I do have a LinkedIn profile of my experiences; however, my work is scattered across domains. Perhaps, it’s due to me being reserved when marketing myself (although, I’m deeply passionate when it comes to marketing and empowering other people and their work). Nevertheless, blogging helps me market myself more, and here's my attempt at the same.
I’ll be turning 30 in a week, so here’s a look back at what I’ve done so far at work and how my career has shaped up! It’s been almost 9 years, but I’ve taken a six-month break every four years (is that like my very own bitcoin halving event?).
I earned my engineering degree (B.Tech) in Computer Science from BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus (2011-2015), achieving a CGPA of 6.86/10. Similar to many Indian parents, I found myself steered toward engineering, a path not of my choosing. My genuine interests have consistently leaned towards non-academic pursuits—I aspired to be a cricketer, then a chess player, and eventually, a filmmaker. The credit for these constant shifts goes to my family's influence, as they tended to divert me from hobbies where I excelled, leading me to avoid pursuing them professionally. The silver lining in this experience? It transformed me into a jack of all trades, mastering some disciplines at times, yet none for the long term.
The long and short of the above means that I kinda sleepwalked through my university without any clear ambitions or life and career goals. I did like the fact that my uni had "no-rule-rules," which gave most of us the freedom to choose to attend classes and brought the entrepreneurial spirit within us. The one side-effect of this was that I didn't take corporate jobs seriously and hence passed on most job interviews I got during placements. I probably wasn't serious about securing a job—after all, I didn't have a vision of what's work, my strengths, and how I can contribute to society, yada yada.
One of the first job offers I turned down was a PPO at Syniverse Technologies (well, none of my peers accepted it either as the job role was slightly dated compared to new-age tech firms). This was a company where I interned for six months as part of our university’s Practice School-2 program (July-Dec 2014), focusing on the Spring Batch framework and Java. Although my team had more significant priorities, I was given some PoCs and the chance to browse through production code, refactor, improve, and have as much coffee as I could. The highlights of my work that impressed my managers were that I fixed a formatting bug in their application—some Unicode parsing!
Coming back home after completing my undergraduate without a job offer isn’t the best way to start a career. It can be stressful—not for me, but for my family.
Having all the free time in the world (although I had a six-month deadline from my dad to start earning), I did try to explore a few things that appealed to me—particularly, building mobile apps. After all, it’s visually appealing and has a marketplace. Building apps also gives us a chance to setup UI and control human actions the way we want—it’s like directing a film — one of my earliest passions.
Like most 20-year-olds just out of college, I aspired to build apps for a living. One of the first ones was a movie review curated RSS feed app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chugh.anupamchugh.moviereviews) with Google Ads that earned me 2 dollars lifetime—significantly less than the minimum payout of 100 dollars. I followed that with a Unity roll-the-ball game called Gimics (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.AnupamChugh123.HarryPotter) with gameplay that lets the user choose the cubes based on the chronological order in the respective film (and poor graphics). As you’d probably figured from the dead links, both apps are now down (and my hard drive with most prototype screenshots was corrupted), along with my Google Play Store account—thanks to a freelance client who published a violation app through my account. Lesson learned: never accept freelance gigs to install apps through your dev console store account.
Anyway, within the first couple of months, I figured apps weren’t going to make me a living, at least not when I have no real-world experience. I eventually got connected with Angad Nagdkarni, my university colleague who had been building software since the age of 13 and had launched a viral conversational AI app during our final semester, Hullo, while also working on Examify. I went to Mumbai for a trial to see if we could work, given the little bit of Android dev experiments I’d done. After spending a week there, we eventually figured out that I was too behind the curve and lacked a sense of “fire” to work independently in startup environments—and no wonder I wasn’t hired. However, within that one week, I learned a lot. Gaining insights into UI fundamentals, Parse framework, the need for speedy development, and crucially, acquiring a Mac for Android dev work (thanks, Angad, for letting me go—or I might've ended up as a corporate monkey).
Now, back home in July 2015, I attended my convocation. During that period, I connected with two distant cousins (MBA grads) who had a startup idea—Courier but door-to-door, think Dunzo, Uber Eats. We called it Dourier. I built a pilot Android app (link to probably the only demo I still have saved). However, building a product can seldom accelerate a startup. Many more things are required, like marketing, capital, and network effects. We were still finding our feet in our own careers (plus, the app I built sucked), so we put the startup on hiatus for the good and moved on. A nice consolation prize while working on Dourier was that I became an independent Android developer capable of building software from the ground up.
