37.7963°S 144.9614°E · Melbourne, Australia
Aurick Chatterjee
I’ve been unusually lucky in the people, places and opportunities that have shaped me.
I tend to become deeply attached to the things I care about. And when something matters to me, I usually end up building something around it.
37.8136°S 144.9631°E · Melbourne, Australia
Origins
I moved from Bangalore to Melbourne when I was ten. For a long time, I understood the world mostly by taking things apart.
At thirteen, that became software. I liked the feeling of starting with something I did not understand, staying with it for long enough, and eventually making it do something useful.
I still work that way. I study Finance and Business Analytics at the University of Melbourne, but most of what I know about building has come from trying things before I was quite ready, getting them wrong, and having patient people trust me enough to try again.
One of the earliest things I built was an automation program for a mobile game. There was nothing especially important about the program itself. I had made it for myself, and then other people started asking for it too. That forced me to learn how to turn something personal into something others could actually use, support and pay for. It became the first software I ever sold - and, without me realising it at the time, marked the beginning of Steadvance.
52.4227°N 10.7865°E · Wolfsburg, Germany
Germany
German started as a subject at school. Then, through the SAGSE scholarship, ten weeks in Wolfsburg changed the direction of everything. A host family who treated me like their own, a German school that didn’t slow down for me, and somewhere in those weeks the language stopped being a subject and started being mine.
There’s a saying among returned exchange students - the exchange only starts when you come home. It turned out to be true. The German Club at university, the community work with GASS and SAGSE, a national radio interview I was far too nervous for - all of it grew out of those ten weeks, and out of people who took a chance on a kid from Melbourne.
„Der Austausch beginnt erst, wenn man aus Deutschland zurückkommt.“The exchange only starts when you return from Germany.
Each bright point is somewhere I travelled during those ten weeks. We made the most of it.
In memoriam · Will Richter
For Will
Some things are much harder to build than software.
My friend Will passed away two days before we were meant to stand together for the German Club committee. He’d just turned nineteen.
In the days afterwards, I built willrichter.org because there were stories, photos and memories of him scattered everywhere, and I wanted there to be somewhere they could stay together.
Thousands of people have visited the site since. I wish there had never been a reason to make it.
Will has remained part of much of what came afterwards. The German Club community we had hoped to build together grew far beyond what I imagined. A fundraiser in his name brought together more than 150 people, and the Will Richter SAGSE Scholarship will now give future students the same kind of life-changing opportunity that shaped so much of my own life.
I have built larger and more complicated things. Nothing has taught me more clearly what a website can mean to people.
0.0000° 0.0000° · Everywhere between
The Atlas
The dots are real places. The lines are the journeys that have mattered to me.
Bangalore is where I was born. Melbourne is where I grew up, and still the place everything returns to. Wolfsburg gave me a second family. Berlin was where an exchange student who still worried about his German somehow ended up speaking at the Australian Embassy in front of diplomatic officials.
Other lines came later: Canberra and Spring Street through work in parliament; London, California and New York through people who trusted me to build things from the other side of the world.
Most of these journeys began because somebody opened a door for me. I try not to forget that.
37.8410°S 144.9666°E · Melbourne, Australia · ABN 38 390 708 723
Steadvance
Steadvance definitely did not begin with a business plan.
It began with people asking whether I could build something for them. A website. An automation. A tool to replace a spreadsheet that had become too complicated. I kept saying yes, usually before I knew exactly how I would do it.
Over time, those small projects became an independent software studio.
The part I enjoy most has never really been the code. It is the moment when someone explains a problem they have been living with for months or years, and we slowly work out that it does not have to stay that way.
While the business has grown, I try to stay directly involved with every client and project myself. I hope that part never changes.
Selected work · Melbourne → the UK → beyond
A few things I’ve built
These are a few projects that taught me something, helped someone, or simply gave me a reason to care about getting the details right.
“Very impressed with both their speed and technical ability. We’ll definitely be working with them again in the future.”Wesley Rowe, Managing Director, My Mobility UK
37.8110°S 144.9733°E · Spring Street, Melbourne
Parliament
I have had the chance to work in two parliaments, first in a federal electorate office and later at the Parliament of Victoria.
Before that, politics could sometimes feel abstract to me: policy, argument, institutions.
An electorate office makes it much harder to think that way. The phone rings because somebody has a problem. Often they have already tried several other doors. What feels like a small administrative task from one side may be the most important thing in that person’s week.
Later, working on research inside the Victorian Parliament, I saw a different part of the same process: how an idea slowly becomes something people might actually have to live with.
Both experiences made me more careful about the things I build. Good intentions are not enough. People need to be able to rely on what you make.
37.8136°S 144.9631°E · Any table in Melbourne
Rally
Somewhere between moving countries, learning German and spending too much time at a computer, there was always a table tennis table.
I played competitively when I was younger, and even joined a club in Germany with my host brother while I was on exchange. These days, I am much more likely to be found building something than training, but I have never quite lost the instinct to keep a rally going.
Your cursor is the near paddle. Click to serve.
No pressure. My host brother would probably beat both of us.
12.9716°N 77.5946°E · Bangalore → Melbourne → Wolfsburg
Four languages
Bengali, Hindi and English came early. German was the one I chose.
For years, it was something I studied. Then I lived with a family in Germany, made friends through it, gave speeches in it, made mistakes in it, and gradually stopped thinking of it as just another language.
Different parts of my life sound different. My name changes with them.
you are here
Say hello
A surprising amount of my life has come from conversations I had no way of planning for. So feel free to say hello - about a project, Germany, something I have built, or something completely unrelated. I read everything.