Hi, I'm Nikhil. I built NJ Cloud Printer.

When Google Cloud Print was retired, a lot of perfectly good printers quietly stopped being reachable from a phone. Mine was one of them: an ordinary printer plugged into a computer by USB, no Wi-Fi of its own, no interest in joining a network. Every time I wanted to print something from my phone I first had to move the file to the computer.

The printer manufacturers each had an app, and each app only cared about its own hardware. Nothing covered the simplest case: a printer that the computer next to it can already print to. So I built that. The phone sends the job to the desktop app, the desktop app hands it to the print queue the computer already uses, and the printer does what it has always done. No new drivers, no network configuration on the phone.

That single decision — print through the computer instead of trying to talk to the printer — is why brand does not matter much here, and why a twelve-year-old USB printer works as well as a new one. It is also the honest limit of the product: the computer has to be switched on with the desktop app running.

I built and shipped it alone: the Android app, the Windows and Linux desktop app, the web app, the backend, the payments, this website. There is a free tier because the first thing anyone wants to know is whether it works with their printer, and the only way to find that out is to print something.

I'm from Jaipur and I studied engineering at VIT, Vellore. Most of what I know about building software I learned by shipping things that other people then had to use — starting with college hackathon projects (an IoT farm system, a publishing portal for reporting on crime and politics) and a research paper on recommending safer travel routes from historical crime data. None of those were assignments I was given. They were things I wanted to see exist.

That has not really changed. I spend my working life as an engineer on product teams, and my own hours building products end to end, which is a different discipline: nobody hands you a spec, and every unglamorous part — the billing edge case, the install instructions, the refund email — is also yours. I like that. I'm drawn to problems where existing software has quietly decided a group of people don't matter: people with old printers, families organising a wedding without a planner, anyone whose setup is one step off the happy path.

The other thing I build is Muharat.in, which began as software for my own wedding — guests finding their own photos, one place for venues and schedules — and is now becoming a product for photography studios and event companies. It is the same instinct as the printer: I hit the problem myself, and building was easier than explaining why it hurt.

I write outside of code, too. I've put together a book of poetry — written over years, in the gaps between builds, and it has nothing to do with technology. Writing poems and writing software turn out to use the same muscle in different directions: both are about cutting until only the necessary thing is left. I also keep a YouTube channel called Code and Lassi — the name is not a metaphor; it is just the two things I'm most reliably doing.

If you use NJ Cloud Printer, or you're building something similar on your own and want to compare notes, my inbox is genuinely open: founder@njcloudprinter.shop.