Anees Iqbal

Firebase is quite a big suite of utilities, so your choice of alternatives would depend on what parts of Firebase you use. That said, I've heard good things about https://supabase.com/ -- YMMV.

I am an engineer turned founder, have been sitting behind screens for more than a decade. I've learned that left to right screens (especially if they are big) cause neck pain after a short while. Vertical (ie up to down) screen arrangement is much easier on the neck but then the screens are so far that you have to zoom in the content to see properly. After playing around with different...

This is not a discussion question, more of an opinion piece. I'd recommend you make a blog post about it instead.

I've found it a great alternative to digging through forums of all kinds. Need some advice on engine rebuild and appropriate donor drivetrains? ChatGPT got your back! Working through a difficult to understand pipeline of ffmpeg to transform a video live stream? Piece of cake for ChatGPT. It will also explain to you what each of the flag does saving you time browsing the obscure...

I think following your body's natural rhythm helps. I have periods of high productivity and periods of low productivity. Being aware of the current state and knowing it's temporary is helpful. I'd go on to say it's extreme to expect humans to continue to perform consistently forever. Also, listen to your body, it'll tell you when you need a break.

Consolidation of features that you'd normally have to get out of different services, as a bonus also eliminates the pain points around data portability for your data

The inspiration behind what I'm working on was my friends' and own experiences and painpoints. We all wanted something where we could keep track of our stakeholders, investors and equity. Do a little bit of HR and also send monthly investor reports. Started working on https://coropera.com/ to resolve the painpoints. It doesn't address them all right now but getting there :)

I think this really depends on what you are personally bringing to the table. In my experience, to build a successful business you need someone who's really good at sales, someone who's good at building and someone who can prioritise things correctly. If you get lucky, you can find people that have more than one of these traits or "good enough" secondary traits while being very good at their...

Off-topic but was this post generated by GPT-4? :)

Many ed-tech companies or startups are rushing to make use of the latest AI tech to see how it can work for their learners and educators, I've seen the most interesting product from Khan Academy so far. Here's a video by Sal Khan explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnIgnS8Susg It's an AI assistant that doesn't just give you answers straight up, but pushes you and enables...

There's a Youtube Channel called "Lofi Girl" (https://www.youtube.com/@LofiGirl) -- Highly recommended for productive sprints

I'm gonna take a different stance than some of my peers and say that Cryptocurrencies have mostly failed. They've opened people up to fraud possibilities that were already patched up in the traditional payment system and have been involved in too many rug-pull schemes. People have been banging the drums for their usecases forever but we haven't seen any material benefits or usecases despite...

Absolutely! There are times when you are too focused on an individual piece that you may forget to look at the whole puzzle. Time-blocking things usually helps to pull me out when that's happening and make sure every bit of work gets the attention it deserves.

I'd say checklists. It's much easier for me personally to define what I need to do (the definitions can be vague but need to be set) and then act on it. If the checklist items are not defined then the chances of getting distracted after completing one task are very high.

I'd say Orion Browser on both iOS and MacOS. It allows you to install Chrome or Firefox extensions on mobile! For desktop use, it's got the extensions but also the battery consumption of Safari so best of both worlds IMO. The company behind the extension is also pretty focused on privacy, they even launched their own search engine called Kagi. Highly recommended

I've been using the macOS TextEdit with some extensions (Pure Paste + default format to Plain Text) for "fresh" notes and Slack comments for archival. What do you use?

Back when I worked at Truebill (now RocketMoney), I built up the referral system for platform. We quickly realised how flawed monetary-reward referral systems are. There were Facebook groups where people would coordinate how to game the system. Based on my experience since, the best referral systems are where the interests of the platform and people doing referrals are aligned, that could be a...

My work often varies between technical and non-technical. For technical work, ChatGPT has replaced digging through forums or writing in foreign programming languages for quick changes. For non technical work, I've been using it for naming suggestions and sanity checking my plans. It's been catching oversights pretty well

My previous company was very community focused. It had a celebrity CEO who already had a massive following. His following helped to build the early adopters of MVP. The platform was then built in public with the involvement and feedback from the community to help with the buy in. I'd say it helps to be transparent, and engage your community, and follow up on the feedback and tell them of any...