Kid happy.

Pup Pad
SPOT & SOLVE LEVEL UP THE TOOLS

Hackathon Highlights

2020 - 2022

BringBackMyWorkspace

Spatial audio office. Won "Mind Boggling Hackers" at Arcesium Hackathon 2020.

Squasher.pro

"Most Creative Hack" 2021. GPT-2 + BERT summarizer, before ChatGPT existed.

Camlio

Camlio

Real-time background removal via OpenCV + TensorFlow. Grand prize, Arcesium Hackathon 2019.

Nemo

Early AI assistant for Aquata

Chapter 4
The AI Era
Leveraging AI to hack my kids' school experience
SPOT & SOLVE AUTOMATE THE TEDIOUS

Digitizing the School Diary

2025

School issues a physical paper diary. In 2025.

  • Photographed every page of the diary
  • AI extracted all events, holidays, assemblies
  • Built school-calendar: React + Tailwind, filterable by category
  • Deployed at calendar.adhiyan.in. Shared with parents. Overnight hit.

Built the whole site in under an hour. June 2025.

My kids became superstars overnight.

School Calendar
SPOT & SOLVE AUTOMATE THE TEDIOUS

Fixing the School Portal

The portal is terrible.

  • No notifications
  • Unstable, frequently down
  • Notices, homework buried deep
  • Parents miss everything

Wrote to the school. Wrote to the developers. Got nowhere.

Built parentsalarm-alert:

  • Puppeteer auto-logs in
  • Extracts notices, homework, stationery
  • Watermark storage, no duplicates
  • Slack channels per child
  • GitHub Actions cron

Both Adhiyan's and Aganvee's feeds are live.

Slack Notifications

Scripts worked. Automation worked.

But the world was changing.

Coding agents were becoming autonomous.

I wanted to build something more intelligent.

Chapter 5
Enter the Agents
From scripts to autonomous AI teammates
LEVEL UP THE TOOLS
OpenClaw

OpenClaw

Clawdbot → Moltbot → OpenClaw

Long-term Memory

Remembers context across conversations

Tool Use

Can call APIs, run code, browse the web

Always On

Runs 24/7 on dedicated hardware

Multi-Agent

Delegates tasks to specialized agents

Skills & Agent Ecosystem

Pluggable skills and agents that can be composed and shared across workflows

Self-Upskilling

Agents learn from interactions and improve their capabilities over time

Channel Integrations

Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, email, web. Interact with agents wherever you already are.

"Think Jarvis from Iron Man. Ask it anything. It learns. It delivers."

The Setup & Security

THE SETUP

  • Mac Studio as the workhorse
  • macOS VM for isolation
  • Slack & Telegram integration
  • LLMs via GitHub provider

SECURITY

Agents have access to email, GitHub, APIs, school data.

  • macOS VM sandboxing
  • Scoped permissions per agent
  • Full audit trail
~ $ openclaw status Naga ● online Cobra ● online Boa ● online Viper ● online Krait ● online Momba ● online 6 agents ready. Mac Studio macOS VM OpenClaw GitHub LLM
VM ISOLATED scoped • audited
SPOT & SOLVE AUTOMATE THE TEDIOUS LEVEL UP THE TOOLS

The Snake Squad

Each agent has a name, role, email, GitHub account, and X handle.

Naga

Naga

Chief of Staff. Delegates tasks.

Viper

Viper

Principal Engineer. Architecture.

Cobra

Cobra

Frontend Engineer. UI and design.

Boa

Boa

Backend Engineer. APIs and infra.

Krait

Krait

Test Engineer. Quality and validation.

Momba

Momba

Study Buddy. Helps kids with school and homework.

AUTOMATE THE TEDIOUS

My Workflow

Assign to Naga → Breaks down → Delegates → Mission Control

School Work

Homework help, event tracking, parent notifications

Photography Business

Client management, editing workflows

Daily Feeds

News, tech updates, curated content

Kids' Learning

Educational content, concept explanations

Mission Control
SPOT & SOLVE AUTOMATE THE TEDIOUS LEVEL UP THE TOOLS

Momba: The Study Buddy

  • RAG system for school questions via Slack
  • Kids can print directly from Slack
  • Auto-extracts contests and events, sends reminders to parents
@momba
When is the next science exhibition?
March 15th. Want me to help prepare?

My son doesn't use ChatGPT or Claude directly. He talks to the agent in Slack.

Homework help. Concept explanations. Conversations. He finds it more natural to talk to a familiar agent.

All four habits converge here.

Tools I Use

Not a lot of fancy ones. Simplicity wins.

Mac Studio The workhorse behind all the agents
GitHub Copilot My favorite coding agent
Claude.ai Writing and brainstorming
LM Studio Local models for offline and private workloads.
Gemini & Grok Image and video generation.

The Four Habits

SPOT & SOLVE

See a problem, build a fix. Don't wait for permission.

AUTOMATE THE TEDIOUS

If you do it twice, script it. If you script it, schedule it.

LEVEL UP THE TOOLS

Yesterday's hack becomes today's platform. Keep evolving.

You've been watching these build up throughout the talk.

Varun
Every hack I showed you today started the same way: a small annoyance I refused to accept. A captcha. A paper diary. A mute button. None of them were meant to become anything.

But small hacks compound. The captcha cracker made me a blogger. The blogger won hackathons. The hackathons taught me to build fast. Building fast gave me agents. Now the agents build for me.

Start small. Stay curious.
The compounding takes care of itself.

Thank You!

Varunkumar Nagarajan