Context: Last December, I decided to take a break from employment and… just make things. This is what I’ve been upto in Months 4-8
I needed to make some modifications to Solve Irodov before I could launch it for the general public to use. Redesigned the home-page purchase widget, added flows to create account. Integrated the payment gateway with Razorpay.
Using the idea of an SRS for JEE was something on my mind for a long time and I finally decided to go ahead and build it.
In the last post, I was beginning to hint at this. I went ahead and started shaping that vision. I spent a lot of time building things for Adarshnet these 4 months. Improving it’s functionality has always been top of mind.
Midway through this period, I was completely devoid of new ideas. I needed to start consuming ideas again so that I could get ideas for things I wanted to build. Bret Victor has a wonderful collection of PDFs over at worrydream.com/refs
But there were just way too PDFs and not all of the topics interested me. I built a tool to help me do a first-pass over all of the PDFs and triage them in terms of their interestingness quotient for me.
I saw a really pretty video on Apple’s Careers Page and couldn’t help but extract all of the variations of the logo they showed to view individually.
These are the things that I spent time thinking about if not necessarily convert into working prototypes.
Reader that enables metacognition I realized I had been reading ineffectively all these years. I spent some time exploring what it would mean to design reading software for myself that would help me read better.
Learning words via Twitter (and other ways) You learn a new word. But you don’t know when you’ll hear it again or when it’ll come in handy. Could learning new words be made more fun if you were shown Tweets from people you follow that used them?
Mid-July, I decided to call off my experiment.
I was out of new ideas to build that I strongly felt about
SolveIrodov and Remember did not receive the kind of feedback from users that I was expecting
Adarshnet was satisfying my desire to build software for myself and I could see myself continuing to do that.
I tried to summarize my work over the last 6 months and did not find enough substance to warrant continued effort. I wasn’t thinking good enough thoughts just yet. I needed more training and practice in thinking better thoughts.
I revamped my personal website to function as a portfolio. I put up the work I’ve done in the last year in a more presentable format and also summarised some of the work that I did while I was at Flipkart.
Applied to a whole bunch of jobs, got a few offers and finally accepted a role at Quizizz.
I’m excited to start working again!
I expect to continue working on my ideas, I’ll just have less time to do so. But that just means I have to be more intentional about what I choose to pursue. Adarshnet will continue evolving.
Other than that, I’m not quite sure what’s next. I’ll have to rethink my priorities and routines.