After ~6 years at Amazon, it’s day one again.
It’s been an honor serving Alexa Developers.
Next, I’ll be doing my own thing. Something I’ve wanted to do for a while.
Working on some exciting projects, starting with an SMS-first app for first-time parents.
More on that soon 🥳
Man, had such a great experience talking to
@stripe
customer support just now.
In about 10 minutes, we went from solving tax issues, to understanding subscriptions, to sample code for Stripe checkout.
Mind blown.
🚀Product Hunt Launch 🚀
I started working on
@howBigIsTheBaby
over the summer, just so
@justdeepti
and I could savor the growth of the baby on a daily basis.
So excited to finally put it on Product Hunt, and open it up to other expecting parents.
We live in a dangerous delusion that we'll have time to do everything we want to do in life.
I want to do this. I want to do that. Oh, and that other thing too.
This is a reminder to self that I can’t.
And it’s okay.
#ship30for30
You don’t need an app to track your habits.
Be a child again, and track anything you want with LEGO Bricks.
It is fun, visually motivating, and at the end, you have a trophy built brick by brick.
Here’s how I do it👇🏽
#ship30for30
I am genuinely curious how people use read later services like Instapaper/Readwise.
It’s a one-way street for me. They give me an illusion that I have it “saved”, but I never go back and read them.
Just me?
We are expecting our first baby soon.
Like most first-time parents, we signed up for a bunch of pregnancy tracking apps, like "What to expect" that tell you how big your baby is each week.
For example - "this week your baby is as big as a pineapple".
Wonderfully delighted with the onboarding experience for
@resend
.
Just went from creating an account to sending an email using a custom domain in less than 15 mins.
Here's why it was great and what I think every API should offer:
I love
@Airtable
, but to be included on their blog is a BIG fanboy moment for me 😇
The truth is wouldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for how easy yet powerful it made database handling for me.
It’s my goto DB for every project 🚀
This may be an unpopular opinion.
Learning is important. But being on a constant “learning treadmill” can be dangerous place.
Online courses, for instance are great (I’ve taken a few myself), but they also make it super tempting to never get off this treadmill.
#ship30for30
Didn’t expect this at all. So, am gonna take this screenshot while it’s still trending as
#3
product of the day on
@ProductHunt
.
No new signups yet, which makes me a bit sad, but hopefully that will turn 🤞🏽
Today is my last birthday as a non-dad.
In a few weeks, we will welcome a new human into our lives.
Everyone you talk to says - “your life is about to change”.
Sleep comes up often.
I have a pretty nice Twitter handle.
But, I am seriously considering renaming it to -
"thisIsNotTheAmitYouAreProbablyLookingFor"
I’ll take other suggestions.
👇🏽
Stoked about the new educational blog series “Alexa Skill Recipes” launching today for
@alexadevs
. First up: How to Randomize Your Responses to Add Variety to Your Skill
I have long been fascinated by LEGO bricks.
But growing up in India, LEGO wasn't exactly a mainstream toy back then.
I didn't buy my first set until I was into my 20s.
Now, I can’t stop.
Also, can I use it to track my habits?
#ship30for30
How would you feel about making life’s important decisions based on the flip of a coin?
My first Atomic Essay on
#Flipism
- a Pseudo-philosophy, in which most important decisions are made by the flipping of a coin!
#ship30for30
I should have known what I want to write about.
I am a
#ship30for30
alumni after all.
I need to set an example for others.
I need to behave like an expert now.
Right?
#ship30for30
I found that writing a 250 word essay is harder than a 1000 word essay.
The 250 word constraint forces you to refine the idea.
Because adding is easy. Subtraction is hard.
#ship30for30
It’s been a while I have built an Alexa skill.
Will be building one from scratch for this week.
Me: “Alexa, how big is the baby today”
Alexa: “It’s week 32, day 4 and the baby is as tall as a MacBook”
Would anyone be interested if I live streamed it?
When you work for someone else, the first sentence of your answer to the question - "what do you do?" is more or less taken care of.
It's on your business card.
It's on the org-chart.
That's who you are.
They provide you with an identity. How gracious.
1/ Last year, my wife and I became parents.
Between the countless diaper changes, we wondered how much we'd spent on Amazon in general and on baby supplies in particular in 2022.
What categories did we spend the most on? What was our biggest baby-related expense?
Good time to dig out this vintage “Fork You” tee back from 2011. Happy 10th birthday
@GitHub
, and thank you for making the open source world so awesome!
Subscriptions are everywhere.
But, what if we lived in a world where we had to pay a subscription for everything we currently "own"?
Would that make us think a bit differently about whether we really need that thing?
#ship30for30
How many unread articles do you have on Instapaper?
My Instapaper is a graveyard of stuff I thought I was interested in, but somehow haven’t gotten back to.
It’s fucking annoying.
Here are three changes I am making to improve my Instapaper game.
👇🏽
#ship30for30
A month ago, I committed to doing push-ups everyday for 30 days.
To keep me accountable, I tweeted the daily progress.
Some days, I would get up in the middle of the night, do the pushups, and go back to sleep, just so I could keep the streak alive.
#ship30for30
Fresh off the press, just in time for some weekend hacking with
@alexadevs
- “Code Deep Dive: Implementing In-Skill Purchasing for Entitlements with Node.js”. Big shout out to
@memodoring
for some prime time hustle on this!
30 Essays. 31 days.
A day late, but the ship has docked nonetheless.
