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Learning Curve
By Brittik & Aravind
🎙 Come listen to an informal conversation between UX Thinker and a JS Dev.
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Peter Levels inspires us ⭐
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Apple power user thinks Samsung DEX is better than Center Stage
Long time users Brittik and Aravind compare both Apple's Center Stage and Samsung's DEX
Hosts
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Can a bridge help you be productive? 🌉
Listen to this short one where Aravind and Brittik talk about how Hemingway bridge can help you be more productive.
Hosts
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Getting a remote developer job in 2023 ft. M Zubair Ahmed
Aravind & Brittik talk to Zubair Ahmed, developer at Mattermost and a wonderful human, about development, the current jobs scene and how Zubair landed his first job, their experiences, showing your work and how community has helped them.
https://mattermost.com/careers/#openings
People
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Graphic Designer With Zero Skills 🌄
Brittik and Aravind talk about how anyone can be a graphic designer right now with little help from, none other than, artificial intelligence. They talk about their experience with art generated by AI and how you can do it too.
Dive right in!
Part of the Transcript -
**Brittik:** Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I'm Brittik. And I'm Aravind. And today we are going to talk about how you can be a zero skill graphic designer.
**Aravind:** Maybe you need a cover art for your blog post, or you need one simple square photo for your episodes cover art. But how would you do it if without any design?
**Brittik:** You would need a designer friend who you have to ask like by Pan Day, please. You know? And then maybe he makes it for you, maybe you like it or not, you don't have a choice, you accept it, , and then you use it because you don't have the skills . So that is one [00:01:00] scenario. And the other scenario is you could use something like Dali or Stable Diffusion, you.
Spend some time with the prompts and refine your prompts in such a way where you actually get the output that you want, or even something better that you couldn't even have imagined.
**Brittik:** you like. What does it mean for graphic designers especially, what does it mean for your, that friend from whom you would ask like by Bakavi?
Like would he come
**Aravind:** to you [00:02:00] for help?
**Brittik:** This is interesting. I think your designer friend would be happy that you are not bugging him to constantly make something for you like, Huh, Now I can finally focus on my work. I can focus on, you know, the different skills that your friend can work on rather than having to make things for every.
So I think it frees up time for graphic designers where I, I understand they're losing, They might be losing some business because of it, definitely no doubt in it, but they would still be having enough time to craft their prompt skills, like they could, you know, give prompts to del your stable diffusion and come up with something even more creative.
Using their hands as you know, like their tools, Photoshop and all the knowledge. That is one part. The most important skill is imagination. Imagination is not something you come up or you can create in one day. [00:03:00] Imagination of people who can draw, who can create things that is beautiful and the problems they can come.
It's crazy. Like the prompts they give to their brain to come up with things, basically even to our brain, we are giving, like we are thinking and thinking is a kind of prompt that okay, brain think, what would it look like this? And then you try it and then you see if it looks good or you try something else.
So that prompt they're giving to ai and AI is generating things so them, so I'm sure that they're making things that, that we can't think of. Everyone's level playing field is being upgraded. Now, people who could not do graphic designing now can, people who had imagination but did not, could not draw, were not very artistic enough to draw.
Now they can, people who could do these things, now they are at an even upper level where they can think, they can imagine the whole [00:04:00] picture, and they can come up with beautiful prompts that we can't, but they.
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AI for Indian developers 💫
In this episode of Learning Curve, Aravind and Brittik discuss the state of AI and how it makes sense for Indian developers to use open source AI to build products. They also talk about how AI is changing the world of development and the potential for AI to replace developers in the future.
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What's on our desks?
Our desks are where we spend most of our time. So what does a developer's desk setup looks like? Listen to find out...
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What is Work and What is Not 🧑💻
Join Brittik and Aravind as they ponder upon the question what is work and what does not feel like work.
Have you figured that for yourself?
