Bhardwaj Rish

Jan 2016 Me : So I spent the whole weekend working on this app - it was a whole lot of fun, though I barely slept. I found this amazing website with brilliant content and thought it'd be cool to make an app out of it. Friend : Its great, but do you reckon anyone would use it? Oct 2016 Me : Over ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND   people have used it, and about 60% use it regularly! :D Friend : Whaaaat! How? LifeHacks on Google Play . Here are the numbers behind the scenes. A collation of statistics and insights you may find interesting. Total Installs (number of unique users the app has been installed by) Interesting note: The first 1,000 installs took 3 months (Mar'16); The first 5,000 installs took 5 months (May'16); The first 10,000 installs took 6.5 months (Jul'16); and now I get around >3,000 installs a day. Exponential growth! Currently Active Installs (i.e., number of users with the app still installed) It's about 60% retention rate, whic...

Procrastination has reached a whole new level! I remember writing a blogpost about Hacktoberfest (I never ended publishing it) on the 1st of October, about how this month is going to be a super productive month. It's the 17th today, and it feels like I wrote that post just yesterday. But wait, it also feels like it has been an eternity of me doing absolutely nothing since I wrote it. Except wait, I finally finished reading The Catcher in the Rye, saw every episode of Minute Physics, discovered a lot of new music, and many random articles on HN. Back to the beginning of October. I had it all sorted - I penned down goals alright, I made plans - I have a nice little 10x5cm diary I write my tasks in (I used to use Keep, but I feel writing down what you want helps much more). It was all going to be perfect. I was glad I knew exactly what I'd do. But here's why things didn't work out. List of things to do: Task Deadline Priority Willingness Boring assignment tha...

tl dr; Hello world kickstarters are easy, and they're shit. Everyone can do HTML. But can they really? Everyone can develop. Take any tool, any technology and the simplicity of the hello world program will have you thinking you're a champ developer off to make the next Whatsapp/(fine, Allo if you think it's that good). It's then a major leap to going from the hello world program to developing something truly on your own. Give yourself a pat on the back for publishing a website, or releasing an app on the AppStore/Playstore - you've done what most hello-worlders couldn't. But you're still a long way away to mastering the tool. Here's what truly makes you a good developer. Initiate a project on their own, taking an idea, and ponder over its necessity/usability/awesomeness. Then design the concept on paper, thinking through the interface and experience. Remember, paper is important . Translating what's on your mind to paper is extremely challen...

tl dr; This article on Hackernews. Its a Sunday morning and you're out shopping. You're buying milk and cereal when you happen to meet this person. You start talking to him and well, he's no different from the average Indian engineer. (To be honest, it really doesn't matter if you're from an IIT or a local college in Assam. All Indian engineers are the same. Blog on that later.) You start talking about life in the city and your respective universities and how long it's been since you left college already. Oh, he's just another one like you. But then, he tells you he works at Google, and suddenly, you have this new-found respect for him. Till now, he was just another guy. But now? You've given him a near superhuman status because he was hired by Google . Buuut wait. Should you be?  Google hired him, yes. But. Did they hire him well ? Was he really what they were looking for, or was he just another one of those people that could solve puzzle...

tldr; Buying a laptop, level of difficulty : so-very-hard-near-impossible-super-legendary-level-hard . You're making an investment that'll stay with your for years. You're buying something you're going to see, use, spend time on everyday. You've got to make the right decision. It should be perfect. You find the right specifications at the right cost, but then its just so ugly. You find a beautiful laptop, but then its specifications are barely good enough for browsing the net and running MS Excel. You finally find the right specifications, the beautiful keyboard you've been looking for with the perfect trackpad, and bam, it costs twice as much as what the ugly-but-right-specifications laptop costs. Oh and of course, then there's the high end MacBook Pro, that's priced at everything I own, combined. The cheaper MacBooks aren't worth buying. Looks                     +         -...