Projects

Published on 16 Dec 2024 ⸱ 5 min read ⸱ 5 views

Labours of love

Greats. - a virtual hall of fame for the greatest investors of all time.

Ideas - a space to record my features requests and ideas. Private.

Sixly - following the Ivy Lee task management method.

Dilution - a dilution visualisation tool for founders.

TextReplace - a dead simple text replacement tool. works across Mac, Windows and Linux. Open Source.

Work From a Cafe - love working from cafes? Find the best cafes in your city.

EchoType - audio and video transcription using OpenAI Whisper and Claude.

IFSC Kya Hai - a better way to search for IFSC codes.

Sherpa - private project. Venture capital fund management OS.

Seven - private project.

OzKit - swiss knife of most used tools. Not live yet. Private.

About this page: This GenAI revolution has got me all excited about coding again. I vividly remember when I saw a computer for the first time and thinking what a magical thing it was. I was fascinated by the idea of creating something out of nothing.

The fact that I could control the outcome and output using code was just mind blowing. I was hooked. My school was the first school in my locality to have a computer lab. But computers were expensive and courses to learn computers and coding were either not available or expensive. Even though I wanted to learn, I was restricted to the 30mins a week "computer period" in school. It was frustrating.

My parents did a lot to get me to learn computers and coding - most of it was beyond their means. In school I learned assembly language and basic programming. I was fortunate along the way to have people give me their old computers and that allowed me to learn HTML and CSS. The sparkle in my eyes, when I saw images on the screen, with hyperlinks with my images and much more. I get goosebumps even as I'm writing this.

Then came the age of internet cafes and computers were slightly more accessible, especially the ones you assemble yourself (as they were cheaper). I self learned to build websites with HTML/CSS and to self host as well.

However, the more complex stuff like PHP, SQL etc with business logic was beyond me. Actually, now when I think about it, I was too impatient to learn those languages, I just wanted to create websites and then fine tune it for my workflow and requirements.

That's when self hosting became exciting for me. But again, web hosting was expensive and I was in college and then early in my career - making little to no money. I was actually even more worried about fluctuating costs of hosting, especially with usage based pricing. Even now, I'm limiting my usage of AI API's because of the usage based pricing. That fear will live with me forever it seems.

Purchasing software products was blasphemy for me for the longest time. I thought it was crazy to spend for software. I would never do that. Self hosting was the only way to use world-class software that would make me productive. That's where I was so wrong.

Open source software is a little too technical, even for me. Open source software is some of the worst designed software I've used. There was no incentive for designers to design for open source software. It was designed by coders who just wanted their product to be functional. Open source software also didn't suit my workflow. The biggest challenge in my view was upgrading and maintaining each software in my bare minimum setup.

I've experimented a lot and then gave up easily because things got complicated too quickly.

Anyway, I've ranted a lot but in some ways, it's to tell you that I'm been on this journey for a long time and with this new age of GenAI, I'm not stopping anytime soon.

My problem statements and software requirements remain the same. I'm just using better tools, I understand the platforms better and I'm able to create more value for myself and hopefully others too.

I started using ChatGPT and Claude for coding since Oct, 2023. It started off with simple chrome extensions. While I got functional code and I built working extensions, it was never full fledged SaaS products/Apps.

For some reason, I got back to Claude after a few months (maybe Mar, 2024), the quality of the output was better with easy to understand error handling. Things really started to take off when I started using Cursor. It uses Claude as the LLM in the backend and it's just amazing.

I started using Cursor with Claude regularly since Sept, 2024 (the day I quit my job and took a break). I've been busy using Cursor with Claude for all my projects since then.

All projects above are a labour of love and frustration and restarting projects from scratch. I've spent a ton of time building these projects often at the cost of my sleep and sanity. But I couldn't be happier to bring my ideas to life - the way I want them to function and to look and feel like the maker has taste.

I'm so excited for this future of AI coding copilots. I don't think it'll take away anyone's jobs, unless they're not using the right tools.

My github contributions graph as of 3rd Jan, 2025. My profile is here.

Note: All blogs posts till 2022 were migrated to this platform (react+next+tailwind). While all efforts were made to migrate wihtout any loss, the migration lost some images and broke a bunch of links in old posts. If you spot anything amiss, please notify me?