Hosts
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Hosting apps & services by yourself 🔧
Brittik and Aravind talk about self hosting apps instead of paying subscription costs. They discuss
- Umami.is - analytics tool
- n8n - automation tool
- Raspberry Pi
- Railway
Hosts
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Celebrating first paying customer for Stackblocks 🎉
Aravind starts his Indie developer journey by having his first paying customer for a SaaS he is building. Brittik and Aravind chat about the journey till here and beyond.
Hosts
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Death of long podcasts
We no longer focus on the length of an episoide. We’ve also stopped planning for the structure. You ask why? It’s because all this takes away from the liveliness of the podcast.
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Build it ≠ they will come!
In this episode we talk about some of @aravindballa’s highlights from @arvidkahl’s book, The Embedded Entrepreneur 📖
If you’re building an MVP, there’s a lot you can learn from Aravind’s experience of building the @StackblocksApp
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The Pathless Path
In this episode we talk about some of @aravindballa highlights from @p_millerd’s book, The Pathless Path 📖
As someone already walking the pathless path, @brittikbasu shares his experiences of walking the pathless path himself and what it takes to find & embrace your freedom
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Thoughts on Crypto in recent times 🪙
Brittik and Aravind talk about how crypto is doing in the current times and why that's the furure.
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Relinquishing Control of Your Captain Seat💺
In this episode Brittik shares a personal story of relinquishing control which changed the trajectory of his life
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Plan and Code or Code and plan 👨💻
Should you start off by writing some code or should you plan first? Listen to know what experience has taught us.
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My discord got hacked! 😭
Aravind's discord account got hacked :(
Learn how it all happened and how you can avoid making the same mistake
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Stories of Burnout 🥵
Brittik and Aravind open up about their recent burnouts and how they dealt with, what they took away and what changes they made.
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The dev scene in 2022
There's a shift that's almost here for developers. Coding is slowly moving to the cloud with GitHub Codespaces and Gitpod. Meta frameworks like SvelteKit and Remix will be coming out of beta in 2022 and deployment of code is getting easier with services like fly.io and railway.app. The heavyweights like AWS still dominate and are the de facto choice for enterprises and for those prefer avoiding the magic of SAAS and stay as close to the metal as possible. In this episode we share our excitement on where the dev scene is headed. Tune in to our very first episode of 2022!
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Cloudflare Workers are awesome ☁️
Brittik and Aravind talk about what they've built with workers and tell you how awesome they are. They also talk about how Codepen makes use of Cloudflare workers at scale.
Overview
- What they have built
- Behind the scenes of a worker (v8 isolates)
- Deno deploy
- Cloudflare Pages
Hosts
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Database Choices for Developers
In this episode we talk about all the different database options we've considered for our projects. This includes, mongoDB, sqlite, postgreSQL, redis, faunaDB, firebase, supabase, as well as ORMs like prisma and do-it-alls like notion.
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Takeaways from the book - Show Your Work! 📖
In this episode, Aravind and Brittik talk about what they learnt from the book Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon. Everyone should read this book (at least once).
Book: https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/
Amazon: https://www.amazon.in/Show-Your-Work-Austin-Kleon/dp/076117897X
Hosts
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Our Git workflows ✨
Listen to Aravind and Brittik talk about how their Git workflows look after correcting their mistakes. And there is a bonus takeaway at the end of the episode.
Hosts
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Art on blockchain? 🌄
What do NFTs mean? Brittik explains Aravind how blockchain is for creatives as well.
Hosts
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Start Your Podcast - What mics we use, what our setup looks like?
In this episode we talk about our trusty Samson Q2U mic which we use for podcasting as well as about all the other gear we use to record a podcast. Our setup is simple, so we believe that even you can start your own podcast.
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Tools for writing ft. iA Writer × Processes & automation × Reading newsletters
Brittik and Aravind get together to talk about Aravind's recent purchase iA writer and how they consume/read newsletters. Brittik also shares a tip he uses to make his girlfriend happy ;)
Links
Hosts
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Future of voice ft. Rajath 🗣
In this episode, Aravind joins Rajath to talk about issues with processing audio, what technology is doing to process and analyze voice and the future of it.
https://www.descript.com/overdub
Hosts
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Talking Typescript
Typescript makes us better developers.
