About Sunil Sandhu

From law degree to software developer

Sunil's path into technology wasn't the traditional one. He earned a law degree (LLB) from Kingston University before teaching himself to code and moving into web development. Working across agencies and startups, he built a broad engineering toolkit — JavaScript, React, Vue, Node.js, TypeScript, and the wider web platform — and developed a habit that would come to define his career: explaining complex technical ideas in plain, accessible language.

Building In Plain English

In 2018, Sunil founded In Plain English. What started as a way to publish clear, beginner-friendly programming tutorials grew into a tech media company home to some of the most popular developer publications online, including JavaScript in Plain English and Python in Plain English. Today it reaches millions of readers each month across more than 200 countries, powered by a community of tens of thousands of contributing writers.

Teaching the world to code with Stackademic

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Sunil built Stackademic — a free coding bootcamp designed to teach people how to code from anywhere in the world. He did nearly all of it himself: building the platform, writing the curriculum, teaching the students, and even marking the homework. It reflected a belief that runs through all of his work — that quality education should be accessible to everyone.

Developer marketing with Circuit

In 2022, Sunil founded Circuit, a developer-marketing agency for devtool and SaaS companies. Circuit helps technical teams create content that earns developer trust rather than buys attention — backed by an owned network of publications that gives it real control over distribution. It grew directly out of the lessons he learned reaching developers at scale with In Plain English.

Betting on the AI era: Differ and Obsurfable

In 2024, Sunil launched Differ, a blogging platform built for a world where both humans and AI agents read content. In a category dominated by Medium and Substack, Differ made a contrarian bet: stay deliberately algorithm-free and let good writing find its audience. Two years in, it serves hundreds of thousands of monthly views.

His current focus is Obsurfable, launched in 2025. As AI answers become the new front door to the internet, Obsurfable helps brands understand how they appear inside tools like ChatGPT — how they're described, which questions matter, and which competitors show up instead — so they can optimise for answers, not just search rankings.

Messy Founder and building in public

In 2025, Sunil created Messy Founder, a community built on a simple idea: momentum beats perfection. It's a home for real, unpolished founder stories — a counter to the highlight-reel version of entrepreneurship — where builders help builders and progress is allowed to be lumpy, nonlinear, and human.

Philosophy

A thread runs through everything Sunil builds: start with an audience, lead with genuinely useful content, and build community before product. He believes distribution is a first-class problem for founders, that education should be free and accessible, and that the most durable businesses are built in public, honestly, and over the long term.