(1.1)In Quest of the ‘IDEA’ — Week 1
The beginning of Hasura internship
My journey with Hasura started in the month of JAN 2017 when i began with the Introduction to Modern Application Development course , the course in itself is a long adventurous story about how IMAD made me fall in love with Application Development , all thanks to Hasura , IIT Madras for arranging this mesmerizing experience and Tanmai Gopal Sir and Gaurav Raina Sir for being excellent mentors throughout the journey …. there is so much to say about the IMAD itself that I can just go ON and ON and ON, probably in another independent post i will write soon.
Well, this is the beginning of another memorable experience and another journey through the adventures of full stack application development , the 1st week of Hasura Internship, …ohh its not a typo , … yes an INTERNSHIP !! . After the goodness of the the IMAD course another surprise was waiting for us, the top 5% students of the course were offered an internship with Hasura ( and YES , I got selected) and this is the beginning of yet another magical journey with Hasura again , bigger and better than before.
The internship is going to be 8 weeks long and will mainly focus around three main tasks :-
- Development of an 3 Screen MVP of an App .
- Deployment of the 3 Screen app on the Hasura platform.
- lastly , the most essential one, Critical Analysis of the development and deployment cycles on the Hasura platform to identify , any bugs, any useful feature that may make the entire process more streamlined and hassle free for the developers and any errors in documentation of the platform.
This time the target and the vision is much bigger and better, this time its not about coding or doing simple practical tasks , this time it was about developing an entire Minimum Viable Product of an IDEA and also the critical Analysis of Hasura as a platform. The internship is going to follow one of the most popular software engineering model the Prototyping Model , following is a rough representation of the phases and life-cycle of the Application Development we have to follow during this internship, following is an info-graphic depicting the idea of the same.
it is for sure going to be an interesting journey and full of surprises and challenges as has always been with Hasura.
The IDEA — Time Tracking App
First things first , for the starters , I required an idea to work upon, frankly speaking even after thinking for a week prior to the actual beginning of the internship on JUNE 05, I still hadn’t decided what to work upon, all ideas coming in my head were either impractical and too complex for a 3 screen app or too basic to have no significant utility at all. I never anticipated that just deciding on the idea could be so confusing.
The week passes in no time and the D-day came , June 05, the first day of internship, also the last day of my semester exams. There was an inaugural webinar scheduled for this day by Hasura to introduce us to the tasks and responsibilities of the internship. When the webinar started i had a bit of disappointment in my mind, everyone there had almost decided their app ideas and almost solid on their app ideas, and I on the other hand, totally confused an lost what should work on???, leaving my wavering thoughts on the app idea the webinar went really awesome, Tanmai Sir introduced us to the structure of the internship, the expectations Hasura had from us, the Interns, etc it was a fine experience. Close to the end of the webinar, I dared to ask the question bugging my mind from the past week, How to I know which app idea would be feasible in 2 months time and yet deliver the utmost utility of the idea? and as it always has happened in the Hasura Journey till now , Problems??? — here comes Tanmai Sir for the rescue. His answers and doubts simply cannot co-exists, withing 5 min of a simple and concise answer, *poof* all the doubts were gone. It is not the innovation in the idea that makes it a success it is how well you do it ,makes it successful,
“Many of the big companies and products we see were not the first one to develop that product , there were many others who had the exact same product in the market, so it was not the uniqueness of these startups what made them this big , it was they made their product so well, that they were lover by their customers that’s how they grew so much”. — Tanmai Sir, Webinar 1
this line made it very clear to me that the simplicity with perfection was what I had to aim for, immediately after the answer to my question he shared with us the attempt he made to make a calendar management app in his college days, and that was the ‘moment’ , it suddenly clicked my mind , Mahn this was one of the biggest problem that I also had faced in my 3 year of engineering, I could never efficiently manage and allocate my time, I have so much to do in college — internships , assignments , courses etc etc , it becomes very hard to manage all that and i always ended up violating the deadlines, without a proper insight into how much time is available to me, there is pseudo sense that I have time, when in reality i don’t. I had just discovered the ‘WHY’of my idea !. All of a sudden all that doubt, and purposeless mind were gone, now I had a purposeful idea and a passion to solve a problem I and many other students might still face.
The Purpose — ‘why’ of the idea.
All too often, students like me just jump mindlessly into studying before they have even strategized how to study , when to study and how much to study in one session. This often leads to lack of clarity of schedule in our mind, we tend to think we have sufficient amount of time when we just plan things only in our head, but when these imaginary scenarios and illusions of mind start to shatter, for example , we might think it is easy to finish off a chapter in 2 hrs but when we actually do so , we might end up taking an entire day for it, such unrealistic goals develop a sense of failure and lack of confidence and self esteem, the consequences? you would end up taking on too much work and then would miserably fail at the pseudo time table you created in your mind, following is a research done by Stanford University which shows how positive impact can it bring when things and time are strategically planned and done, compared to just mindlessly jumping to work/study.
I am no exception to this , even I always plan my day mindlessly, I used to just allocate time in my mind and that always made me think that I don’t have time for anything , there is so such to do , but in reality most of the time and my mind’s resources were wasted in just planning out the the day with unrealistic goals and when things didn't go as planned my mind would again start to wander in thoughts to remake that pseudo timetable that is even more unrealistic thereafter. Majority of time was wasted in this unrealistic planning rather than on the actual tasks and this resulted in wavering decisions and unclear erratic short term goals which could never be fulfilled , unnecessarily giving a sense of failure that I myself had unconsciously planted.
This is a problem of almost many average students , i conducted short surveys with my friends , family and came to realize almost all students sometime or the other have definitely faced this issue , yet I could not find a simple , perfect app for this , all apps, platforms like google calendar seemed to be over engineered and a bit complex for this task. I didn't know how but i had to solve the problem by any means , there must be a solution !! ,
Well there definitely was a solution, indeed an awesome one, The SMART principles developed by Edwin Locke in 1981, this solution existed from so long yet non of us are aware of it , strange ! I found this on University of Groningen’s Youtube channel , when I tried this for a week on pen and paper I was amazed by the change it had brought in me, things seemed to be so sorted out with this , though it was hard to do this on paper so I decided to automate this , and thats how and why this became my app idea .
Your Time is priceless, take good care it, your life is nothing but TIME , your lifetime, all the time we waste, basically means wasting small parts of life, so plan it well ! use it well !
Concluding the post, I would like to give due credits to Hasura for providing the opportunity to solve this problem and developing this app, and Tanmai Sir for inspiring me for this idea, had you not mentioned that experience of yours with that calendar management app in Webinar 1 , my mind would have never got this direction.
The next Phase will be of prototype development , in my next post i will be demonstrating the first prototype of this IDEA , hope implementation goes as planned — Stay Tuned for more !