On a page of Olympic television credits, Vaibhav Rai’s name sits among the software developers. Around it are producers, directors, editors, designers and engineers. The project is an immersive livestream of the Beijing Winter Games, nominated for Outstanding Digital Innovation at the 2023 Sports Emmys. In another part of Rai’s working life, the credits are smaller: a writer, a narrator, someone making the music, someone responsible for concept and video. Here, too, his name appears. The production is a story you can listen to.
The two credit lists make an unusual introduction to a Gurgaon software engineer. One belongs to international sports broadcasting. The other belongs to The Project Quote, the writing and storytelling venture he founded. Both involve entertainment, although a poem and an Olympic ice rink have rather different requirements. An ice rink, for one thing, is much harder to fit into a paragraph.
A name in the credits
Rai’s Olympic credit is specific. The 44th Sports Emmy programme lists him in the software-development team for the XXIV Olympic Winter Games project titled The World’s First Immersive 8K Livestream. He appears alongside James Loosli, Rohit Mallah, Mauricio Mesa, Parul Raheja, Pushpinder Singh and Mateusz Spiewak. The production was nominated; the category’s eventual winner was McEnroe vs McEnroe.
That distinction leaves the achievement in its proper proportions. Rai contributed to a recognised production with a substantial team. The credits give software its place in the same enterprise as camerawork, editing and production design. Television can make the finished picture look effortless. Its personnel list has a less romantic view of the matter: many jobs, many names, each doing something the picture needs.
For the Beijing Games, NBC Sports selected Cosm to supply immersive streaming feeds. Delivered through the NBC Olympics VR by Xfinity app, the production included more than 150 hours of coverage. Its formats included 180-degree live views and 360-degree on-demand material. Figure skating, ice hockey, snowboarding and freestyle skiing were among the sports involved. Those are production-wide details, the setting for Rai’s credited contribution.
Delhi, before the dome
Earlier in his biography, the scale is a university rather than a broadcast. Rai attended Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University between 2015 and 2018. His listed activities include coordinating a sports meet and an annual cultural festival, along with public-relations work for a university publication group. Sport, cultural events and publishing were already appearing beside one another on the same page.
During that period, The Project Quote began. The venture gives 2017 as its founding year and describes its start in quotes and articles posted to Instagram. In November of that year, it organised a Delhi open-mic and poetry event called Rhythimic Concursion. Writing had acquired a physical gathering: words on a social feed, then words delivered in a room.
The venture’s listed activities include story writing, content writing, poetry events, advertising and collaborations. Its early description also names a collection of publishing and social platforms, from WordPress and YouTube to Pinterest and Quora. A small media project can have quite a large set of doors. The practical invitation was to people who wanted to contribute ideas and work on them.
- 2017The Project Quote begins; Delhi poetry event in November.
- 2020Audible Tales episodes carry concept and video credits.
- 2023Olympic livestream credit in the Sports Emmy programme.
- 2024A public question about cached API data.
A story gets a voice
By 2020, The Project Quote was producing Audible Tales, a storytelling series made with multiple writers and narrators. Rai is credited for concept and video on several episodes. The role is useful to keep precise. A founder’s name can become shorthand for an entire project; the episode credits show who wrote, who spoke and who supplied the other parts.
Take Just Five More Minutes, published in April 2020. Pooja Sharma wrote the story, Trisha Haldar recited it, and Sandeep Nemi supplied the introductory music. Rai’s credit covers concept and video. The tale concerns childhood summer holidays, a subject with no need for a giant screen. Its published running time is about two minutes. The invitation asks for a little of a listener’s day.
She Asked, released in August that year, names Anubhuti Anup for both story and narration. Elsewhere in the series, Music Is Powerful; Always gives Rai a writing credit as well as the concept and video credit, with Ruby Yadav reciting. These are different arrangements of collaborators around different pieces. The series makes the division of labour unusually easy to see.
There is something pleasing about such modest credits. They do not require a grand theory of creativity. A writer writes. A narrator gives the writing a voice. The other contributors help turn it into a finished piece. For Rai, the resulting catalogue adds actual creative production to a biography that also contains professional software work.
The everyday work of code
The software side has its own public traces. Rai has described working with Unity, React, BabylonJS and Tailwind CSS. His GitHub account identifies Cosm and links to The Project Quote. The account’s biography currently offers a single word: “Learner.” It is a remarkably economical introduction in a professional world that has never been accused of using too few adjectives.
“Learner.”
Vaibhav Rai’s GitHub biography
On February 23, 2024, he opened an issue in the Redux Toolkit repository about API caching. He described generating endpoints with OpenAPI, adding cache tags, then fetching a list of users and the details of an individual user. He expected fresh information but was still seeing cached data. His question set out the workflow and asked what he was doing wrong.
It is an ordinary technical problem, and that ordinariness makes it a useful detail. An engineering career contains the visible credits and the less ceremonial work of describing a problem clearly enough for another developer to examine it. The question gives a concrete example of Rai working through application behaviour. There is no need to decorate it with an invented late-night breakthrough.
A reading room with a shop next door
The Project Quote’s website places a blog beside a shop. The shop navigation includes star maps, zodiac maps, quote posters, dictionary frames and illusion lamps. The blog has its own spread of subjects: film, television, books, travel, poetry and relationships. The homepage offers two straightforward routes, one to read and one to browse products.
Its archive includes an article about autobiographies, another about screen adaptations of books, and pieces responding to Indian films and television. The individual articles have their own bylines. This is a publishing venture with contributors, rather than a reason to assign every sentence on the site to its founder. The distinction matters when describing someone whose work often involves collaboration.
Even the site’s structure tells part of the story without needing a motivational speech. There is a submission route, a place for articles and a catalogue of objects. Writing and commerce occupy the same address. A visitor can arrive with time to read, an idea to submit or a present to find. Rai’s venture makes room for each of those different intentions.
More people in the picture
Rai has also publicly announced a promotion to Lead Software Engineer at Cosm. In that announcement, he describes taking more ownership, leading a team, mentoring colleagues and becoming more involved in engineering’s people and management work. He thanks Brian DeBoer for guidance and support. His stated next steps include continuing to learn and helping the team grow.
The Project Quote has expressed its own ambition: a platform through which writers can reach a larger reading audience, with room for bloggers and entertainment videos. The ambition concerns distribution as well as creation. Making something is one task; arranging a place where other people can encounter it is another. The venture’s publishing channels give that intention a visible form.
Another venture appears in his public work history: Atharva Food And Agro Processing, where he is listed as a founder. The business names Indore as its location and links to Annrisha Foods. Its team page carries the same background in Cosm and The Project Quote. This adds food to a professional record already containing technology and media, without making the companies interchangeable. Each has its own business and its own audience.
Outside his work, Rai lists content creation, travelling and cooking among his interests. They are straightforward preferences, worth leaving at that. A hobby does not have to explain an entire career to earn a sentence in someone’s biography. Here, cooking also sits beside a named food venture, while content creation has a visible catalogue of episodes and publishing projects.
Across these projects, Rai’s biography contains several kinds of participation: university event coordination, founding a media venture, producing stories with collaborators, and developing software for entertainment. The credits remain the most useful guide. They place him among other people doing identifiable work. At the end of an Olympic production or a short narrated tale, his name is there, doing its particular job.