Posts

You can read more about my work on the Figma Blog. TLDR: Design system adoption is a measure I’ve been working on at Pinterest. The more people that adopt a design system, the more impact and use it has. I got a chance to work with Pinterest’s Design System Team to make a few changes in the way designers accomplish their work Built a plugin to help clean and lint designs.

This is an exploration of research and methods to solve the chessboaord problem

After working on Figmage, I got pulled a little bit deeper into the digital asset management space. Bynder is a digital asset management (DAM) solution for many large companies such as Spotify, Rakuten, Audible, Decathalon, and many more name brands. A good DAM solutions helps manage the 1000s of images that make up the modern web, from newsletters to product pages. I was honestly surprised at just how many people work behind the scenes to manage all of these assets.

I had an opportunity to consult with Co.Lab at a very early stage to work together and figure out a platform to scale their peer based learning model. Traditionally, schools are hard to scale. They face two problems with scaling: Localized. They have limited amount of reach and how far they can go Individuals. There is a cap on the number of instructors and students a school can support over time Co.

Product frameworks don’t account for distribution. As ex-software developers and product managers (especially at larger companies), we often assume that our product skills will translate over to the startup world. However cutomer acquistion is something that’s easy to overlook in our skillset. As a product-focused engineer and ex-product manager, I fell into this trap. Discovery is not Distribution I have two stories to share. While I was still a product manager at Microsoft, I helped a group of guys in Korea find their product-solution fit.

In 2019, Amazon introduced Cloudwatch Log Insights. For most people, this is like a datadog or splunk replacement: free text log analysis without leaving the AWS console. For me, it was way more than that. Log insights is a low cost way to: Handle Form Submissions (replaces formspree) Perform Product Analytics (replaces Amplitude) Though far from feature rich and perfect, it fit right into my existing workflow, and it was enough to avoid paying for services that I didn’t need.

Something I’ve learned from working on a startup is that there are too many options. There’s no management to tell you which way you should be going. You’re too early to completely follow your customer’s judgement. And everyone seems to want something. Traditionally, I’ve always used a product prioritization matrix. impact and effort matrix However, being the sole-judge, it was easy to get too excited with what I wanted to build next and forget what customers actually wanted.

I hate working with images. It’s the most tedious part of making websites and writing blog posts. In fact, sometimes I dread it so much, that I don’t publish posts because I have to make the assets for them. too many images everywhere And if you muster up the energy to make them, it’s a cycle of uploads and re-uploads till you get the right resolution, size and colors.

I hate working with images. It’s the most tedious part of making websites and writing blog posts. In fact, sometimes I dread it so much, that I don’t publish posts because I have to make the assets for them. too many images everywhere And if you muster up the energy to make them, it’s a cycle of uploads and re-uploads till you get the right resolution, size and colors.

Amna is my first startup, that I quit my full-time job to work on. You’ll also seem me writing about my experience as a founder, and managing a team of interns, and startup-building. See the website Context Switch Context switching is the 21st century problem to solve. A new email, a co-worker pinging you on Slack, a text from a local restaurant on a sale they’re having, these are the everyday context switches we do.

When I first started working on my startup, I wanted to do some hiring to help me build the product faster. Armed with a little bit of savings, I had two paths in front of me, either hire one-person as a part-time contractor, or leverage 15 UT Dallas Senior Design Students. The need for projects I hadn't considered the second path at first. However, with the Covid pandemic, the school had a need for projects, and I was still in touch with director for the program, so there was mutual enthusiasm to get some teams.

Play the Game Growing up I was a nerd. I was exceptionally good at pathfinding, and reading maps. So when Google maps first came out, I made up this game called “Going back home”. The gist of it was to drop yourself on the map at a random place in the world, and use the arrow keys to navigate yourself back using the roads on the map. Eventually, as I learned how to make apps, and build cooler things, this game eventually became engrained as something I wanted to build.

I hate numbers. They take the fun out of everything. You’re born on a date. And what is a date? A combination of numbers - yuck. Do you remember that you had a a table of them to memorize growing up?

I read Hacker News religiously. It’s part of my everyday routine. I read articles when I wake up, as I eat lunch, and before I fall asleep. HN allows you to upvote articles. Upvoted articles appear in a personal “upvoted submissions” section so that you can find them again later. However, the problem with upvoting is that there is no good way to search through all the articles you’ve upvoted. By default, Hacker News comes with a search bar, but that searches all of the articles people have submitted over time and not necessarily the ones you upvoted.

