London · since 2020
I build systems by day and make drinks by night.Most people call me Shaw.
Four worlds, each with its own page and its own CV. Pick the one you came for, or read the story below.
Five lessons, in the order I learned them. They look like different careers. They are the same one: how systems behave under pressure.
I grew up in New Delhi loving maths, physics and hard problems. In 2019 I earned LCSP at Safe Security there and interned with them, testing real websites and servers. Web apps, networks, mobile apps, a bit of reverse engineering. The first lesson stuck: every system has a pressure point, and someone will find it. Better that it is you.
I moved to London in 2020 to study Computer Science and started working kitchens and floors to pay for it. L'Antica Pizzeria, then Darjeeling Express, where I went from Chef de Rang to running the bar. A Saturday service taught me more about people than anything I had read.
I stood for election at Brunel's students' union and won. Two years as Vice President for the College of Engineering, Design and Physical Sciences, a trustee, and a member of Council and Senate. I chaired the AGM and the Student Assembly, fed 130 students for free during the cost of living crisis, and met the University of London when Brunel joined it.
In late 2025 the news felt overwhelming, so I started a weekend project to see it all on one map. A year later World Chaos Map is on v3.2: it reads 486 audited feeds plus GDELT, in over 100 languages, and rescores every country every four hours. Alongside it: MaetriXs, One Sentence, Public Opinion, and now Last Drink. All solo.
In my final year I am building a model that forecasts which way a person's routine is heading, from the sleep, movement and phone data in GLOBEM, and checks how far its own confidence can be trusted. It is the first step of LifeOS, a longer programme I started earlier this year: could selected parts of a person be modelled honestly, as a personal digital twin that updates as they change?
From my notes · Nov 2025
Suraj Shaw
Most engineers I know have never held a job where a stranger could shout at them and they had to answer calmly. I have. Five years of it. Here is what hospitality teaches you that no Computer Science degree does.
A dinner service is a distributed system. Kitchen, floor, bar, till and bookings, and it falls apart constantly. You learn to triage, reroute, and keep the part the guest sees stable while the back end is on fire. Sound familiar?
You cannot ask a guest to rate their night from one to ten every five minutes. You read body language, response time and tone. You build a mental model from incomplete data.
When the kitchen is down to one working burner, you do not cancel service. You change the menu, reset expectations, and still deliver something. That mindset transfers straight to incident response.
The best interface I ever designed was a conversation with a stranger at a bar.
Off the clock
The thread through all four
Read the room.Find the pressure point.Make the system hold.