Next on the agenda: what's a cash-strapped individual with three consecutive app setbacks to do? I opted to launch a website. Yes, like one of those million-dollar idea websites! I headed to DigitalOcean, got a cool domain name, and requested my dad's credit card for a $5 payment. Witnessing the additional bill alerts pop up on my dad's phone was terrifying for both of us. Alas, I’d forgotten to uncheck two premium features worth 200 dollars. Admittedly, I was a bit too careless and restless. Despite successfully reversing those payments, my dad threw down a 30-day challenge: find work online, make money however you can. He even set up an account for me on freelancer.com.
That started my career in freelancing. Every day, I would get up and bid on Android app projects, quoting the lowest price. It was like participating in an auction or stock market trades! The initial gig I received was for uploading an app to the Play Store (a decision, as I previously mentioned, that led to the termination of my Google Play dev console).
The first app-dev project gig I won was to build an end-to-end geo-location-based-communication app. Think, WhatsApp meets Google Maps = “Ownspeech Technologies.” It was a fun project that my client (who was a web dev and I finished in a few weeks — integrating QuickBlox + Google Maps + Parse.
At the same time, I got another gig – a blog-writing contract for a website called JournalDev.com (acquired in 2021 by DigitalOcean) by Pankaj. Between Oct 2015 and 2018, I wrote over 350 Android dev technical tutorials for it. Most of these tutorials ranked at the top of Google search, thanks to Pankaj's SEO prowess and skills. Pankaj and I became great friends, and I went on to build the first version of the JournalDev Android app, which received over 10K+ downloads.
As I completed my first gig towards the end of Nov 2015, I purchased my first Mac and iPhone. The next freelance gig I secured during this period was for a delivery-on-demand application for a stealth startup based out of Gold Coast, Australia. Coincidentally, my Dourier work (and source code) did help in winning this client pitch. It was a one-and-a-half-month contract to build a driver/partner Android app and assist their junior Android developer in the client-side app. The app was named MUBER and functioned as a competitor to Uber Eats, with the added unique selling proposition of alcohol delivery.
As my contract neared its conclusion, there were uncertainties in startup, primarily related to fundraising, resulting in payment delays that unsettled some colleagues, prompting the departure of some. In due course, I got the opportunity to assume the role of lead Android developer, and got a long-term contract with the startup (and got paid too). I was the second hire after Nishant (who crafts exceptional iOS apps and consistently enhances his skills) and Allie (our team manager/supervisor).
Another month passed as we toiled day and night. Just as our apps were nearing launch day, we received a legal notice from Uber regarding the clout-chasing name "MUBER". Consequently, the company underwent a rebranding to MOBEY, and in the process, I learned a few more refactoring lessons while updating the apps!
Here are a few screenshots from MOBEY Android apps:
Working at MOBEY for two years was a fun rollercoaster experience. Without ever being in Australia, I had the opportunity to simulate various trips and analyze data. It was a challenge to ensure the Android apps looked as good as their iOS counterparts, given that my UI skills were, and to some extent, still are rusty.
Weirdest incident: Me, botching up the first launch of the Android client app, by shipping the app without an onboarding flow to production.
The craziest thing I did that got approved: Adding a “Here Comes The Money” theme song to our driver app in place of notification alerts to make it quirky (this got hilariously featured in an ad):
Best takeaway: I got a chance to work as the second lead in iOS towards the end (thanks to Nish for being an excellent mentor).
In August 2017, due to a lack of business growth and a conflict of interest among board members regarding the vision, Mobey was shut down for good. On my last day, I uploaded the final four app updates (2 for iOS and 2 for Android) to the App Store and Play Store and called it a day!
During the two years, I simultaneously worked on a few minor projects and wrote Android tutorials on JournalDev. All this while, I was working remotely and missed the office cooler conversations and real environments. So, I traveled a bit, collaborated with people at co-working spaces (nothing to write home about), and attempted to become a full-time blogger—eventually burning out and shifting to Bangalore.
Coincidentally, through my JournalDev blog, I received a call from an Agri-tech startup, Agricx, that specialized in a camera-based AI enterprise application to detect crops in an image, analyze count, length, etc. I led and managed the Android team and worked with OpenCV, Aruco, and served as the interface between the web and ML/AI teams. Eventually, I built and shipped the first version iOS enterprise app on my own.
Screengrabs:
I worked at Agricx from September 2018 to Oct 2019, and decided to conclude my tenure as my project milestones were completed, and the company was not securing additional funds. Subsequently, Agricx ceased operations within the next seven months amid the COVID pandemic.
