How I had a sense of time travel in an Indian Himalayan Village

Bir is an incredibly special place which represents a blend between the modernity of western civilization while also seeing a glimpse of past life a village era.

As I sit in a modern western like cafe cum co work, I see lot of tourists and workation folk roaming the streets. They represent the modern workforce, which is information based, which is time free and location independent. I see a girl that has passed across the same cafe quite a few times which symbolized the new freedom to the youth. After a while I see an old fellow a kulfi walla passing by the street. He has bhompu in his hand which he blows in a pattern of two strokes and then waits patiently for kids to come out of their home to the street and get the kulfi. Before, as I was roaming the streets, I saw him travelling several KM ago. He must have been doing these daily long walkabouts in the hope that today he would be able to sell all and reap some profits.

It's almost a sense of time travel, this scene has taken me 2 decades back when I used to be in village and used to get excited whenever I heard such a sound. I remember that I used to request my grandmother to give me a few coins so that I could get that kulfi. Often when she wasn’t at home, I would take the money out of galla of the shop. We gathered around the kulfi Wala and then enjoyed the flavor with so much satisfaction and peace. Now back to the present. The kulfi wala is old, and I am not getting as excited as the kid I used to be. The abundance of pleasure has made the value and significance of such joy comparatively less.

The kulfi wala would still continue to roam the street in hope that kids will come out in the street and flock as they used to before. His dried eyes and veins on his head show how much tired he must but he could do nothing but hope.

The rush of success and cities has taken these glimpses away but if you come to BIR you can often see these glimpses again almost as you have time travelled.

Times have changed, as so is the process of recruiters. During our own screening process at twimbit.com, I observed what mistakes candidates were making. There were so many applications that only a few things stand out and help make our decision.

Don’t take me wrong but modern application portal are like tinder apps where best profile makes the difference. And there are trivial things that account for it.

I can confidently say that these things won't just be appreciated at our company, but anyone. I pointed these things out and mentioning them here. Surprisingly, you don't need to do a lot of changes, just minor mentions and corrections and you are good to go.

We will call them the 5 P’s -

1. Platform 🚉
2. Profile 😎
3. Profession 🧑🏻‍🎨
4. Portfolio 💼
5. Purpose 🚀

1. Platform 🚉

Many of us don’t realize but recruiters tend to stick with one recruitment platform. The main reason for this is the chaos it creates when you need to manage the application and visit various platforms regularly. Although there are many platforms, but they share the same process flow. You apply to an opportunity; they screen you and the process starts.

Now if you carefully understand your odds of getting more opportunity will increase if you have profile on multiple platforms. This information can be just copied from one another with minor adjustments. For you to respond and apply to positions is easier than recruiter stumbling around on various platform.

2. Profile 😎

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but when you have a lot of choices, the cover does make an impact. In this case a recruiter on an average must screen 50 applications every day. This makes it difficult to go and check for individual profiles and read about them. It really helps in making the decision if there is something that stands out. These traits can be as simple as putting up a decent profile picture, writing a greeted intro, mentioning your skills, hobbies etc. You can arguably say that these things are mentioned in my resume already, but the catch is that a recruiter won't even reach till your resume and go with a better choice.

Here is a small example of 2 applicants, which one do you think stands out.

You will quite agree that the first one is more appealing than the second. It has a nice picture, a good bio, mentioned skills and of course past experiences.

Also don’t forget to mention appropriate external profile that count your experience. eg. Developers should mention there Github, Kaggle, hackerank or designer there behance, dribble etc. and your personal website is a huge must these days.

3. Profession 🧑🏻‍🎨

You should clearly mention the profession you are in or the one you want to pursue. Don’t leave it to your fate and the recruiter to decide. Usually when we look at an application, we are actually trying to find commonalities between what we need and what the candidate already possesses. Also, don't confuse your expectations between full time, intern, part-time and freelance. You yourself know what you deserve and what you are capable of. Minor hustling is OK, but dream castles not. Mention what you aspire and only go for the opportunities that meet your expectations. These things make it easier and faster for recruiter to decide.

4. Portfolio 💼

You may not have experience in the position your applying for, which is completely fine, but you should have at least done something in past in that field. A recruiter definitely wants to have a taste of your work style. For developers going for technology stack-based opportunity, should mention a sample project or an open source contribution which can show their work. Designers should have their mood boards or past work mentioned. A cherry on cake can be, if you are an influencer of your domain like a speaker, blogger, opensource maintainer. So, keep on trying these things and cataloguing them on your portfolio.

So next time you are working on something keep them logged somewhere. A best practice can be writing a blog about it. Others can learn from it and recruiters can see your work.

5. Purpose 🚀

Apart of the tabular data you have added to your application there should be oozing passion. How can you do that? by adding your personal swag in your work. This is applicable to all the above-mentioned points. To start, write your goals on a paper and whatever you write in the application field, think about how your goals match with it. Also ask your friends to review your application and ask for their first impression (but don’t ask the people that care for your feeling 😓).

