Productivity as a DIY project

As I was wrapping up my time at Fullstack Academy, the future seemed bright. I had an in-demand skill set in my arsenal and after three months of drilling algorithms and learning best practices in web development, landing a position as a web developer was all but guaranteed.

And although my time in the classroom was done, I continued to get my money’s worth from Fullstack. I was assigned a career counselor who would continue to help me in my efforts to break into the world of tech, whether it be mock interviews or salary negotiation tips.

In order to make it easier for her to keep track of where I stood in the interview process with a given company, she had set up an account on Asana for me to record my progress. After trying Asana for a week, however, I was not a fan. This was not my first project management tool — I’ve used both Trello and Todoist extensively — and Asana felt cluttered by comparison.

I shared my gripes with my career counselor, she said I could simply keep her in the loop via Slack. Through this minor experience, however, I came to realize how much time I had been wasting switching between multiple services, which totally defeats the purpose of “productivity” apps.

Rather than have all my projects and tasks splintered across multiple services, I decided to consolidate all my projects onto a single platform. The only issue was which one to use.

Trello’s kanban boards were great for large-scale projects, but left much to be desired for one-off tasks (e.g. “Buy milk today”). On the other hand, Todoist’s single stream of tasks made it difficult to visualize workflow. I sought out other services that might have been a better compromise, but each service I sought out came with it’s own off-putting limitations (oftentimes it was the price tag).

It seems silly in retrospect. Here I was in search of a web app that would fulfill my particular needs, forgetting for a moment that I had just spent the past 3 months developing the skills I would need to build it myself! And so began my quest to build my perfect web app.

I chose the name Dharana both in reference to Asana (as both words refer to concepts from the Eight Limbs of Yoga) and as a way to describe what would be the experience of using my app — the word dharana in Sanskrit has several related meanings, including “a collection of the mind” and “uninterrupted focus.”

I was delighted to find out that Todoist was built with several of the same tools I had learned at Fullstack, and so I began building my app with a similar structure, adding my own twists along the way. Ultimately, Dharana’s tech stack was the following:

Anybody that has been job hunting within the past few years will tell you that it is simply not enough to get your resume circulated to the right people, your reputation also needs to make the rounds.

It’s for this reason that I began attending meetups almost daily since leaving Fullstack. One particular meetup group that I became fond of was the React NYC meetup. Every two weeks, they bring in some of the best professionals in the tech industry to give presentation on how their companies go about using React in their online offerings. Each time I attend a React NYC event, I walk away learning something new, and feeling like I’ve better refined my understanding of contemporary best practices on the front end.

Whenever I learned something that I felt would improve the experience of Dharana, I would spend the time to refactor the project; I usually ended up extremely satisfied by the results. Slowly, I began approaching my building of Dharana less as an end goal, and more as an open-ended exploration.

While the current culture in tech dictates that developers must monetize everything under the sun, I’m in no rush to make Dharana into a full-blown business.

I have no doubt that Dharana could be a tool that several people might find useful in their daily lives, but for now I’m very much content with Dharana being something that’s just for me.

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