Hi, I’m Aravind Balla and you are reading letter 13 from the Hackletter where I talk about my learnings and give you behind the scenes of things I keep doing for fun.

I was a curious kid in college. I still am. I always want to find solutions to the issues I face. Only if I solved them all, my life would be at peace already.

Hi, I’m Aravind Balla and you are reading letter 12 from the Hackletter where I talk about my learnings and give you behind the scenes of things I keep doing for fun.

I recently built a corner on my website with the details of the books I read on Kindle and the highlights I take while reading them. I call it – Bookshelf. . Thanks to modern technology, the website updated automatically while I keep reading and I don’t have to push a button.

Hi , I’m Aravind Balla and you are reading letter #11 from the Hackletter where I talk about the learnings and give you behind the scenes of things I keep doing for fun.

Takeaways from Show Your Work!

It’s a great book. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend getting a copy. It’s short one packed with gold. I couldn’t resist taking notes while reading the book. These are my takeaways from it.

Hi , I’m Aravind Balla and you are reading letter #10 from the Hackletter where I talk about the learnings and give you behind the scenes of things I keep doing for fun.

Is Notion’s new API ready yet?

TL;DR Mostly yes, but not complete.

Hi, I’m Aravind Balla and you are reading letter #09 from the Hackletter where I talk about the learnings and give you behind the scenes of things I keep doing for fun.

Customising your tools

Most tools these days, come with this capability of adding plugins which let us extend the usecases of that tool. Plugins in VS Code for example. We have plugins that help us format code, run some linting checks, change the colours (themes) etc.

Few days back, I work on setting up a websocket client for a frontend React project at work. There was a lot of thought process involved.

• Do we store the socket instance in state?
• Or a ref because we wont have to update it.

You might have know from my previous letters that I’m rebuilding my website using NextJS.

Turns out, recording videos while working on it harder. And it doesn’t make sense to record the non interesting parts, or parts where a lot of manual work is involved instead of creative work. There is one video yet to be edited where I set up themes (dark & light) using Tailwind CSS. I worked on the parts where I had to fill up the content from my old website. And I’ll record more videos when I start working on interesting things like /bookshelf page, page views counter, etc.

A few notes from the commits I pushed recently

Hello, hope you are well in these crazy times. It wasn’t a productive week for me since the last Tuesday. But I could manage to ship a few updates to my new website over the weekend.

Repo I’m working on - https://github.com/aravindballa/website

I have nothing to share in this letter as I hardly wrote anything.

Solving something is good. When it is for yourself, meaning when you solve your own problem, it’s the best.

But to make it a successful Saas, there are a lot of factors to consider. Building it in way that is scale-able is the obvious part. Building it is actually the small part of the big system.

Finding the right audience is the key. Or customers as people call it. That problem needs to be a real big problem to people and they should be ready to pay for it.

Hey,

Happy Ugadi. I hope you and everyone at home is well.

Incremental Static generation

Few days ago, I was thinking – What bottlenecks do I have? I want to do a bunch of things. Do my job, create courses, build products and help people. But there are a few obstacles, bottlenecks as I call them here, in my way of getting to do what I want.

Everyone has a common bottleneck, time. But the thing is, everyone has the same amount of time in a day. How can you create more time? By saying no to almost everything. This would help me to focus on the task at hand.

Another bottleneck is our mental health. Taking right breaks and being healthy is important to be able to make the most of your time. How does it help, when you have a free day, where you can work on the thing you want, but you are mentally drained. You aren't able to concentrate on anything. Waste, right?

Think of the bottlenecks that are in the way for achieving what you want to do.

Hello,

How's it going? Let's talk about Shortcuts on iOS.

iOS shortcuts are a game changer. It was one of the reasons I bought an iPhone. (Well, at least I feel good when I think like that)

If there is a task that takes opening up a few apps and clicking buttons in it, it can be done with a single click using Shortcuts. It’s crazy.

Hey.

You enjoying this Tuesday?

I've kept postponing this letter but now its time. This is the very first email I'm sending out on my newsletter and I can't wait to hear from you.