Wrapping up 📜

If you do all these things properly your application can truly be reflection of you. Good things don’t come easy and bad time doesn’t last long. Be patient and humble to each opportunity. Also be experimental with your application if something doesn't sounds right try out something else. You should keep on trying new ways to make your application stands out.

I hope this note would have helped you and you can reach out to me for any queries or advices.

Try out positions on twimbit careers.

Careers | Twimbit

1. Passion

This read has everything you ever wanted to know to get started with your startup idea with no investment.

It’s been a while since I am in the start-up league. Over the course of time, I have made multiple mistakes, while making good decisions. Often, I am asked, how to start with a start-up idea? Of course, there is no simple answer to that. Most importantly, it’s your validated idea and second is your willpower. There are some good reads that can help you in getting the basics right such as Zero to One and The 4 Steps to Epiphany.

Despite sounding simple, it can actually become tough on the ground. So, rather than making it easier on papers, validate your idea by executing it in reality. If it’s a success, great; otherwise you can improve and perform better than before. Miraculous outcomes of seeing a thousand customers in the first month is a far-fetched ambition.

Ending the excuses

It’s easy to get lost in the fuss and build long-term plans with many loopholes impracticalities. You can choose to wander in such plans for weeks, but they won’t fetch you anything. The real answers can only be heard once you start. So, in this blog, I want to tell you the things that you can use to build your start-up without burning your pocket on extravagant things. Keep it simple and when you have the money―improvise.

Always keep in mind

Things don’t need to be perfect in the first go, your audience will gradually grow in number, giving you plenty of time to iterate and become better.

It’s easy to feel that an investment can solve all your problems. But that’s what every other entrepreneur is thinking. The real creativity lies in the scarcity. Think this as an opportunity to create something more awesome even when you have fewer resources. So for now just focus on getting started which can be done with minimum budget and rest you will figure out later. In this blog, I am going to tell you about the tools and their implementation process. You may be familiar with some of the tools, but I have some hidden ingredients.

Name

Keep it simple and easy to pronounce (Don’t put too many lingos or hard to remember crossmatch), but something that makes it easier to remember.

Advice: Go with something that is popular in your product domain. For example, Twimbit was named as an acronym for The world is moved by ideas and technology.

Business Name Generator

Logo

Follow the rule of simplicity and create a first draft that should be good enough to go with your idea. In the beginning, it can be as simple as your company name in a good font and color combination.

Advice: Don’t try to copy the logo theory of combining words, it’s just stupid. Eg. if your company is FastServers you may think of going with FS coupled over each other.

Hatchful | Your digital logo designer

Website

Once you have a name ready, purchase a domain from any seller like Godaddy or NameCheap. Then, you can use “Stackbit” to generate a good looking and fast website for you. Stackbit takes care of theme, deployment and free hosting with some simple clicks.

Advice: Put regular blog posts, FAQs, and a clear product statement on your site.

Stackbit | Stackbit

If your start-up needs an e-commerce presence you can use “Square”. It comes with a built-in payment solution.

Sell Online - Build a Free Online Store or eCommerce Website | Square

Customer communication

In the process of building your start-up, always remember to keep your customers closer, while communication is frictionless.

Advice: A happy client is word of mouth marketing for your brand.

Emails

Start with “Zoho” mails, which comes with 5 free business emails and if your team grows you can switch to other premium plans.

Advice: It’s unprofessional to use a “Gmail id” for client communication.

Email Hosting | Ad-Free Business Email Hosting - Zoho Mail

Hiring

To build a strong team, you need a good set of minds. People who can belive in your Ideas and take them forward. From the beginning, there has been no better platform to get good talent then angelist. It’s free and has a good crowd. Additionally, it has a good hiring app that makes shortlisting candidates much easier. https://angel.co/recruiting/

Advice: Give a sense of responbility to new comers and full trust. If they proove to be valuable keep them as an asset. If not don’t keep them tied up for too long.

Teams collaboration

Slack is always a go-to solution for me in this case. It is free for unlimited users and offers a lot of features that can help you communicate and share ideas with the team.

Advice: To manage tasks, you can use Trello, which offers easy kanban boards ( drag and drop based board columns), keeping track of all ongoing activities.

Accounting

Accounting must be managed properly from day one. It helps in keeping everything in check and restricts you from overspending from your pocket.

Accounting software - Free small business bookkeeping software

I have been a huge fan of wave as it makes accounting an easy-breezy. .You can manage invoices and collect spending receipts easily with mobile apps. It also helps in company analytics on profits and expenses, completely free.

Email Marketing

Keep your consumer informed with the latest updates and offers. Mailchimp helps you to manage all-round customer email campaigning in a free plan.

Advice: Try possible methods of capturing their emails such as, webinars and free giveaways like an ebook or a small gift. This will serve you as future leads.

Turn emails into revenue | Mailchimp

Bonus

These are a few tools that every start-up would need but if you still need some more, you can check out “Secret” and get utilize various offers/credits for start-ups.

Secret - Exclusive Software Perks for Entrepreneurs

Conclusion

Now that you have everything in place which was on your mind before kick-starting, don’t wait anymore. It is okay to make mistakes, they often tend to result in better products. Listening to your customer problems is a great way to learn and become better, rather than pondering on the problems that you think they might have. Get on the ground and get real feedback. Talking on getting real, below is a bonus read for you. Good luck and enjoy!