In this episode we talk about our first impression of typescript.
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iOS Shortcuts we use 📱
iOS Shortcuts is a game changer. Listen to the episode to know how Shortcuts make us productive and do certain tasks with ease.
Hosts
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Let's talk Next JS 🚀
In this episode, we talk about our first impressions on NextJS. Do we not like Gatsby anymore? Listen and find out.
Hosts
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Building a brand on Twitter 😉
Listen to Brittik and Aravind talk about what they use Twitter for, tips and tricks and how to build brands on Twitter. (And there is a secret after party later in this video)
Youtube link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym7R-pRaDjQ
Hosts
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What did we automate using Puppeteer 🤖
Puppeteer is this cool headless chrome library that lets you do things on a browser with code. Listen to Brittik and Aravind for all the cool hacky stuff they did using this library.
https://pptr.dev/ - Puppeteer Homepage
Hosts
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Writing for clarity & focus ✍️🤔
In this episode, Brittik and Aravind talk about their writing practices, like Morning pages and journaling, how they take notes, what they do with Twitter and also how Brittik writes songs. This is fully packed with tips to get started.
Hosts
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Organizing 2nd Brains 🧠
We discuss our processes, apps we use and tell techniques to help you organise your second brain.
Hosts
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Why we love iPads 📱
Brittik has been using an iPad from 8 years! And Aravind started using one after he saw Brittik with it. But why? Listen to Brittik and Aravind talk about iPads and the future of computing they wish.
Hosts
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Why you need a second brain? 🧠
Did you know that you could have a second brain? Listen to Brittik and Aravind as they talk about their second brains, how they built it and how it has helped them. They also talk about lots of ideas around second brains.
Hosts
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Beginning Javascript 🧗♀️
Resources
Codecademy
Tree house
Hosts
Aravind Balla
Brittik Basu
Learning Curve Podcast
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Facing Your Fears 😨
Hosts
Aravind Balla
Brittik Basu
Learning Curve Podcast
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Practical Remote Working Tips 👨🏾💻🏡👩🏾💻
Hosts
Aravind Balla
Brittik Basu
Learning Curve Podcast
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Corona virus - everything we know 🦠
Resources
Coronavirus Disease 2019 vs. the Flu
What Is Coronavirus?
Will warming spring temperatures slow the coronavirus outbreak?
Coronavirus at a Glance: Infographic
Here's what coronavirus does to the body
Coronavirus at a Glance: Infographic
Hosts
Aravind Balla
Brittik Basu
Learning Curve Podcast
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Making a portfolio doesn’t have to be difficult 💼
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Tools we use 🛠
Resources
The tools we talk about -
Lulu Firewall
Notion
Streaks
Zoho Notebook
Self Control
Alfred and its powerpack
Cloudinary
Netlify
Anchor
Logic Pro X (or Garage Band)
Hosts
Aravind Balla
Brittik Basu
Learning Curve
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Wordpress vs. Static site Generators 📑
Resourses
wordpress.com/
www.gatsbyjs.org/
blocks-ui.com/
twitter.com/learningcurvpod
twitter.com/brittikbasu
twitter.com/aravindballa
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Things we learnt doing client work ☕️
Brittik's Twitter
Aravind's Twitter
Learning Curve Home
Learning Curve's Twitter
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Tailwind ~ A utility-first CSS framework
Resources
tailwindcss.com
Source for Learning Curve website
Death in Custody Website
learningcurve.dev
twitter.com/learningcurvpod
Hosts
Aravind Balla
Brittik Basu
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JS Workers 🏗 (Web Workers, Service Workers & Node Worker Threads)
Hosts
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How to think like a UX Designer? 🤔
Hosts
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How to get a job 💼
Join the conversation of Brittik and Aravind as they share how they got their jobs. Brittik dropped out of college before he got his first job and Aravind has a remote job now.
Resources
https://beginnerjavascript.com
https://twitter.com/levelsio
https://aravindballa.com/writings/position-yourself-for-remote-work/
http://remoteindian.slack.com
Hosts