Medium and Substack Era
Using my newfound love for ML/AI, I started exploring it on iOS and dabbled with the new buzz of the town, SwiftUI. Working on side projects, I began writing tutorials about them on Medium, my personal blog, and GitHub. Eventually, I got an audience in the SwiftUI space and some freelance contract work (the prominent one being building MomLikes app with Horace), and my Medium blog blew up (and it paid okay for a side income), thanks to Better Programming!
Call it COVID Quarantine blues or my long-pursuit of becoming a full-time blogger, I started actively publishing on Medium and exploring writing beyond tutorials as well — specifically, I gave a stab to satire writing and tech reporting.
Some of my most famous articles:
Apple Is Killing a Billion Dollar Industry — 500K views on Medium and Substack.
Ugly Truths About Working From Home — 120K views on Medium.
If Programming Languages Had Honest Slogans — 150K views on Medium.
Google Joins Apple to Cancel Facebook’s Trillion-Dollar Empire Dream — Medium + Substack posts: 50K views.
Google’s New Popup Will Further Weaken Facebook’s Advertisement Business (Substack: 41K views)
And… many of them got featured on the front page of Hacker News:
During my blogging spree and venture into the creator economy, I got a new part-time contract offer from a Brisbane startup, Aged Care Decisions. The goal was to build white-label native Android and iOS web view apps with some native functionalities that could be modified from the server side.
As that contract was approaching its conclusion towards the end of 2020, an interim role managing the Medium publication Better Programming became available. Zack Shapiro, the co-founder and managing editor of Better Programming, was going on paternity leave for a month, and I stepped in. While I am not a professional editor, my interest lies more in the marketing and management side of publications. Moreover, the publication already had a copyediting team, so my role primarily involved acting as a bridge between them and the engineering-focused writers. Importantly, I had previously worked with Zack as a writer and admired his building skills. I was eager to explore the tools and systems he and the team had built-in for tracking authors, traffic, and content to focus on growth.
Better Programming Days
So, I took on the role and had a blast increasing the publication's views from 5.5 million per month to almost 6 million (PS: it’s all an algorithmic game). Unfortunately, Zack decided to move on from Better Programming, resulting in me being offered the full-time managing editorial position by Tony Stubblebine, the CEO of Better Pubs and Coach.me. Managing a tech-media publishing house and community is a rollercoaster, and the role is often everything except editing. Think of my role at Better Programming as a: hiring manager, engineering manager, debugger, growth marketer, and communications person (thankfully, automation did help a lot in most places!).
Medium went through plenty of trough phases in the following and, eventually, Tony Stubblebine became the CEO of Medium in July 2022, and things did improve!
However, the network effects and distribution of programming articles were consistently on the decline, placing me in a state of uncertainty. I was always asking myself the tough questions: “How could I empower authors, curate the best stories, foster a vibrant community, and keep the BP ship afloat?” I made concerted efforts — from publishing comprehensive programming newsletters spanning the breadth and depth of Medium to strategizing with a select few Better Programming authors and promoting on various social media channels. Despite giving my best, the traffic never rebounded, and since the publication editor’s role is often tied to incentives, it was emotionally distressing to justify what I was doing.
Contemplating my decision to step down took almost a year. It was one of the most difficult choices, given the significant access, freedom, and control I enjoyed in my work (thanks to the Medium CEO being my boss). Moreover, the structure and tools of Medium publications meant I served as the single point of contact for thousands of writers, making leadership transitions particularly hard.
Eventually, I resigned in Sept 2023 after growing the publication from 50 million to 150 million pageviews in two years and stayed around for a few months to support the new team. However, as it turns out, Better Programming was placed on hiatus as tech was no longer the focus of Medium.
Working at Better Programming was one of the greatest learning curves in my career. I gained valuable insights into the workings of social media algorithms, media corporations, and human behavior and psychology. One of the biggest takeaways after working in the blogging space was about owning your content, data, and adopting the POSSE approach. When my JournalDev column got acquired by DigitalOcean, I no longer had access to modify/remove it. Similarly, once BP was paused, my traffic and discovery died.
So, that’s a key learning that having your own domain. Blog platforms, in the grand scheme, are all about making that copyright, SEO, and algorithmic crash. I’ve resurrected a few Substacks for various topics I write on, restructured my iOSDevie.blog, and set up a personal blog on GitHub for portability.
Since October 2023, I’ve taken a break from work, not just due to pandemic burnout and the BP debacle, but for self-reflection and exploring life outside of work. During this time, I traveled to Vietnam, watched most end-of-the-year films and shows, and read a few books, while also taking the opportunity to introspect about how I want to approach my work and life in the next decade.
I’ve primarily worked in tech, media, marketing, and blogging ecosystems until now, and recently, I've taken on a new challenge. I'll journal about it once I find my feet!