Getting Real

The internship is the first and most important step in one’s career path. It gives a first glance of the work culture and helps in gaining confidence in deciding the right career for you. There will be hardly anyone who hasn’t done at least one internship. But the most important part is finding a good one and then making the most out of it. I did 5 internships in 3 college years that too traveling across 13 countries around the world and all self-funded. I can’t emphasize enough on what an important role they have played in my life that is helping me in doing my job as CTO of Twimbit. In this read, I will take you along my internship journey through various keystones that one should consider to find better opportunities and make most out of their internship.

1. Source of Opportunity

Internship 1 Fall 2016
Internship project — WEB operations 
Company - Joint EBWA and BPW 
Place - Cairo, Egypt

I have seen many folks wandering around to find a good internship. This shouldn’t be a big challenge as there are many platforms that get you matched with a good opportunity. That sometimes becomes a challenge itself as you don’t know what is the company behind there job description. You should dig deeper about the company as much as you can and ask about it more during your interview round. Also, you should not conflict your interest with too much of this and that and other materialistic bullshit. Always remember it’s you who is getting the most benefits, not the company. And your focus should be to work with the right minds who can help you grow. Everyone won’t find an internship at big companies like Google and it’s ok to start small. You will learn more at startup and will be given many responsibilities there.

My first internship was through a talent organization named AIESEC which helps students find internships abroad. I applied for a volunteer opportunity at an NGO named EBWA which empowered women in running their business. I lacked experience at that time hence anything would have been better but working for a noble cause was the best thing. After a couple of interviews, I got the opportunity. It was non paid but they would offer accommodation and travel allowances. I collected some money to get the visa and flight tickets and set off for my first travel. I was 17 at that time, so my family was worried about traveling alone, but ultimately everything turned out to be good. During the program, I not only did some amazing things but also explored ancient Egypt and made many friends.

Nowadays at Twimbit, we hire interns from all around the world through various sources. For us, no platform is better than other and we treat every candidate equally and give them every possible chance to get the best opportunity.

2. A solid reason

Internship 2 Summer 2017
Internship project — WEB development 
Company - Tommorrow Systems ( IWASSA)
Place - Milan, Italy

The first time I heard the idea of internship it seemed to be fun, like getting to work in an office without actually completing your degree, sounds really cool. Most of my batchmates had to do it for the main reason of adding it their resumes but I, on the other hand, had no idea at first why I was doing it (other than that I get to work in an office 😂 ). But later I realized its mainly to get a glimpse of how your future life would look like. Those folks who are doing it for theirs. resumes ( not to offend them ) would find themselves just passing the time and not learning something real.

I got the proposal to work at Tomorrow systems during my internship in Egypt when I was traveling for a weekend holiday to Dahab which is an island in Eastern Egypt. A stranger sitting next to me helped translate instruction from a security check personnel and later this stranger became my friend who was CMO at IWASSA. He asked me to have an interview with there Tech manager. I took that very lightly at that time and went to have an interview and surprisingly got selected. It was a remote opportunity where I would be paid monthly and often travel to Milan during my College vacations. During the internship, I learned the important lessons of managing work and delivering things at a time especially because of the remote environment. Some tasks were more challenging but my seniors always helped me and guided me through those hard tasks. I learned a lot about serverless, web security, Wordpress development, Hosting, etc during the time. Later the company was acquired by Tomorrow Systems and I was lucky to remain the part. I also worked on projects from Sanrios the famous company behind hello kitty.

Fun fact — Sanrio's official website was developed and maintained by me and I also visited the office at Milan which was full of Hello Kitty stuff .

3. The required skills

Internship 3 Fall 2017
Internship project — Front End Developer 
Company - Upsell.ai
Place - Athens, Greece

The most difficult part of getting an Internship is when you don’t have many skills and better the company the higher will be their requirements. At this time it becomes more of a chicken-egg problem when you have to think between learning the skill first and then doing the internship or doing the internship and learning simultaneously. In my opinion, it should be a mixture of both. You should continuously work on adding more skills but that is not the only thing a company needs. It should be more about what you desire to do. Companies most of the time look into your style of doing things, not expertise in a language or stack. At the same time, you should be ready to take the required tech stack as your next challenge and be open about it during the interview. Most of the time people are kind enough in believing in you and giving you every chance to prove yourself.

I applied for a Global entrepreneur program through AIESEC, this time for Europe ( Just because I wanted to travel more 🤩 ). I applied for multiple companies where everyone’s requirement exceeded my skill set but I still persisted to give it a try. Among them was a company named Upsell.ai which was a hotel and luxury AI company and needed a Front End guy knowing React.js( I, of course, 😂 lied in my application ) and went to have the interview. My interviewer was the founder and CEO himself and the coolest guy I ever met. I was honest about my skills and told other things about me and the interview turned out to be 1 hour of fun call. I got the opportunity and traveled to Athens. Soon I was handed many important responsibilities and made many awesome techs. We use to travel around hotels in Greece and really enjoyed our work. Later the company offered me a job as a UX and AI consultant with a stipend I could never refuse.

