Our lives have become increasingly easier with the advent of technology. What once took hours is a now a task of mere seconds and there are more tools to help you live the life of greatest convenience than there have been at any other time in history. Mobile applications are one of these tools. The Apple store or the Google Play store has hundreds of thousands of applications that are designed to cater to all our needs.
Yash Poddar, who recently completed his A Levels, has already launched three apps. Poddar always harbored a love for problem-solving and designing and, backed by his fascinations for programming, it was only a matter of time until he put it all to creative use.
It was when he was a student at Rato Bangala School that he identified a need for a systemized scheduling for students and designed an app that aided with school schedule. “For this, I teamed up with my friends and our computer science teacher, all of whom loved the idea, and we sat together for months with Netbeans and Android Studios integrated software development environments intently devising a simplified layout where students could customize their class timings with digital schedules. The basic intention was to make things easier,” explains Poddar.
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The app was Managyy and it yielded great success among the students at his school.
Accelerator was another of his and his team’s creation. It allowed for user doodling on messages and blocking sent messages (often saving great embarrassment). SmartMUN is another addition to a string of his works. It digitized MUN proceedings that helped the sessions become the urbane affairs they were supposed to be.
Poddar credits his work as something conceived off all that he learned at school. It did stem off from him having to come up with a project for his class but later took a commercial turn. But what started as a compulsion eventually transpired to loving what he did, “It was a refreshing experience. I hope to maintain ground in the computer sciences even years into the future and devising apps was a step closer to what I wish to be doing.”
He admits to the existence of bugs in the apps he has come up with but also insists that he has identified the areas that need to be worked on. Currently, he’s processing ideas to make sports-related apps as he balances interning at Khaalisisi, a local band of entrepreneurs dedicated to recycling wastes of the valley.
Poddar is of the idea that applications are a shorter time need, they make mundane life easier but the time is close when Nepal will be in need of technologies that can revolutionize the way its sectors operate. “We need robotics in agriculture and with AI and virtual reality reaching new heights, the time seems closer than ever. It often feels like a far-fetched idea but it is within the realms of possibility. And I definitely wish to be on the front lines when this wave hits us.”
Making apps might seem like rocket science to the benighted, but Poddar promises it isn’t so. “It isn’t all that hard to make apps. People think it is and that’s only because they haven’t done it or even because they have never thought about it. Akin to playing tennis, passion, and interest is all it takes,” he concludes.