Here are things to do before I die in no particular order. It’s worth sharing so anyone reading can reach out also wants to take part in something on here. Why do them alone right? If you can help me knock some of these off - let’s do it together! Reach out to me. Publish a book Publish a song Create a product of value that 10,000 people use everyday Go on a “people tour” and learn cultures, problems, and how they do things Africa Asia Australia South America Produce and direct a film Get a Pilots license Master the manual transmission Learn great car handling skills - like in the movies Be a student at Stanford (have to say thanks to Marty Stepp) Speak in front of a large audience (10K+) Have a youtube video series with 5k followers Co-author a research paper Be part of a protest and fight for rights of people Campaign and Run for City Office Run a Half Marathon Have a house with cool cars, a science lab and a meditation room

This post is a part of the Xamarin July series where various Xamarin Community contributors publish posts about Xamarin UI. In this post we will explore how to create a bottom sheet or drawer interaction that is used to complement your main app page. These are similar to half modal pages - but can be of varying lengths. The iOS Maps app and Siri Shortcuts are two out of the box applications that utlize this custom control by Apple to display information contextually.

This was an Alexa Skill I built when I was a student pilot and was struggling to talk on the radios. You can speak to Alexa as if you’re a pilot and requesting to take off or land and ATC will respond. Under the hood is a finite state machine that handles the voice and actions that come as a result. The main challenge was getting the Alexa Skill to parse the pilot commands correctly, because there’s quite a bit of information when pilots communicate with the tower.

I wanted to add some more detail about the implementation we did in part 2 and limitations. There are disadvantages to using an embedded browser for authentication in Xamarin. Mainly, it’s isolated from the native browser. So if a user is already logged into Facebook on his phone, he’ll still have renter his credentials in your siloed browser. There are also some security concerns. However, I’ve read that latest Xamarin.Forms updates utilize a more modern WebView making the approach a bit more appealing - such as shared cookies.

Using the steps outlined in part 1 of the series , we learned that we can log in users with just a browser. If you just want the code, checkout the github The most basic implementation of OAuth in Xam.Forms utilizes an embedded web browser and reading events from it. The gist is to send the user to the login screen of the 3rd party auth provider, and then listen when the browser URL changes.

Still working on moving this over from my old website. Please be wary of broken links Using OAuth2 and logging into 3rd party services with Xamarin.Forms, as it turns out, is not so bad. Although, Xamarin.Auth is very nice, it sometimes helps to understand how OAuth works without it being abstracted away. In fact, as you’ll learn in this post, we don’t need even need separate libraries than just Xamarin.

I love elasticsearch. I love serverless functions. But I love serverless functions more because they’re cheaper to run. The purpose of this project is to allow the benefits of free text searching but work and scale at the most minimal cost. In essence, I built a a poor man’s elastic search. Use Cases The search algorithm powering the system is lunrjs. There are various applications, and here are a few reasons why you should use it:

Coming out of college, it was intimidating to know that I only had 6 months of free time before I began my real job. It was reassured by the fact that everyone after graduation kept saying, “This is the only time you’re going to get to do this kind of stuff”. So I told myself - in these 6 months, I’m going to build something of value. Hopefully one takes off and I find myself doing something that I love.

See the website Update 2022, the alphavantage API is now paid, so the app can’t get stock data anymore :( Scatter Stocks was inspired by a Bloomberg article on how companies kept getting “Amazoned”. To be Amazoned means to have your business crushed because Amazon got into your industry. Embedded within their article was a graph called Bezos Bombshells. It was a great visualization that displayed how different shares rose and fell based on news from Amazon.

Background I’m constantly coming up with ideas for apps that will help me in my daily use. I don’t need complex interfaces, just a few buttons and labels in the right layout (or at least placeholders in the right position, so I don’t have to mess with the CSS). UI takes too long for prototypes - easier to make in Powerpoint. Hmm…wouldn’t it be great if Powerpoint was my UI designer?

I graduate from college in December 2017. And I keep getting asked what I’m going to do next. Do I go work? Do I tour the world? Do I go help with world hunger? The honest answer is, I don’t know. However, I want to take some time to explore the things that I love and explore what I care about. It’s not money I want to make right now, but more about finding my place in the world.

This one was an idea that I’ve had for a while now and I finally got around to building it. I’ve always wanted to be able to wake up to my own music. I hoped that when I bought my Amazon Echo, I’d be able to do this. There’s always a song running in the back of my head and a morning alarm with that song is the perfect way to start out the day.

Hackend Check it out here I’ve really wanted to build a website for a while. Serverless applications are simple to set-up and use, but tedious to configure. So I wanted to build something to help with that. Hackend was one of those ideas that I set out building back in JULY to make it happen. I recruited a few friends to help me with building it out as well. However, it never turned out the way I expected it too.

Aid-AR I had the idea for Aid-AR a while ago. I was thinking of a way to help people using mobile apps after a disaster. Of course, I set out to build it (I called it HelpLens at the time), but I never was able to really follow through with it. However, it seemed perfect for a Hackathon project. So, that’s when I pitched it to my group of friends, and we set out to build Aid-AR.

isLocation Check it out here Problem: Working with coordinates and location data is a tedious process. I mean, ok, I guess it depends on how you work with it. I usually use a cross-platform mobile solution, so take something like Xamarin.Forms or Jasonette and you realize that there’s no native library to work with locations.The same applies for web applications. For example, if I want the rough distance between two points, I usually end up searching the web till I end up finding a solution like this on StackOverflow:

Open Garage Problem: We recently got a new garage opener, and unlike the old one, this one only came with one remote. Unfortunately, we have three cars. This means that every time I came home, I have to get out and open the garage or park up front. Nope. I wanted a remote! Ofc, I don’t want to buy one like a normal person. I want to hack our opener to see how I could crack open the door.

