Category Archives: Life

The Top 10 Websites I Check the Most

While writing my blog post on the software of my daily life, I thought I could make a post on the websites that I use the most (that don’t include utility/local sites). So here they are:

Hacker News: It’s a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham’s investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”. This is usually the first website I go on everyday, it keeps me up to date with the current state of technology and how it affects various matters in the world, such as policies, finance, business, research, the people, and their thoughts.

The Verge: It’s an American technology news website operated by Vox Media, publishing news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, and podcasts. I’ve been visiting this site for as far back as 2012/2013. It’s my favorite technology news website, their podcast (The Vergecast) is something I have been religiously listening to since 2017. I mainly like their coverage on consumer technology but also on (Tech x Policy).

Last.fm: I have been using this website since about 2008. I mainly use it to see what music I’ve mainly been listening to in the past week/month/year/years. It’s like Spotify Unwrapped but not just for the end of year. You can use it with Apple Music or Spotify.

ProductHunt: As someone who loves to test out random apps for fun, this is definitely one of my favorite websites to discover new apps. It lets users share and discover new products. The site, which was founded by Ryan Hoover in November 2013, is backed by Y Combinator. Users submit products, which are listed in a linear format by day.

One Page Love: As a sucker for pretty static one page websites, this is definitely one of my muses. It showcases wonderful single page websites.

CodePen: As yet again a sucker for beautiful front end experiences, I love looking at other people’s designs. This website is dedicated for testing and showcasing user-created HTML, CSS and JavaScript code snippets. 

Officelovin: I love interior design especially for commercial businesses, I love to see how offices are designed all over the world, this website displays modern offices and their design.

Design Milk: More muse for viewing beautiful interior design. Design milk is a design blog featuring interior design ideas, architecture, modern furniture, home decor, art, style, and technology .

Dribbble: It’s one of the largest platforms for designers to share their work online. No, I never did one of those challenges to get drafted on to Dribbble but I do have an account and love to view what people are working on.

Classycleanchic: A lifestyle blog that I follow mainly for seeing what trends are popular in suburban fashion, (so I can avoid it….or secretly like).

The software of my daily life

I love software. I download apps for fun and test them out. How did they design the app? How is the user experience? Is it easy to use? Does it provide me more value than other similar apps? Why does it exist? Who are the users? Why is it popular/not-popular? Although I’m constantly downloading apps and going through them (yes, I’m a frequent user of ProductHunt!) I only end up using a subset of my downloaded apps on a daily basis. There are some I use weekly/bi-weekly, some I forget that I even have, til I try to download it from the App Store and realize I already have it. I’m going to list out some of my absolute favorites that I use on a daily basis, followed by a few honorable mentions that I use weekly/biweekly separated by type of app.

Mac Apps

iTerm : My go-to, of course we all have our terminal, but I always just liked using iTerm a lot more. When it comes to themes, my favorite has been the Dracula theme for the past few years now. I use it with oh my zsh.

Bear : I love using Bear for writing notes. It’s clean, easy to organize and you can access your notes from anywhere.

Sublime Text : It’s my favorite app to copy, paste, edit any text. It’s like notepad but way better. There’s probably an easier way to do this, but I love pasting in Sublime because I know it’s going to give me any text in plaintext.

VS Code : The only code editor I use when working on side projects. It just satisfies all my needs.

Postman : When I’m lazy to think of API calls and to write out a curl call, Postman comes to my rescue.

RescueTime : I love seeing how I’m spending my time at home, was I being productive this week or did I watch a lot of lifestyle Youtubers? It helps me understand my habits and set limits to commentary Youtubers on Beauty Guru Drama!

Mobile Apps

I’m going to skip out on the obvious “essential” apps for emails, social media and focus on some that are just slightly-less popular. I also have a huge list of photography and photo editing apps that I use based on the type of picture I want to take/ edit, I’ll probably reserve that for a separate blog post, but I’ll link some that I use the most here.

Pacer : I use this app as my pedometer. Gotta get my steps in! iOS | Android

SuperImpose : I like making random memes, this app helps me with that by allowing simple masking/erasing/layering functions. iOS | Android

Flora : Helps me stay off my phone and be productive. It’s just like the Forest app but it’s free. iOS (Also check out DonutDog for both iOS & Android)

Musi : Although I use Spotify Premium, sometimes I just want to stream songs in the background from Youtube like “Stolen My Heart” from KadhalViruz. iOS

LoseIt! : Tracking my health/weight, have been using this for about a decade on and off, my favorite in terms of data visualization of my progress. I like to enter what I ate when I’m not too sure of how many calories something takes up. iOS

TimeHop : I like seeing where I was 7 years ago, or what I posted 4 years ago on twitter. It aggregates social media posts from places like Swarm, Instagram, Twitter and lets you know your “memories”. iOS | Android

Web Apps

Remove BG : I make memes a lot, I love this web app it removes backgrounds from images. It’s hella fast.

JSFiddle : When I want to test HTML/CSS/JS out real quick, this is my go to.

JSONMinify: I like my JSON minified, so it doesn’t take up madd room.

JSONLint: For linting my JSON without npm/yarn and doing all that.

Pixlr: When I need a computer to have Adobe Photoshop and it doesn’t this saved me.

