I did not set out to become someone who builds apps.
Three months ago, I had one. Pre-Post, a small anonymous pay-it-forward experiment, launched in early February mostly to see if I could. I could. So I kept going. As of this week, I am at ten.
The two newest ones are iCapsule and Namma Ooru. They are also the most self-indulgent, in the best possible way.
iCapsule answers a question I have always found quietly fascinating: what was the world doing on a specific day? Not the broad historical sweep, but the granular texture of a moment. What song was number one the day you were born? What was NASA photographing on your wedding anniversary? What were people arguing about on Hacker News the morning a stock market crashed? Pick any date since 1995, and iCapsule assembles a small portrait of it, pulling live from The Guardian, Billboard, Wikipedia, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, and a few other sources. No database, no tracking. Just a date, and a window.
I built it because I find time disorienting in a specific way: the recent past feels simultaneously close and completely inaccessible. I can remember 2007 but I cannot quite picture it. iCapsule gives that feeling somewhere to go.
Namma Ooru is harder to describe because it is doing several things at once. It is a Bangalore dashboard. It tracks traffic corridors, Namma Metro lines, local events via Luma, city news, a daily Kannada word, a daily lake or park, historical photographs, a company-of-the-day from Bangalore’s tech history, and a live pulse of the city’s numbers: cups of filter coffee consumed today, dosas served, flights landed. Some of these are real-time. Some are pattern-based estimates. All of them are, in some sense, mad love for numbers.
I have lived in Bangalore long enough to have a complicated relationship with it. The traffic is a civic injury. The lakes are disappearing. The weather, which used to be the city’s one unarguable selling point, is no longer what it was. And yet. There is something about the place that resists clean dismissal. Namma Ooru is my attempt to look at it clearly and still find it worth celebrating.
The full list is at apps.snanu.com. Ten things in three months, which sounds either impressive or concerning depending on your relationship with productivity.
Some of these came from curiosity, the question of whether a thing could exist. Some came from an actual gap I kept bumping into, a tool I wanted that did not exist in quite the right form. The snake tools came from the field work. The family tree app came from a cousin who kept asking if there was a simple way to map out a large extended family without it becoming a spreadsheet nightmare. The hobby program came from conversations I kept having with people who had interests they could not seem to sustain.
The honest account is that building has become a way of thinking. The constraint of making something functional forces a clarity that writing alone does not always produce. When you build a thing, you have to decide what it is actually for. That decision, made repeatedly across ten projects, turns out to be good practice for understanding what you are actually interested in.
I am a brand consultant, a wildlife educator, and a comedian. None of those job titles explain why I built a Bangalore city dashboard or an internet time capsule. But I am not sure job titles are supposed to explain curiosity. They are just what you call yourself when someone asks at a party.
The building continues. I have no particular target. When something interesting presents itself as a question, I will probably try to build the answer.
