In December last year, I decided to take 2021 off from regular employment and… just make things. 4 months have since passed and this is all that I’ve dabbled in.
ReadNCERT.com
I put the NCERT 12th Physics textbook online.
I was extremely annoyed at how NCERT made its textbooks available only as PDFs and they could only be downloaded one chapter at a time. The downloaded files are not even properly named?! These are textbooks that are read by tens of millions of children across India and this is the best that they could do?! Reading PDFs on a phone is horrible.
I felt that the students deserved better. They deserved textbooks that could be comfortably read on a phone.
Would I be breaking copyright? Most definitely so but… the students deserve the best tools. And I figured even if it did eventually come to NCERT asking me to take the website down, I would and write off my time-investment.
It never came to any of that.
Initially, I wanted to put all of NCERT textbooks online for 10th, 11th and 12th but I abandoned the project after just the Physics Class 12 textbook. Despite a friend helping out with a few chapters, it was extremely time-consuming despite and I stumbled onto something more interesting.
SolveIrodov.com
Problems in General Physics by Irodov is a book that is a collection of problems for college and university students. In India, it is widely used as a preparatory book for the JEE Advanced.
I put it online. I made the process of browsing the problems and seeing their answers easy.
I did it because a PDF is a silly format for such a book. The existing ways of navigating through pages in a PDF sucks. If I want to view an answer, it should be right near the question I’m solving, not somewhere 200 pages later. And if I’m solving a question, why do all these other questions have to be on the page? What if I need hints.
The book format is fundamentally broken for such types of books and I wanted to take a shot at this.
Both the above projects were iffy around the copyright area. I researched into running them secretly but it didn’t seem particularly easy to do so and I didn’t like the feeling of living under a dark cloud. Also, both the projects had to do with books and I wanted to branch out more.
Over the years, I have been collating ideas and now that I had the technical know how, I could finally get around to bringing them to life. I wanted to empty the existing reservoir of ideas so that I open myself up to new ones.
Here’s what I made as part of that attempt -
Webrobe
This stemmed out of a desire to just see how much value I get out of my clothes. What clothing do I own? How many times do I wear a piece of clothing? Which clothing was a good deal?
I essentially built a browsable wardrobe on the web. Every piece of my clothing is tagged with the date of purchase and its price and how many times I’ve worn it.
Every time I think of this, I find myself rushing to defend my making it. It feels …. silly and it was an indulgence, no doubt.
One pleasant side-effect from doing this was that.. I felt more comfortable letting go of old clothing that I’ve had since many years and only keep around for nostalgias sake. I don’t see myself wearing them any more but now that there’s a record of it on this website, I’m more okay with just retiring them.
With some tweaks, I can actually see myself using this for the rest of my life. This seems fun. Building software that’ll you use for the rest of your life.
Tracking PG’s Essays
I like to read obsessively. If I like a writer on the internet, I tend to want to read everything they’ve ever written systematically.
I’ve wanted to do it for Paul Graham, Manas Saloi, Robert Heaton and Boz.
There’s no real way of doing it today so I built myself a tool that enables this.
Essentially, it’s a website that contains every single essay that Paul Graham has ever written and there’s a ‘read’ button beside it. Every time I read an essay, I go there and I click that button and the entry disappears and I’m left with all the articles I haven’t yet read.
Tweet without Twitter
I wanted to tweet without being distracted by the Twitter timeline. Just be able to send a tweet and then get back to work.
Who the most popular person following me on Twitter is
I was curious, so I wrote a script to find out.
Liked tweets in common
Given two Twitter users, this script generates a webpage of tweets that both users have liked.
Timer Tracker
How long does the rice cooker take? How long does the egg boiler take? How long does the lift take to go down? How long does an alphenliebe take to melt in the mouth?
I like timing things and I start a timer but I find remembering these times to be difficult. Timer apps on phones do not allow to save times. This was something I’ve been something I’ve wanted since college, I even did an entire assignment on it for a course and now that I had the skills to build it, I went ahead and did.
Essentially, it allows me to make a record of a time that I tracked in the real world.
My Rice cooker takes ~20 minutes to cook the rice. The Egg boiler takes ~8 minutes. The Lift takes 30 seconds. And the alpheliebe takes ~7 minutes.
Storees
Sometimes I randomly remember stories from my past that I’d almost forgotten. As I grow older, I imagine my forgetfulness will become worse and some of these fun memories/stories will just disappear. I wanted to save some of these for posterity, so I built Storees.
Essentially, it allows me to quickly type out something that I want to remember and stores it.
Why
Built a website that just asks me ‘why are you visiting’ when I click on a website to make my visit more intentional.
Twitter Triager
During the early days of the covid crisis, Apr 18, someone on Twitter reached out to me with an idea to search Twitter for requests for medicines/plasma/beds.
Over 2 nights, I ended up making a website which searches tweets for keywords like “plasma” across cities and then enables you to triage those tweets as whether it’s a person requesting help or if it’s a source of useful information.
It looked something like this.
I worked on it for 2 nights before feeling extremely disillusioned and giving up. I’m glad others didn’t.
Since then, tens of other companies and people have banded together and made similar tools. Sprinklr’s is the one that is the closest to what I was trying to do.
I think this idea has potential to be useful as a way of triaging information from twitter with a group of volunteers so that all the triaged boxes get the help they need.
While making this, my eyes were opened to what Twitter as a novel protocol means.
There were a few other ideas that I started working on but left midway. Despite abandoning them, I still think they are interesting and I expect to get around to them in the next few months.
Design Repository
As a designer, I often look at other apps for inspiration, to see how they solved similar problems. For example, as part of my last job, I went through the login flows of tens of popular apps and made meticulous notes about how they work. Except, these screenshots and these notes exist in a single page within Figma. They’re trapped in there.
I wanted a better way to store and organise this information in a way that would compound with me over time. A ‘folder’ of my own design observations. A space where I can store interesting things I come across on the internet.
Pinterest and Arena (or MyMind) don’t serve my EXACT need. There are some websites that try to help with this by making flows of popular apps available. But.. the apps that I care about are usually not there.
I didn’t end up making all of this yet but it is right up there as something I will be making soon.
Word Seeker
When you come across an unfamiliar word in a sentence when reading a book, you have two choices, you can either look it up and figure out the actual meaning or you can ignore it and move on to the next setence.
Both are bad. Looking up a word during a reading session breaks flow. Ignoring it and moving on is a wasted opportunity of learning.
What if before starting a new book, I could see all of the words that are used in the book that I don’t know. What if I spent a little bit of upfront time learning those words to preserve the flow of reading.
Word Seeker tries to be this. You give it a book, it extracts all of the words from it and gives you a list of words that it doesn’t think you know. You spend that little bit of time learning those words and then once done, start reading the book.
One idea to extend this was – Since I track every book that I read, what if for a given word, I could see all sentences where it has been used in all of the books I’ve read. Or all of the sentences in the books I’ve marked as to-read in the future.
Common Spotify
Given two Spotify profiles, it makes a playlist of the songs that both accounts have liked.
Adarshnet
The internet is vast but our means of accessing it every-day is through an address-bar. Something about this doesn’t sit well with me.
I’m trying to build my own home on the internet. My day on a computer should start and end from this place. This is where I would store all my ideas. This is where I would write. Still trying to figure it out.
Well, that’s about it.
I’m excited to see what I’ll end up building in the next 4 months.