Asad Dhamani

How to set up personal OKRs

I've spoken about how it can be helpful to use the OKR framework for goal setting to drive growth and improvement in your personal and professional life, but it can be hard to come up with the right OKRs. So this is a guide to help you avoid some of

penpersona

Why I'm building PenPersona

Writing has always been a struggle for me. I have countless ideas, but bridging the gap between those thoughts in my head and actually sharing them with others is a daunting task. It takes a significant amount of effort to transform these ideas into written work, and most people are

What I'm reading this week (Sept. 1, 2023)

These are the articles and books I'm reading this week; and here are my thoughts about them. If they seem interesting, check out the original resources. How to Build Side Projects 🕹️How to stick with them, and why you should start them in the first place. A chat with Vic

Tech Stacks for Indie Hacker

As an independent innovator, or 'indie hacker', time is your most precious and scarce asset. You're wearing multiple hats - from product management and design to development, marketing, finance, and customer support, you're juggling a cornucopia of critical roles. Large organizations have dedicated individuals or entire departments for these functions.

penpersona

Simplifying Productivity and Building Sustainable Habits

Today, I wanted to share a few thoughts on productivity and habit-building that I've picked up along my journey. Life can sometimes throw us a curveball, and it's during those times that our routines and habits tend to take a hit. I recently experienced a period of chaos and personal

The Ultimate Guide to building an in-house chat platform from scratch

This is a topic I've wanted to write about from a long time. I've built quite a few chat platforms over the years, and I've faced the build vs. buy debate many times. The problem is, most SaaS chat platforms cost exorbitant fees. Back when I had first started with

I'm building a feature.

A couple months ago, I started getting into the habit of writing regularly. I've always desired to be more regular with my blog, share my thoughts with the world, and put myself out there, but to go from idea to a finished piece of writing presents a lot of friction.

penpersona

How to Make Your Resume Tech-Industry Ready: A Practical Guide

Ever-so-often, I've seen youngsters reaching out to me for advice on how to sail this vast ocean that the tech industry is. And more often than not, I find them grappling with the same fundamental challenge - how to craft that perfect resume. So, I thought it's about time I

penpersona

Redefining Goal Setting: A Dive into Personal OKRs

A little while ago, my workplace adopted OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) as a method for goal setting. My initial reaction? A healthy amount of skepticism. It felt like just another procedural practice. However, with time and research, I discovered an interesting trend - individuals were applying OKRs to their

Charging ahead vs moving on from a project

I launched Solvemigo on May 13th. It’s been 42 days. Let’s just look at some numbers first. In this time period, we have driven a traffic of 549 users to the site. Out of these, 104 users have come from ads (Display) that we ran on Google AdWords.

How to learn programming

I've been programming professionally for more than 7 years now, and recently I was thinking back to when I first got into programming. I know a ton of people who are learning to program, for fun, to improve their career prospects, to grow their businesses, etc. I am a self-taught

Committing to Launch Six Products in 12 months

Today, I am committing to launching six products within the next 12 months. There are several reasons for this ambitious goal. Firstly, product launches have been a challenge for me in the past (infinitely growing scope, fear of failure, perfectionism, you name it), and by setting a timeline, it will

penpersona

Breaking Down The Subscription Vs One-Time Purchase Debate

Evaluate immediate value vs long-term commitment * Customers with one-time purchases only need to evaluate its immediate value in relation to the cost. Subscriptions, on the other hand, require evaluation of the long-term value and can feel like a lifetime commitment. * Companies rarely encourage users to cancel after just one year.

Early thoughts on marketing from a developer

I am a developer and have built several products in the past. As creatives, we have the power to make incredible things, to solve our own problems and to turn ideas into reality. A common mistake made by developers building products though is that they never prioritise marketing. It doesn't

Lessons Learned From Failing My First Product Launch

Last Sunday, I launched my first ever product to the world. I've made several products before this one, but a fear of failure and perfectionism always prevented me from hitting the launch button. Looking back, I realize those fears only inhibited my learning and cost me potential revenue. To be

When life gives you lemons

I've always believed that there is no problem that exists without a solution. The solution might not be perfect, it might not be immediate, and it might not be ideal, but a problem without a solution is something that simply doesn't exist. Life is hard. It's a race where people

Beginning on a new Micro-SaaS journey

This year, I have decided to finally launch a few products. I've made several products in the past, but I never went ahead with launching them, always waiting for them to be "perfect", or, at least, having a pretty wild definition of "MVP". Some of the (unlaunched) products I made

SSO (Single Sign-on) between web app and Chrome Extension

I recently implemented authentication for a Chrome extension, and it was interesting.

Tiny Habits

Book NameTiny HabitsAuthorDr. BJ FoggPublished2019Started Reading5th May 2022 Finished ReadingIn Progress

How (and why) to archive web pages

The internet is a transient medium of information. Our reliance on the internet is greater than ever, for: Sourcing knowledge - from trivia to information essential to doing our work Entertainment - YouTube videos, Netflix, and eveything in between Staying Connected - With existing friends, making new friendships, finding our

Reflecting on 2020 and Plans for 2021

2020 has been a real roller-coaster of a year for all of us, and it's taught us a lot about ourselves–when you're sitting at home, you can't escape your thoughts. Sure, there were a lot of bad things, but let's focus and double down on the good. The Good

Parsing parameters with special characters in Ruby Grape

Recently I was building an API where I had to accept URLs as parameters in Grape routes. I URL-encoded the URL, but either my request would hit the wrong route, or it wouldn't capture anything after the second . in the URL, because it tries to parse that as a format

Using default Rails authentication with a Grape API

Recently, I was working on a Chrome extension for a web app where I wanted to share the login state between the extension and the web app. Generally you'd roll with a token-based authentication system or relying on API keys, but neither of those approaches are acceptable if you want

Considering different strategies for archiving web pages

I'm working on a project that has an aspect of archiving web pages for posterity [http://www.crestify.com]. This is to fight the problem of link rot [https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs]. There's already sites like archive.org [http://web.archive.org] and archive.today [http://archive.today]. But

How to learn deep learning on the cheap

Deep learning is something that needs a discrete graphics card. Running deep learning programs on a CPU is just too slow, it can take days upon days to run even the most basic deep learning programs on a CPU. Also, CUDA by NVIDIA is what's most often used, so if