This is my reflection and post about my Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip. It was sponsored by the UT Dallas Student Volunteerism Office and I am in Elm Mott, TX for the week. I was placed in the Sustainability group and was there to learn about alleviating World Hunger. Here’s the org that housed us. Make sure you read my first impressions before reading my reflection. What was it like? I was very worried about the living conditions, but I think it grows on you.

This is my first impressions and post about my Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip. It is sponsored by the UT Dallas Student Volunteerism Office and I am in Elm Mott, TX for the week. Yeah, I’ll give you a minute to look that up. It’s about 20 minutes north of Waco,TX. I’m placed in the Sustainability group, here to learn about alleviating World Hunger. Here’s the org that is housing us.

I know our education system is broken. Learning is non-existent in a system where we’re just looking for the best grades. Is my goal to understand and absorb material or just get the highest grades? They are not necessarily dependent on each other. Focus on the slides, understand the exam, and game the system is one way at winning in our modern education system. But is it really merit if you know how to win?

When Amazon Echo devices first came out, there was no easy way to set an alarm to your music of choice. I’ve always wanted to be able to wake up to the song in my head because that’s the perfect way to start out the day. Building this as an Alexa Skill wasn’t really feasible because Amazon doesn’t really let us “ring” its devices. However, as I was experimenting, one way this was possible was using Spotify APIs.

This was the first app I ever built and published to the iOS/Android store It lets your friends know if you’re open to hangout, and sends everyone a notification. You first have to add someone as a friend, and mark what you wanted to do. I built it with Xamarin.Forms and the data was hosted on AWS using DynamoDB, S3 and Lambda. I handled all of the design on this one.

For the past 3 months I’ve been hard at work trying to make a new social networking app. The app is very straight forward, it is a platform where you can notify your friends when you are free to do something. Although there are existing apps in the marketplace, they all are lacking the simplicity or completeness of what we expect from such an app. Background I began my app with a simple idea at the beginning of the year.

Okay… So, I wrote this a while ago during finals week, and I never published it. It was the night before my OS exam, and I spent more time writing this than preparing for my exam. It was an interesting train of thought, but I never went back to complete it. In any case, here’s a work-in-progress article. ##The Life Function Understanding humans and their nature is something that philosophers have observed and criticized for ages.

This is my premise for learning skills that extend beyond just the keyboard.If I was stranded in a society without computers or modern day technology, would I survive? That’s why I began spending less time at the computer over the past month and began expanding my skill set to include a better array of things that I could do. I guess I just want to diversify my portfolio. Dusting the Old Guitar A couple years ago, when I was in middle school, I was fooling around with my newly bought guitar.

I rarely read books in my leisure time and I feel that most of my friends have been so caught up with their work that they’ve also lost the habit as well. It seems that beyond the amount of reading we are required to do for class , it seems ever so burdening and time consuming to open up a good book. So it caught me by surprise when one of my friends (I’ll name him, Vishnu Dantu) brought it up that I should read this book called Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

The Bottomline What a year. Nothing made sense at the beginning of the year, and it still doesn’t make complete sense, but one thing is clear…I’m thankful for where I stand right now. This is a continuation of part1 College Rejections It was my last semester of high school and I had just submitted all of my college apps. The long and grueling waiting times were only met with a letter(s) of rejection at the end.

This year has been quite a mix for me, but then again, I could say that about my past couple of years. However, this year is very special because I learned so much from it! Perhaps this post is overdue, but I think I really need to say what I’ve learned. Somehow, I have an interesting but relatable story to tell. I think a good starting point for my story is sophomore year of high school when I had a slight idea of who I wanted to become in life and why I wanted to do so.

EVA is your personal assistant to kicking off the day. So when you wake up, a wearable band detects the change in orientation. The band uses BLE to communicate with a mobile app and the app then sends a post request over the internet to trigger the lights. Tech Stack The mobile app is a fork of the Xamarin.Forms BLE sample. It uses the basic framework of the sample project.

As a kid, most of my toys were broken, becaause I had to take them apart and see how things worked. Naturally, I gravitated to being an engineer, and the invisible software that makes everything tick. I’ve worked with a lot of different things (See my projects) Nordic Bluetooth, iOS Apps, Elasticsearch, Xamarin, S3, Garage Openers, Serverless, Figma Plugins, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Alexa Skills, Javascript, Python, AWS, Azure. I always find that the technology is really just a way to enable an experience.