Sasi Moorthy

In my final year at Tagore Engineering College, the iPhone was making waves and I wanted in. I built a music player for my project — storing tracks, playlists, playback — but I couldn't afford a real device, so the whole thing ran on the simulator.

It sounds trivial in 2026. In 2010 it wasn't. ARC had only just arrived, Core Data was brand new, and most people were still doing manual retain-release by hand. The project did well, and it planted the root of everything that followed.

After graduating I went through three companies in about a year — an ERP shop I left in a week, a startup that couldn't land projects, and a dev shop that moved me off iOS onto cross-platform tooling I couldn't connect with. My confidence went with them.

I bought the bank-exam books, ready to leave tech entirely. Then in May 2012, Karya Technologies offered me a junior iOS role at the last possible moment. That's where the real journey began.

Karya built mobile apps on top of Microsoft Dynamics, and I built a lot of them in one year: a schema-driven iPad client for Dynamics NAV, a split-view CRM with a reporting dashboard, a supply-chain app with live vehicle routing — plus complete demo apps for restaurant ordering and airline booking.

This was the pre-Swift era. If you wanted a carousel or a custom transition, you built it yourself with Core Animation. After a year I'd hit the ceiling of enterprise client work — I wanted to build something that reached millions.

CricHQ was that something: the Wellington-based cricket scoring and social platform founded by Stephen Fleming and Brendon McCullum. I joined their new Chennai office on day one, alongside my friend Karthik — working on CricEngine, the shared C++ scoring core, and building the Duckworth–Lewis calculator from scratch with the New Zealand team.

A year in, I was promoted to lead the iOS team, mentoring engineers and planning sprints with leadership across time zones. Then the IPL contract the growth plan rested on didn't come through, and the Chennai office wound down — my first real lesson in how startups end.

LeanSwift handed me a blank page: an Infor M3 ERP services company that wanted to go mobile, with me as its only mobile developer. I prototyped my way to a budget, then spent four years building the platform — a core that grew to cover around seventy M3 operations, offline sync, barcode scanning through cameras and Bluetooth guns, and apps localized into Japanese and Swedish.

By the end I'd grown the team from one to more than ten, shipped MobileFirst and a suite of field apps for US clients like Merchant Metals and Rudd Equipment, and was flying to the USA to sit with customers — trips that lined up with WWDC 2017 and 2018, where I talked M3 integration and the Swift migration with Apple engineers.

After four years at LeanSwift, my wife and I decided to see the world before our son got older and a move got harder. I interviewed widely — including the usual giants — and adidas Runtastic in Linz is what felt right. I moved alone in September 2019, then brought my family over in February 2020, right after our son's third birthday.

Two weeks later, the world shut down.

No family nearby, no language, and a lot of uncertainty. We held on, kept our son safe, and got through it — and I poured myself into the work: learning how a large-scale app is really architected, taking on more ownership, becoming a release manager. The Workout Creator redesign I led through that stretch became one of the pieces of work the company most appreciated, in 2021.

In 2023 my wife restarted her career in Vienna, so we moved from Linz and switched our son's school. A few months later, adidas decided to close all its Austrian branches and laid everyone off. I'd been through shutdowns before — CricHQ, Amos InfoTech — so I knew how to handle it. I stayed on the transition team through the end of 2024, shipping the adaptive training plan and sport-activity sync on the way out.

The Austrian job market was rough in early 2025, but five years of contacts paid off, and I joined Dynatrace that June. After fourteen years building things people use, I now build the things engineers use — mobile SDKs, crash reporters, and the monitoring tools that keep other apps alive. It's a completely different world, and I'm learning every day.