About
I'm Charan. I build intelligent systems — and the small ones that run my mornings.
I'm an AI & Automation Engineer in Bangalore. By day I ship production LLM systems — a Springer-published model that reads chest X-rays well enough for a radiologist to take seriously, and document pipelines that quietly run themselves. Before all of that, I wrote real-time control code for jet engines at DRDO, where a millisecond of lag isn't a bug — it's a flameout.
FlowPack is the relaxed version of that instinct. Same itch — make the machine do the boring part — at a much friendlier scale. Six little workflows that handle the ten minutes of admin I used to do half-awake, so I can spend that attention on the hard problems instead.
This is one project. There are 18 more — and those jet engines — over at charanreddy.dev. Fair warning: it's a bigger workshop than it looks.
What I learned building this
Five honest takeaways.
Plumbing is a feature
The clever part of an automation isn't the API call — it's the boring glue. Empty states, retries, a polite User-Agent, a confirmation reply. Get the plumbing right and the magic takes care of itself.
Credentials are a design decision
Keeping every key in a credential instead of a node is a five-minute habit that saves you from a public-repo heart attack. I built the whole pack so it could be shared without redacting a thing.
A Code node beats a clever node
n8n has a node for everything, but ten lines of plain JavaScript are easier to read and reason about than a chain of UI toggles. I reach for the Code node the moment logic gets interesting.
Friction is the real enemy
The Telegram capture flow exists because the best note-taking app is the one already open. If a habit needs an app launch, it dies. Meet yourself where your thumbs already are.
Tools you use daily get fixed fast
I dogfood all six. When the briefing arrived at the wrong time or an email looked ugly, I felt it the next morning — which is exactly the feedback loop you want.
Collaborate
Want to build something — or break something interesting?
Let's talk. I'm good company on a hard problem and tolerable on an easy one.
Available for new projects
Have an idea?
Let's talk.
Want to build something — or break something interesting? I'm always up for a sharp problem. Pick whichever door is easiest.