4. Not just about work

Internship 4 Summer 2018
Internship project — Research Associate for Recommender Systems 
Company - TU Wien, Ecommerce Devision of IT
Place - Vienna, Austria

In the hustle of becoming better and making good profile situations sometimes become really daunting and challenging. When you are not enjoying things that you do, you can’t think creatively and do things at your maximum potential. If you are not feeling good about your project you should talk about it. People mentoring you have a better experience and can always help you in the situation. Self-motivation is also important and it's not necessary that you will get things that you want but you should be ready for any situations and that's what your future life is going to be about. The best thing you can have from your internship period is finding friends and mentors that will remain for the rest of your life.

I was doing amazingly good at Upsell but Babis ( CEO of the company) had something more for me. He offered me to be the company representative at a research project that we were doing with the Technical University of Vienna (TU WIEN). The project was to build a recommender system with AI/ML about which I had no prior knowledge. I went for the internship and learned many things about Recommender Sytems, Flask API, CNN, Deep learning and more. This gave me confidence and credibility to go on to build anything that had AI in it for the future.

But one thing that I realized was, more than the technical learning I also did learn about things like people skills, communications, overcoming the tough situations and helping others. These are the lesson I would never learn at home or in books. I now have a friend from almost all parts of the world and have people to visit for any help.

5. Managing the variables

Internship 5 Fall 2018
Internship project — Startup incubation 
Company - Kievents.co, AIC Bimtech
Place - Noida, India

The path to internship won’t be easy and many obstacles will come along. Most of you must be wondering how did I go for these internships during college time. BIT ( my college ) had the same strict attendance rule like the other colleges. Due to this reason, I always fell short of my attendance. But somehow, I always found a way with a certificate or an amazing excuse to get pass it. I don’t encourage you to go against your college rules but figure out a way to manage both of them parallelly and that’s what I exactly did. When you have the right opportunity in hand everyone will support you. And always be open to work remotely with the company, many of them already support a program like this. The other challenges that may come can be financial. I never depended on my family for my expenses and had a workaround to gather the budget. During my college days, I took freelance projects and saved my stipends for future travel.

Turns out if you have the full will of doing something you will find a way.

My final year internship was actually an incubation at AIC Bimtech. By this time my college realized my will power 😎 and didn’t bother me too much about attendance. Later I met other like-minded people and co-founded Twimbit

Conclusion

Most of you won’t be having the same things as I got and sometimes a little luck is also needed. But more than that you need to have the 4 most important things that I have at the back of my office wall.

I am always excited and happy to help anyone looking for an opportunity or need any guidance. Feel free to connect with me anytime. I hope you found something fruitful from my journey and I wish you good luck in the future.

• Get in Touch
• Careers | Twimbit

5 Internships taught me 5 rules of Internships was originally published in mobile-web.dev 📱 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Analytics is very important to track the performance of your web app. In a single page application, you would like to see the changing URL in Google Analytics Dashboard but as the page path changes, it doesn’t loads and sends the data automatically. Hence Just including the Google Analytics script tag won’t work. In this guide, I would take you through each step that you need in order to set up Google analytics with reach router that sends real-time data on each page change.

Reach router is a small, simple router for React that borrows from React Router, Ember, and Preact Router. Reach Router has a small footprint, supports only simple route patterns by design, and has strong (but experimental) accessibility features.

In this guide, we will use React-ga that handles the Google Analytics tag and sends that data whenever there is a URL change by listening to the route changes.

Step 1: Setup Google Analytics Property

We will first create a Google Analytics property and obtain the tracking ID

Step 2: Install React GA

React GA is a JavaScript module that can be used to include Google Analytics tracking code in a website or app that uses React for its front-end codebase.

Installation using npm:

npm install react-ga --save

Step 3: Import required modules

Now we would need to import the following modules from the Reach Router and the react-ga library in our App.js

import { Router,createHistory,LocationProvider }from "@reach/router";
import ReactGA from "react-ga";

Step 4: Setup tracking Code

Initialize Google Analytics with the obtained tracking ID in the first step in the global scope just after the export in App.js . Also, declare const history globally that enables you to record the browser history. We will use the constant later.

ReactGA.initialize("UA-103xxxxx-xx");
const history= createHistory(window);

Step 5: Handle the Routes

Now declare <LocationProvider history={history}> in return statement of your const App ifi function in App.js so that all components are inside it. This will help us listen to the URL’s as the route changes.

Step 6: Send the Tracking Data

Now on every URL change using history.listen, we will trigger and send the data using ReactGA.pageview. For this, we will setup a function that listen to the history object and changes the value of ReactGA.pageview object inside the const APP ifi function in our app.js

history.listen( window => {
  ReactGA.pageview(window.location.pathname+ window.location.search);
  console.log('page=>',window.location.pathname);
});

Here window.location.pathname is the URL and window.location.search are the URL Params.

Your dinal setup in App.js should look something like this

Run your code and you should be able to see the changes live in google analytics dashboard as you change the path.

