Posts

I have 100,000 installs!

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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

Instant Gratification Monkey GO AWAY!

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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

Everyone Can Develop. But can they do this?

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

Interviews, Interviews

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

Mission-Super-Impossible | Buying a Laptop

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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                     +         -       +      - Specifications        +       +       -    

The Best Online Community

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devRant Probably the best online community I've come across, and a really nice social network. I've been viewing its posts over the last 6 months or so, and the quality of the content remains as good as when it first started, if not better. Its pretty much 9gag for devs - unlike users from SO and Reddit, the people here are light hearted, post meaningful, hilarious rants from their adventures in programming. Here are a few :D A good laugh :D (Though, I would've preferred Sublime over Notepad++ :p) A couple more funny posts - - Exception up = new Exception("Something went really wrong"); throw up; // hehehe - Boss : Nice job with that bug, when the erp feezes and magically starts working after a few seconds. My code : try {                      // something something                  } catch(Exception e) {                      sudo reboot;                  } - My girlfriend got bitten by a mosquito and kept scratching it. After I compla

Allo kthxbye?

Google Allo. Just a chat app? Sorry, but lol. Yes, okay, its extremely pretty and looks so bubbly and cute. Plus it has those nice little cat stickers. I love all that. But. It's much, much more than that. Sundar Pichai was supremely confident with Google's ability to process language during his keynote in I/O '16. Allo is Google's playground, and humans their subjects. Allo is their path to testing and building a 100% literate machine that can communicate in perfect everyday-human-like language - and it becomes more like you the more you use it. Like IBM's Watson, Google will have a system that knows what to say under different circumstances, understand emotion, and interact differently with different people. It will be able to not only take part in everyday conversation with everyday humans like you and I, but even debate with top notch speakers, artfully reply to political leaders, logically argue with mathematicians, and so much more. And all this, in

Email Subscriptions Can Be Useful | Playstore

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tl;dr . Subscribe to updates over email on the play store. LifeHacks has been doing really well on the play store recently. It gets about 2-10 written reviews each day, which are quite fun to read. Over the past couple of weeks, I developed a habit of opening the developer console every morning right after I woke up, to read and reply to the meaningful reviews. So, I fiddled around with the console and found out you could subscribe to updates via email. Its great because for one, you get immediate push notifications. The real benefit is the persistence of emails. The dev console doesn't show deleted reviews, but emails sent can't be unsent. ;) I had a good reply ready in my mind for this guy. The place I've hosted these images is blazingly fast and can take a whole lot of load. His Internet was probably messed up at the he tried the app, and immediately jumped to the play store to write this review. (Though I wonder how that didn't give him connectivity issues.

Manjaro KDE No. Mint Yes.

tl;dr. Manjaro KDE - it's super cute, but maybe not for me. My laptop has been a wretched mess for the past couple of weeks. The reason was silly - the OS disk partition that I initially gave 30GB to was out of space, and there was no way I could extend it, even though I had over 200GB free in my other partitions. It required an empty space right after the OS partition - no fragments. :/ So, after about 2 weeks of cribbing and waiting for a new laptop to magically appear at my door, I succumbed to it. I couraged to format my disk and re-install my OS. I had been using Linux Mint 17.x Cinnamon for about 2 years now, and thought it'd be nice to go for a change. Manjaro KDE, based on ArchLinux. People on the internet seemed to love it. Plus it was Arch. It seemed perfect. Except. Now that I have it, I dislike it. It's too Windows-y. It's just very cute. Everything looks so beautiful! I know, I know, I love good design, and all the nice little icons and setting

Is All of Webdev Just A Pile of Hacks?

tl; dr : This post on hackernews. I had written a (not so structured) blogpost on how web dev is insanely different from app dev, comparing UI design, backend code, and flow of the app/webapp. And how webdev is just hacky. I've seen so many profiles on LinkedIn/personal websites where people proudly designate themselves as ardent lovers of JS . No offence, but huh, lol . You can be really good at JS, but it's just very hard to fall in love with, unlike languages like Java and Python. Now I don't entirely dislike JS - I understand why it is the way it is, and the history of the Internet and yada yada. But all frameworks, all libraries built using JS felt like attempts at revival of something that should have long died. Every new framework gives JS lovers (honestly no offence) a little bit of hope and adds a year or two to its survival. JS is a hack on top of a series of hacks! They have fake classes and now  pretend inheritance in React (I used refactored a lot of code