About Ravi

Ravi Mehta spent five years as a senior software engineer at Asana before he started writing about software for a living. The transition was deliberate: he had grown tired of every productivity-app comparison he could find in the consumer press not knowing what a P95 latency number meant, what a context window actually constrains, or why “this app supports markdown” is not the same statement as “this app round-trips markdown faithfully.” He left Asana in 2021 to write the kind of comparisons engineers want and consumer publications had stopped writing.

Theodora hired him in September 2025, two weeks after the publication launched. He owns productivity, note-taking, focus, AI assistants, and AI coding tools. His tests are deliberately reproducible: he runs a fixed battery of tasks against each tool and publishes the time each one took.

Credentials in detail

• MS, Computer Science — Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science (2016)
• BS, Computer Science — University of California, Berkeley (2014)
• Member: Association for Computing Machinery

Pre-Lab work

Senior software engineer at Asana, 2016–2021. Ravi worked on the search and filters team, where his work on result ranking and query latency informs how he thinks about UX in productivity software today. He has also published technical writing in Increment magazine and Fast Company.

Editorial focus

Ravi writes the productivity, AI tools, and coding-assistant verdicts. He holds the line on technical accuracy in any article that mentions latency, model versions, context windows, or memory.

Conflicts of interest

Ravi has no affiliate accounts, no equity in any productivity or AI company, and no consulting relationships with the software vendors his work covers. He owns Asana stock he received as an employee, vested before 2021; he has not bought or sold shares since leaving the company. Asana is not currently named in any winner verdict on this site, and any future article that names Asana as winner would be reviewed and signed off by Theodora before publication.

Recent work

Authored

• What's the Best AI Coding Assistant in 2026? · Apr 3, 2026
• What's the Best AI Writing Assistant for Long-Form Work? · Nov 3, 2025
• What's the Best Focus Timer App? · Nov 30, 2025
• What's the Best Note-Taking App for Researchers? · Oct 4, 2025