Bonus Step: Sending Aditional Info

You can also send additional information using React.GA such as user ID, demographic, preference and other additional information and even on certain triggers using the same approach.

react-ga/react-ga

Google analytics with Reach router in 5 steps was originally published in mobile-web.dev 📱 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are a lot of hosting platforms to choose from these days. If you have just started building your web app and don’t know much about what hosting to choose, this read will help you understand about hosting services and also which one makes more sense to choose. This comes from what we learnt when testing our beta apps at Twimbit.

The biggest trap

When it comes to hosting our app there are many fancy terms that come across. You worry about the load, traffic, speed, uptime and what not. And then it becomes more difficult out of all the hosting providers like AWS, GCP, Azure etc. You would probably read a comparison test and choose the one that you think stands out. Some of the hostings also offer you free credits and you probably would think, Why not, it's free. Here is where we fall for them. It would be easy on your pocket but you will need a lot of knowledge and time before deploying the app. So the money you were thinking you saved is wasted in the time you spend in learning all those things. The actual question is, do you actually need all that for your initial stage. So instead of looking more into the specs, you should instead consider the hosting that is much easy on everything. If you talk about major web providers they were actually built for large scale application in mind. One should have proper knowledge about the Kernel and network before deploying the app on a self-managed server.

Types of Hostings

1. Shared hosting — In this hosting the resources of the server are shared among various other websites. This is cheapest as the cost is also shared among others. But if one site gets affected with malware your site will be vulnerable too. This will only happen with a cheap hosting provider as the good ones take the job of security very seriously.
2. Dedicated hosting — In this hosting, you have the complete ownership of the server and control each variable. It's expensive as you have to bear the whole cost. Also, you need to be a technical expert to manage the hosting.
3. VPS/ Cloud hosting — This hosting is most on-demand as it offers the flexibility of scaling the resources as your application size increases and you only pay for what use. But again with this hosting, you need to have technical expertise with the cloud environment.

So for a beginner application, it makes more sense to host it on a managed shared hosting. You don’t have to pay much for it and also you don’t need any technical expertise. Shared hosting comes with an easy to use console where you can manage everything about your application.

What things to consider?

Support

You don’t want to get messed up with hosting problems that come and there is a long list of them, from permissions issues to simple problem like HTACCESS error. A good hosting provider will take care of everything and will make sure that the application should run smooth. You should definitely check for 24 x 7 live chat support that really helps a lot at times.

Availability

You should consider where the server is actually located. Mostly it should be near to the area of usage so that the support time zone matches and also the response time is less.

Security and Backup

A good hosting provider will take the responsibility of security in their own hands. They come with Virus scanner and free SSL certificate and if any threat is detected on the shared server the site is quarantined until the issue is resolved so that the other sites don't get affected. Also, automated backups is a must these days. Daily automated backup can help you rollback to last stable version of your web app without you worrying about anything. Even if you messed everything up.

Hosting environment

This depends on the stack you have and the OS you will need out of Windows and Linux. The most application works with Linux. On top of this, there is managing setup that helps you manage the settings and also upload the code. CPanel is the easiest to use and offers a lot of features.

Uptime, Speed and Limit

Uptime is in percentage that is the time that your website would be guaranteed up. 99.9 % is good enough as the hosting provider needs to apply patches and schedule maintenance. For speed, you can check pingback from any of the hosting websites which should be less than 200 ms. There are 2 types of limits, Bandwidth and storage. There is nothing like unlimited hosting so don’t fall for it. Calculate the actual need and go for it. If the need increases which is good, you can expand and also migrate out.

Cost

The first thing is “ Don’t go for free”. The hosting provider will lure you and when you are most dependent on the hosting, it will probably ask for the charge. So consider all the above 5 points and choose a decent one. Normally it should be around 10K INR or 120 $.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the initial stage for application development is most complicated as you are struggling with the ideas. At that time adding hosting problem to your list is not a good thing. Shared hosting can take the load from 0 to around 5000 users. Till then you should have gained the confidence about your tech stack and also what kind of hosting you should choose from. On the Next milestone, you can go for Cloud hosting that can help scale to any number of users.

Some good managed shared hosting( not sponsored )that I came across in order as follows -

1. A2 hosting
2. Blue Host
3. Siteground
4. Hostgator

Hosting your web app at the beginning and the 6 things you should consider was originally published in mobile-web.dev 📱 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is always a time while developing web apps when you have this dilemma about which stack to choose. We usually have to trade-off between the performance (faster load times) or aesthetics ( the user experience ). All frameworks have there pros and cons and I don’t choose to favor one over another. But instead of choosing a single stack, I thought it would be cool to try something new and go with a paired tech stack. In this read, you will be able to see the why and Ifs to both of these technologies and how you can make them coexist enabling a seamless user experience. The final outcome is going to be a web experience that will use AMP for improved search results and instant load in search appearance proceeding to a React PWA that has fluidity enabled by virtual DOM. This means that we have to create 2 frontends with the exact same content and UI so that the user doesn't feel much difference. This read will cover the why and the Approach. And the next read will how and the steps to accomplish this.

Who will actually need this?

