Appspiration

I wanted to create a simple "Goal tracking" app for personal use. An app which will allow me to add goals and mark them manually whenever I achieve them. So I fired up Gemini CLI . I don't remember the actual prompts nor does Gemini CLI save the history, but the initial prompt was something like this. Prompt:   "You are an expert Flutter developer. Create a simple "stock goal tracking" app to allow users to add manual goals. It should allow users to mark the goal as achieved." Within a few seconds, it not only created the app but also added some built-in goals! But it used "shared preferences" ( a different storage usually for minor things). So I had to prompt it to use the sqlite database (personal preference).                                                                 It also added a "Title" as well as "Description"....

Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast episode Think Bigger & Innovate from ' The Psychology Podcast ' featuring "some" Columbia business professor. Half way through the episode I learn that the guest professor is a blind person! She is Dr Sheena Iyengar! According to Wikipedia, " As a child, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By the age of nine, she could no longer read . By the age of sixteen, she was completely blind, although able to perceive light.  She remains blind as an adult. In 1992, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School and a B.A. in psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She then earned her Ph.D . in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 1997 " If she can do it, why can't we? #Inspiration #Resilence #NeverGiveUp #WhatsYourExcuse

I was recently listening to a podcast which featured Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels . "Sometimes you have gifts that you don't know about untill you start doing them" Did you know: He studied radiology and worked at hospitals He was an Academic and had been a research scientist at the Cornell University In 2004, Amazon (the book company!) invited him to give a talk about some material he was working on and Werner seemed skeptical about visiting a "book" company After joining Amazon, in 6 months he became the CTO because the existing "Tech guy" at the company really wanted to be a developer! #DiverseBackground

While reading the book, 'The Psychology of Money', I came across these two lines: "Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in the world that had a computer" "During one of their late-night sessions, Allen recalled Gates showing him a Fortune magazine." And this got me thinking: Would Bill Gates be "Bill Gates" if he had not got access to THAT computer at Lakeside? Would Microsoft have been born if two kids (Bill & Paul) did not have access and end up reading  THAT Fortune magazine? Ofcourse, Bill Gates himself answered the question in a way. " If there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft ", he told the school's graduating class in 2005. Me Then I started to think: As a kid, even I had early access to a computer when in the year 1995, my elder brother got home a 386 computer! I would randomly play around with some games and some design tools. Pretty sure this helped me later i...

T he last post in my personal entrepreneurship series  ( see the note on the pure coincidence at the bottom of this post ) . In this, I just wanted to share some useful tools and ideas which have helped me along this journey, for storing important things like Designs, Ideas and Book notes! Design repository When you work on so many products and screens, referring good designs becomes essential. Looking at some professional designs out there naturally inpsires us to improve our own designs or even carry some of those ideas over to our Apps and screens. That is why maintaining a place where I can store all the inspirational or nice designs comes handy and I use Google Photos for that! Some of the pictures which I have come across, stored as an album in Google Photos When I come across an app, instead of immediately jumping into using it, I take a moment to look at the design and other things. If its interesting or something which could be applicable to my own app, I store a screensho...

I n my  previous post , I briefly mentioned what led me to quit my full-time salaried job with Motorola and jump into the world of entrepreneurship. The year is 2013 and I was starting off as a Solopreneur. I was skilled in developing Android apps as well as the technologies required to build a backend (server). But to grow the business, more had to be done. This is what I ended up doing, step by step: iOS Apps with no skills By this time, iOS was already a force to reckon with. So expanding the Apps to the iOS platform was the next logical step. For that I initially outsourced the App-work to a consultancy from Pune. After that relationship gracefully ended, I got a freelancer from Romania whom I found via freelancer.com . Interestingly, I was his first client on that website! I believed in his work even though he had no prior experience or reviews to show on that website. Hiring full-time engineers A year and a half later, I started hiring full-time Android and iOS engineer...