Welcome to my site that will perpetually be under construction.
I am Abhinav, and I go by Labadal or Hopafoot. My username is inspired by Sador who chopped off his foot, much like I shoot myself in mine with my choices.
After a coule of internships in the first half of university and enough covid lockdowns to drive anyone stir-crazy I wanted a change.
At this point in time, as most of you may well recall, the world had gone through a lot. We saw obscene obscene of privacy and a huge spike in people looking to make a quick buck off internet scams. We also saw our phones and computers cement their place in our lives as our most meaningful nexus to the world around us, video calls being the closest thing to human interaction we could reliably expect.
My friend Ani and I got together one night. By the next morning we were nursing a hangover on his living room floor, carbing up with idlies. Among the muffled rantings of anyone in such a situation, we started talking about a project that Ani wanted to start. It was built upon the same feelings that brewed within me. A frustration towards the way our phones went from a utility to a basic need yet somehow a constant distraction. A way for people we didn’t want to talk to- scammers, spammers, people from a former life- to reach us without any consent. His idea was to proxy phone calls through a service. This would allow people to create a gap between them and people they weren’t certain were deserving of access to them.
I on the other hand had recently been inspired by Signal and wanted to build my own end-to-end encrypted messging app as a project to hone my (at best questionable) skills. Too cheap to pay for Twilio to send OTPs to register phone numbers, I used an approach that I later learned was similar to Session’s and used high entropy random numbers to route messages. Along the way, I decided that it was easier for me to maintain a unique identifier per connection.
Somehow our goals kind of lined up. A couple of months later, I flew many many hours to return to University, but the foundation had already been laid, and work had begun.
It took some time and we made many mistakes. We were joined along the way by some of the most dedicated people we could ask for. Now we have Port, a messaging app by Numberless. We’re hoping that this starts the revolution towards bringing control access to you back into your hands.
To connect with me, you can do so over Port with this link