1. Ecommerce Sites relying on Google Search for customers and then wanting to have a closer audience with PWA
2. News and media sites with quick SEO ranking needs
3. Content sites like medium and Twimbit

Why AMP+ReactJs?

The usual scenario for a person to discover your app is via Google Search. AMP has a unique advantage over other frameworks that it can perform better on search rankings and also gives a bolt icon to your search results. It will also give an instant load as soon someone clicks the AMP search results which feels as if the content was part of search results. This can be easily achieved if you can create a 100% valid AMP Page. You might have compromise on some aesthetics and user experience on the way to have a 100% AMP valid page. It would look great, as AMP has almost all the web components. Switching between the pages would be as instant but not seamless.

This is something we discovered on the path of creating a perfect PWA that the navigation should be seamless. And for this particular reason, we have to move to ReactJS because of its Virtual Dom implementation. But the important part is how to make this transition without the user even noticing it.

The Approach

Following is the scenario for our users —

1. The user finds an AMP-enabled search result with a bolt icon.
2. On clicking the results it will take him to the cached version of the AMP page.
3. On any further click, it should take him to the React Page which is PWA enabled
4. Users will choose to install our PWA on the install prompt.
5. Now that our PWA is installed any repeat visit to search results containing our domain name will take him directly to our PWA.

Steps

These are the overview steps to do it with WordPress

1. Create an AMP valid WordPress theme with all components as per your design requirements with link Relation of React page.
2. Install WPGraphQL plugin
3. Create ReactJS frontend with all components as were in AMP theme
4. Fetch the content from Wordpress via GraphQL( we have user Apollo client)
5. Keep the URL structure the same as of the WordPress permalink Structure
6. Enable PWA
7. Apply URL forwarding using HTACCESS method

The detailed method to create this experience is in my upcoming Read.

Things to consider

1. The UI should look almost the same for a smoother experience
2. AMP page should be 100 % valid in order have bolt sign and cached google result
3. Both frontends should be hosted in the same parent domain but with different subdomains (“amp.domain.com” + “domain.com” )or directories (“domain.com/amp” + “domain.com”).
4. The URL structure should be the same.
5. If your site is dynamic then there should be Backend CMS to serve paired content to both of the Frontend.
6. ReactJS page should be PWA enabled.

Here is an example stack of what we used at Twimbit to accomplish the approach. WordPress as backend CMS with paired AMP theme and ReactJS connected using WPGraphQL.

Conclusion

Though it feels very complicated actually creating this was fun and really simple. The entire Development cycle took 4–5 weeks with just 2 developers one for AMP + WordPress and the other for ReactJS. Everything that we used is opensource and well documented. And in the Next Read, I will tell the actual steps to create this stack with all links to the Documentations. We didn’t face many issues apart from some CDN and server-side errors which are also covered in my other reads.

Seamless paired AMP + ReactJs PWA | Goodness of both in one was originally published in mobile-web.dev 📱 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chrome is the favorite browser among all categories, but what it makes for developers too is the features it provides to the developer community. With the statement of bringing always fresh and exciting tools for the developers let’s see what can we expect from chrome in 2020. They got announced at the Indian web community lead summit and Google for Mobile conference last week so chances are you won’t find this information anywhere else.

Chromestatus.com

Before jumping into the actual features, this information is not too Top Secret. You can visit chromestatus.com to find out the upcoming, in-development and deprecated features.

New Features

Portals

The goal of portals is to improve navigations, by providing faster and smoother transitions on the web, while maintaining the user’s privacy. This will be an alternate to iframes which can be implemented with similar kinds of tags.

<portal id="myPortal" src="https://www.example.com/"></portal>

Periodic Background Sync

Periodic Background Sync provides more background processing power to web apps, by allowing them to schedule a task to be run in the background periodically. The task will usually also require network connectivity and will be used by apps to update state or content. With this, any PWA can run background jobs such as download media/files offline at a specific day time

Content Indexing

The content index allows websites to register offline enabled content in the browser. This allows the browser to improve the offline experience and allow content browsing when the user is offline. This data could also be used to improve on-device search and to augment browsing history.

Web Bundles

A Web Bundle is a file format for encapsulating one or more HTTP resources in a single file. It can include one or more HTML files, JavaScript files, images, or stylesheets. This means you can carry your web project like an executable file and carry it wherever you want.

Lighthouse Bot

Lighthouse is a great tool for auditing site Performance, Accessibility and improving PWA capabilities. With the same capabilities Lighthouse bot, a CI utility is available to the public that helps in automatically performing audits on every PR.

Llama Pack

Llama Pack 🦙 is a Command Line Interface (CLI) that helps developers to create a Project for an Android application that launches an existing Progressive Web App (PWA) using a Trusted Web Activity (TWA).

New Chrome API

SMS Reciever API

SMS Reciever API solves a major bottleneck in providing seamless web experience when browsing Web Apps. It will allow web apps to get SMS content such as pin authentication which generally took users to another screen something that can force a person to jump between apps remember the pin and comes back and enters. This is already implemented in IOS safari and will be coming to chrome too.