Through the process, I found that instead of asking "what should I write about", a better question is "what am I curious about"
#ship30for30
There's two basic elements to a podcast app - discovery, and playback.
But, there's a third element most podcast apps lack - capturing (highlighting and taking notes).
This is where
@otter_ai
really shines, and has now become my goto app for listening to podcasts.
#ship30for30
My wife gifted me stand-up comedy classes. She thought it may help curb my silly jokes.
It didn’t.
But, after performing a few sets, I realized that stand-up comedy was quite similar to a cassette tape.
It has two sides, and no one likes Side-B of the mixtape👇🏽
#ship30for30
I used to think I must finish every book I pick. I felt compelled to somehow get to the last page. Just so I could mark it as “done”.
We live in a world obsessed with vanity metrics that assumes that the goal of reading is to “finish” a book.
It’s not.
#ship30for30
I wish I had thought of this earlier.
But, here’s a fun time-lapse of some of my
#ship30for30
essays.
It’s fascinating to see how the titles change, and how they all come to fit the template.
@dickiebush
@Nicolascole77
In today’s app icon sketch, I’ve got
@dayoneapp
.
My favorite journaling app since 2011.
I don’t think the sketch come out as good as I would have liked, but hey it’s always “day one”!
My first attempt at drawing using
@Procreate
.
My LEGO Push-up Tracker.
It’s pretty crap. Still figuring out the coloring, but hopefully,
@OzolinsJanis
would be proud 😊
I often spend hours thinking about an essay or an email - staring at the blank page.
But find it so much easier to get my thoughts out in Slack and Zoom chat.
Why is that? 👇🏽
#ship30for30
Alright, I am gonna do it.
I am going to build an Alexa Skill from scratch for , and I’m gonna live stream it.
What can go wrong, right?
Join me, maybe?
Got inspired by
@AaronFrancis
and just built a Telegram bot that turns voice notes into emails using a few lines of Python code.
Uses
@AssemblyAI
for transcription and
@resend
for email.
Still fine-tuning the code – anyone interested in a step-by-step guide for this?
I've spent very little time on the computer recently, but I have been fiddling with my pipeline to generate articles from audio.
Record a voice note → Telegram it to a bot → transcribe via Deepgram → article via ChatGPT.
Telegram as UI is👌👌👌
Here’s the original design I used to track my 30 day pushups last month. The colors didn’t mean much. I just added a brick each day I did the pushups.
It was so motivating to see something get built out with my hands. The mini-fig doing in the pushup position was a joy too :-)
Are we living in a simulation?
This is something I have been thinking about for some time now.
No one probably knows for sure, but it's an intriguing thought.
What if we are actually in a Westworld kind of setup?
#ship30for30
Playing around with the idea of building a personalized AWS dashboard to manage AWS services with
@retool
Started with this simple interface that lists all my EC2 instances (running/stopped, IP address, image used etc) and allows me to start/stop/launch new instances.
I got into
#ship30for30
so I could write more consistently.
That definitely worked.
Only a small problem. I am not reading as much now.
Is that normal?
How do you balance your reading with writing?
A tour of the Lego factory in Billund, Denmark - "the home of Lego" has been on my bucket list for sometime.
So, I was super excited to learn about the opening of Legoland right here in New York.
Last week
@justdeepti
, and I made the trip👇🏽
This meme has been bothering me a bit lately.
Like most memes, it hides what’s important, and talks up what’s not.
Feel free to share this with your uncle the next time he posts this meme on your family WhatsApp group.
#ship30for30
Alright, if you were brave enough to have unmuted me last couple weeks, or you’re a new follower.
This is your warning to set your filters 🙂
Round 2 of
#ship30for30
starts today. 30 days of random non-sense from this guy coming your way.
Follow this thread to chug along 👇🏽
Been advised by my doctor to switch to a split keyboard. Any recommendations on split keyboards? I am looking at you
@cassidoo
@cwillycs
:-)
#keyboardPros
Why is a “small” size shirt the same price as an “XL”?
How is it that a pair of “28L” pants are priced the same as “34L”?
Is it some sort of a scam? I had to find out.
#ship30for30
1/2
@stirtrek
- one of the best dev conferences I’ve been to in a long time. Hosted at an AMC theatre in Columbus, Ohio. Meticulously planned w/ really good content. Oh, and it includes a showing of Avengers. Yup. It’s that kind of a conference. Take a bow
@jeffblankenburg
& team
I have officially lost track of all the subscriptions I have.
How do you keep track of your monthly subscriptions?
Is $300 too much money for monthly subscriptions?
#ship30for30
Next, I plan to open this up so other soon-to-be parents can use it. I am keeping it invite only for now, while I work on the kinks.
If you know someone who'd be interested, I've put up a waitlist here -
Feedback welcome :-)
We like talking about how the world today is fucked up.
It is.
But, it’s not a binary world.
Everything is not as bad as it seems.
The world is NOT getting worse.
My Indian parents will probably disapprove this kind of dismal performance on the leaderboard.
…but a “century” of upvotes - I think they might like that 😊
It’s said that 80% of all English sentences can be formed using just 200 most common words.
So, could I improve my typing speed by mastering the 200 words most commonly used in everyday writing?
#ship30for30
I have long been fascinated by LEGO bricks.
But growing up in India, LEGO wasn't exactly a mainstream toy back then.
I didn't buy my first set until I was into my 20s.
Now, I can’t stop.
Also, can I use it to track my habits?
#ship30for30