Polarr: For when I need to edit pictures and need something equivalent to Adobe Lightroom.

Well that’s been my daily software lineup. I might make one for websites I visit daily/weekly next! Hope you guys found at least one software you can add into your life. 😊

COVID-19 & WFH

It is March 30, 2020. I have been working from home since March 6, 2020. I only ever went out for groceries and went to a nearby Thai place on March 14 to eat for Nush’s birthday. The first week of working from home I also went to the park daily. The parks got crowded once the colleges and public schools closed and I stopped going. I started working out at home too.

I think the best thing for me during this time was finding a routine and sticking to it. It gave me a better control of my eating and exercising habits. I ended up experimenting with food a lot incorporating a lot of vegetables into my meals. I also have a variety of smoothie ideas now. Got myself a big bag of supergreens, flaxseed, cocoa nibs, almond butter, walnuts and a bunch of frozen and non frozen fruits. Smoothies have been my go-to breakfast. Just a cup of any smoothie honestly has helped me become more happier. I also am now in love with Stok’s Cold Brew with Vanilla Oat Milk. I also tried out the Oatmeal Cookie Oatmeal Creamer and I love putting a tablespoon of that into my cold brew! Exercise got me goin back to low intensity stuff walking/yoga/dance and it’s actually helped a lot more than high intensity ones.

Tik Tok, an app I never thought I’d get into so much. This quarantine got me making Tik Toks every few days. It’s fun because you can be silly with it and the video editing is super simple once you do it once properly. It also got me making whipped coffee for my mom. She absolutely loves it! I ended up getting an electric frother, makes it much easier to make it then whisking it with a spoon for 10 minutes.

I’m not sure how long we will be doing this, but the last three weeks have been feeling like forever.

Change is coming

There is a lot of change coming into my life, fast and hard at this very moment. I’m embracing it, trying my best to try new things, it’s difficult but must be done in order to improve myself.

On food, I was pretty consistent the first two weeks then I kinda had a few cheat meals & snacks the past few days, which is gonna definitely set me back but overall I have been cooking for myself and am definitely better off than I was before. It’s easy to avoid sugar, but its’s hard to avoid chocolate when it’s in my fridge. 🍫 I ended up eating an entire chocolate bar, its too addicting for me and I just am gonna throw it out on sight or give it away if I see it again. The only positive is that I did lose weight from the start of the year, I hope to keep it up moving forward.

On shopping, I had to literally hold myself back from buying stuff, which is something I never thought I’d have to do. Currently my Youtube suggestion videos are all mainly centered around beauty and fashion, there are way too many “haul videos”, “what’s in my bag videos”, “Amazon favorites” and “my best 2019 purchases videos” out there right now and I am an absolute sucker for pretty packaging, little hacky gadgets and cute dupes 😅I end up window-shopping and adding stuff to my cart then going through my list of questions I promised myself to think about when it comes to purchases like (“Is this from a sustainable brand?”, “How many times will I wear this?”, “Is this made from plastic?”) it helped me avoid all the purchases. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t make any purchases at all but I did avoid all the unnecessary ones. I did buy a 2020 wall calendar and some skincare, but avoided all the clothes and jewelry yay!💥

Pongal (பொங்கல்) 🌞🌾was a few days ago, it’s one of my favorite holidays. I got to celebrate it and attend the local festival celebration filled with bharathanatyam, parai and an authentic Tamil dinner on banana leaves and payasam dessert. It was wonderful to see the community locally driving this right here in NYC. My heart was so happy to feel home.

It’s MLK day today, I always like to take the day to reflect on the role many African Americans like MLK have done for justice and equality in this country. It’s a reminder that we all have to continue that fight. Like MLK said:

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Martin Luther King Jr.

On that note, I’m off to bed. 🌙

2020, A New Year!

Happy New Year y’all! I’m back again blogging on the internet after a short break, I tried to blog again last year and failed miserably, but it’s a new decade and I’m ready to blog again. I always had a fun time blogging in junior high/ high school/ college so here’s me now — a working gal bloggin’ again because I need an outlet to write nonsense on the internet in long-form because twitter threads are no longer cutting it for me. I usually made blog posts originally on my daily life, rants, book/movie reviews and I wrote out my monthly/bi-monthly favorites. I might do the same on here but might add some tech and design into the mix!

2019 was a good year for me – a few highlights included getting compensation raised twice, moving to a new team to work on building internal tools, going to Paris, France (including Disneyland Paris) two of which were ultimate dream bucket-list items for me since I was a kid, learned a lot more about my relationship with food when I was on Whole30 (also lost some weight – bonus!), tried poutine, Japanese cheesecake and Onigiri for the first time in Toronto, saw my second Broadway play (Wicked), and most importantly finally really understood sustainability and is in the front of my consciousness now.

2020 and moving forward I have a lot of goals. A few I want to focus on and want to keep track of on this blog is reducing sugar, reducing the use of plastic and single-use items as much as possible, and will try to go on an almost no buy in terms of clothing/accessories/books. I will only purchase clothing that is sustainable and that I can get a lot of use from that is high quality – no more fast fashion.

It’s almost midnight, but I really wanted to write this post before I head off to bed. It was a good new year’s day my cousins from Switzerland came over and we had dinner together while watching “Kaappaan”! A great start to the decade! 😊