File System API

File Handling provides a way for web applications to declare the ability to handle files with given MIME types and extensions. The web application will receive an event when the user intends to open a file with that web application. It adds more bells too such as multiple file upload, directory upload, file upload progress and drags a drop to area upload like features.

Contact Picker API

This API will allow web apps with secure access to pick contacts from the user‘s phone books. It can be implemented in various uses cases like booking air tickets for someone or filling out forms. It again reduces a lot of hassle of switching between apps and copying contacts and going back to the web app

Biometric Authentication API

Technically, Support for CTAP2 FIDO devices via the Web Authentication API will provide advanced security capabilities such as biometric authentication and resident keys (keys stored on the device).

Deprecating/ ChangingFeatures

Chrome Apps & Extensions

Chrome had a bad reputation for being RAM hungry and consuming a lot of computing power. That was true because, with every tab, every app/extension is consuming its own processor thread resulting in multiplies compute consumption. Google has already removed the app section from the chrome web store and soon will start deprecating them. Similar action to the extensions could be taken.

Cookies

Google is coming up with ever new cookie policy that could change the way we use and store cookies a lot. There is no clear information available on what it will actually do and how it will impact the user, But for sure Google is becoming more concerned with users’ privacy and this could be a major change to its policy.

Conclusion

With the passion of always staying at the top, it looks like Google is doing a pretty amazing job. But it is always dependent on the wide acceptability of the features across other browsers and by developers.

Let’s See who wants to go the extra mile to make web even better.

Exciting new features to Google Chrome/Web in 2020 | Inside Story was originally published in mobile-web.dev 📱 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Why ?

Why no to native?

There were times when the world was crazy about Native apps. The excitement people use to have on having the best apps on their phone. Native apps provided the developer with the flexibility to reach the highest level of UI experience without comprising much on performance. Soon the apps got bulkier and people start losing interest in downloading the apps or keeping up with them. A recent study showed that on an average a user installs 0 apps per month.

That should not be surprising because you also have only the most frequently used apps. On top of it if you want to cover a much larger audience you have to cater to all platforms that mean that long development and complicated DevOps. To make things worse, the requirement of the app keeps changing and your features development can not keep up with user demands. So too much effort you spent on developing a native app and not much engagement after-all can be demotivating.

Following are some other Con’s of Native app development :

1. Takes download time and user can’t see any preview before installation.
2. Longer Development time and huge learning curve for native frameworks.
3. Store listing requires different set of licensing, authentications and IDE + tools.
4. For starter apps low user base discourages users from downloading App.
5. Bug Fixing and new feature addition take too long development cycle to actually reach user as an update and most users don’t even update apps frequently ( Especially in India).

But can web app match native apps ?

The absolute answer is Progressive Web Apps(PWA). They were made keeping in mind the promises of app and flexibility of web development.

This Site tells you the present capabilities of PWA.

On the downside, the web can be slow which is a nightmare and will lose a lot of audiences. According to Google 50 % users will leave your site if it doesn’t load within first 3 seconds.

The Solution to this is choosing the right web framework and good code practices.

How?

How to setup PWA ?

Setting up PWA is not a daunting task at all. If you know some basic JavaScript, you are good to go. Also it doesn’t depend upon the web framework you are working with. You just need to specify a manifest file and a service worker, that’s it. My colleague at Twimbit Sidhant understood it very well and did a very good job, delivery us amazing results.

The web app manifest is a simple JSON file that tells the browser about your web application and how it should behave when ‘installed’ on the user’s mobile device or desktop. Having a manifest is required by browser to show the Add to Home Screen prompt.

A typical manifest file includes information about the app name, icons it should use, the start_url it should start at when launched, and more.

A service worker, written in JavaScript, is like a client-side proxy and puts you in control of the cache and how to respond to resource requests. By pre-caching key resources you can eliminate the dependence on the network, ensuring an instant and reliable experience for your users.

This Guide tells how to create a PWA in 5 mins. You should definitely check it out.

How to make PWA behave like an App?

1. Choosing the front-end framework -

The solution may vary from framework to framework. Most web framework these days come up with built-in support for PWA. But it is preferred to go with lightweight client-side frameworks that result in greater performance and less server-side rendering.

PWA + AMP (aka PWAMP) has a great advantage of being fast at first load and afterwards service worker caches the file in the background. Also, the learning curve with AMP is small so it makes a good choice for web app projects. (Do check my guide to AMP)

2. Keep the UX /UI feel like native but using few libraries -

• As your app is hosted on web, you would want to avoid using too many libraries to add effect like swipes and animations. You should make efforts to make your UX/UI more close to native at the same time keeping fewer libraries that ensure performance with richness of fluidity ( I am also currently working on this)

3. Optimizing the cloud hosting and back-end architecture -

• At the back-end also you need to take care that server response time is low and assets are being delivered at its best. This includes setting up a CDN, Compressing the assets, writing a good service worker, server side optimizations and other tweaks. ( Follow this complete 5 steps guide to cloud and hosting for web Apps.)

How to optimize and speed up?

To do this you can use the lighthouse tools that give a in-depth analysis of your PWA and tells everything you need to do in order to optimize your app.

