Home Cooked Application[Logs]

02.06.2024 — experiments, problems, fun — 3 min read

Hi,

I am Aman, and this safe space is where I am most raw with my thoughts, hop on if you'd like to interact with them :))

A long time ago, I read an article about home-cooked-app and using programming as a tool to make my life more convenient. Ever since then, there have been chapters in this blog where I have thought about that idea and have tried to practice it.

This chapter today, is about my musings from working at a product based startup and realising that it is hard to build intuitive web interfaces that people want.

The web captures majority of our real life interactions nowadays and people who actively think about making these experiences are certainly very talented.

Interface Problems ⊂ Technical Problems

I started writing blogs back in 2020, as a way to think clearly and project my opinions, since then I have followed a simple process to publish chapters, which has worked very well for me.

Writing a Draft
Editing the draft and publishing it

Fast forward >>> last year,

"wouldn't it be cool If I can quickly reference my previous blogs and link them in my cms during the editing process",

What started with an idea to make my writing process more convenient turned into an opportunity for me to experiment with vector embeddings and play around with Go as a language,

Iteration 1: normal cli tool to fetch blogs similar blogs
Iteration 2: Simple Next Js apps to play around with the interface

Once I had implemented the basics, I became fascinated with this idea of transforming it into a full-fledged product.

Embracing my inner hacker, I immersed myself in the project and even convinced my roommate to join me.

Fast forward >>> Intelilink[v1],

Lessons on building a product I thought would use:

Turns out I don't write that frequently :(

It only sounds cool, I have never used it even once, what I wanted all along was the ability to save drafts on notion through an extension which I currently do manually

ctrl + c && ctrl + v

that's it!

From my experiences and learnings at Commenda, I've realized that we are often confined by our own assumptions about what the user will need, rather than validating those assumptions.

At Commenda, we primarily built features without any designer, relying solely on our personal assumptions. However, we eventually discovered that many of these features were not effective. We ended up removing many features and even changed the entire platform offering.

Fundamental Questions

What is your job as an engineer?
Speed of iteration > Thinking about what to build
Discovering what users actually need

Let's expand on each of these,

1. What is your job as an engineer?

As I have mentioned in my previous blog,

I started building out something I thought I want, and ended up building up something I actually needed. There is an inherent complexity building out simple things.

2. Speed of iteration

It started with a very small cli application,not everything has to start big.

Implementations should have the room to be dumb enough for us to validate the idea

The realisation of what we need is result of n iterations, where speed is the only metric that counts.

3. Discovering what users actually need

Now that I have discovered what I actually needed when I think about my writing process it makes me happy that I have made it more convenient for myself,

I don't have to worry about laptop switching off or accidentally changing clipboard history by copying something else, I can easily dump my thoughts in notion.

This clearly resonates with the idea that AN APP CAN BE A HOME-COOKED MEAL. which additionally very well aligns with my definition of engineering and what it takes to build a product that users want.

Conclusion

I think I will continue on exploring things that add convenience in my life, going forwards my primarily motive would be to maximize fun by building things that

Make my life easier
Are fun to build and difficult at the same time
Takes us closer to science function