Ultimately, the better the score > lesser the load time > better User Experience

Conclusion

These question haunted my nights for a very long time. But I needed to be sure when I was responsible for leading tech team at Twimbit ( Our user app Twimbit.pro ).

Following is a sample architecture for our web Apps.

I asked myself these questions and came up with a quite good idea of developing web apps. There are many challenges on the way but as my coach says -

A good chef focuses on the process of cooking at very micro level, tries to perfect everything and the dish as outcome automatically becomes its best version.

ASHISH PASSI

I will keep adding and updating this article as I get to know more and face more challenges. Contact me if you have other queries or ideas to make this project much better.

Here is the link to my original deck that I present at talk shows.

Building exciting lightning-fast Web Apps | The Why and How Guide to PWA in India was originally published in mobile-web.dev 📱 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Google invited 50 Ecosystem influencers, GDE’S and Community organisers to its offices in Bangalore and also Googlers from chrome, web and Design team from around the world to come together and discuss the things that can drive the future of web community in India forward.

I was also invited to represent AMP opensource Community.

Google has always tried to do something innovative by giving equal opportunity to new people trying to join opensource as well as bring expertise from around the world that can make significant changes to the web.

India Web community leaders Summit 2019 #iwcls was organised in keeping the following things in mind -

1. Hear out the issues and problems that community leaders are facing.
2. Discuss together solutions to major problems
3. Discuss key trends and insights about the web
4. Network and bring together different web communities in India
5. Have a wonderful time with Googlers and get answeres.

Biswajeet Mallik on Twitter

Some pics from today's kickoff of India Web Community Leaders Summit #IWCLS with @rajpal_saurabh @tyohan @sidagarwal04 It was absolute fun to talk to 50 web experts, influencers and community leaders. Fascinating and very very impactful group!

Keynote

The Day started with a keynote from one of the Google DevRel speaking about how much web is growing especially in India and how developers play a key role in this. With a networking activity, we quickly got to know the cool facts about each other and also how important they were to this summit.

Before the event, all the attendees were asked to come with the challenges that they think were mostly faced when running the community. And that’s what was the agenda for the next discussion.

Community Lead: Technical Leader or Program Manager

We discussed what matters the most for leading a community where everyone shared their own stories and experiences. In most of the cases, a person starts with technical expertise and then becomes more modular to a managing kind of role or vice — versa. There are no actual answers to this but for sure there needs to be a balance of both and ultimately the team effort can never be compared with the individual.

Women In Community

Also, we discussed the common problem that women face in community programs that could be a reason for the less turnout ratio. Women tech makers in the room felt that it's often due to uncomfortableness in bieng in minority in such events and that’s why women-specific events drive them out. To solve this, one solution could be to promote women speakers so as to bring more gender-equal audience.

Open Source Contributions

Communities have been the key drivers of open source. But at the same time, a very frequently asked question among beginners is how they can start opensource and there are many ways to do it. It can be translations, documentation, learning material, speaking, Code PR’s, Bugs/features and endless other things. Communication is the most important thing in open source and communities are the common ground for developers.

Remya Vava on Twitter

Together we can do so much..We singed, we learned Bhangra, discussed some amazing projects... That's how we wrapped Day 1 @ #IndiaWebCommunityLeadersSummit @GoogleDevsIN

Fun Night in Google’s way

Like other Google events, IWCLS night was also an amazing one. From Karaoke to Bhangra we got blended in and fun-filled.

Also, we heard out success stories from 2 community leads and how they have been doing great stuff using the web to conserve the environment.

State of Web

On the following day, we got into the actual business that is the web. Yohan (web developer advocate) introduced to us the state of the web and how it has seen key growth in some years. We saw how various technologies have risen in the years and also other country-specific statistics.

Paul ( Chrome DevRel ) introduced to us some key insights and upcoming cool things to the chrome and PWA’s. FileSystem API, SMS API and Lighthouse CLI bieng the favourite one. He also brought up the latest MDN survey that showed the common problems faced by developers and what could be done to fix them.

Biswajeet Mallik on Twitter

Folks at work @ #iwcls

Then we had a live feedback session with googlers where we discussed our problems/queries and also came up with the suggestion that can improve web platform.

We also got to know 2 other community project one the platform that is bringing the communities together and others that are enabling VR/AR in Web.

Material Design

Googles Material Design team was also present in the summit who gave a quick introduction to design systems and templating and got suggestions and feedback from the attendees.

The Google Stardom

The event couldn’t have been more amazing after seeing many more star googlers that came especially to hear out the Indian web community and filled us with the energy to do more amazing stuff.

Aman Sharma ⚡ on Twitter

Some forces behind the @GoogleChromeDev trying to make the web even better. Lots of learning and conversations @GoogleIndia #iwcls @jaffathecake @petele @sidagarwal04 @rajpal_saurabh @swetha_go @Paul_Kinlan @kosamari

Conclusion

The summit delivered what it was intended for and that is to close up the gap between the web community and Google. Google has been investing in opensource and community than never before and holding summit like IWCLS is a way to keep in check the direction. For me, it was quite amazing to experience to get closer to the opensource community and Google and I am really excited about what it has to bring next.