The summer break between IBDP Year 1 and IBDP Year 2 ended last month, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the cool things I built and changes I made to my life during this break.

From tweaking my daily schedule to diving into new tech projects, there's quite a bit to cover. In this post, I'll go through the highlights of my summer break and summarize all the amazing things I got a chance to work on. Let's dive into what I've been up to these past few months.

1. Setting up a schedule...

One of the first things I did, when my break started, was to set up a schedule for myself. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I go to a boarding school. The biggest takeaway I’ve had from that experience is that a fixed bedtime and wake up schedule is a great path to achieving peak productivity. So this summer break, I decided that I would carry forward a strict bedtime and morning routine for myself similar to that at my school. I made sure I slept around 11PM at night and woke up around 6AM, and no later than 7:30AM. I’m really happy about the fact that it worked out so well, this gave me adequate time during the day to work on my school stuff and projects while also ensuring I get enough rest at night. I also decided that I would read books first thing in the morning after getting up. I grabbed a cup of coffee, and read books for an hour before going into the shower. I think this also worked really well since the motivation to work in the morning meant I could focus really well on reading, and if I ever felt sleepy when reading, the shower at the end would freshen me up.

2. Meditation

As a part of this new routine, another thing I did was to meditate using the Mindfulness app on Vision Pro every morning after shower for 5-20 minutes. This was a great way to improve my focusing ability, and have a great start to the day. It was also one more reason for me to use my Vision Pro, haha!

3. Social Media Detox

You may have noticed how I’ve kept going online away from my morning routine, and that’s for a reason. I realised that going on Twitter or YouTube first thing in the morning was a terrible idea, I would end up drain the energy burst I get in the morning, and would end up scrolling endlessly when I really should have been working. That’s why I started using Ochi, an app from Michael Tigas, which allows me to block certain apps and websites for specific time slots throughout the day. I set up a website and app filter to block social media websites from 11PM at night to 11AM in the morning. This meant I wouldn’t end up wasting time at night on Twitter instead of going to bed, and also so that I could start my day off by getting real work done rather than endlessly scrolling on Twitter. The scheduling feature is paid, and I did upgrade via the student discount, but you can still use the app if you have enough dedication to switch it on each morning; in my case, I wanted there to be no chance of me ending up on Twitter or YouTube so paying for the scheduling feature was a good option.

4. Starting a Weekly Blog

I’ve had this blog for a while now, in fact, the original iTech Everything website dates back to 2019. However, I had mostly kept this website for occasional tutorials or product announcements; that was until June this year when I decided I wanted the iTech Everything blog to be more than just a place for me to share tutorials, I wanted this to be a place where I share my love and passion for technology, so that’s exactly what I did. I launched a weekly blog, and this blog post is a part of it! I’ve been having a lot of fun with this blog, and I hope you’re enjoying reading it just as much as I am writing it. This has given me a platform where I have a lot of creative liberty, and can also express my thoughts freely and share my projects instantly.

5 & 6: Launching 2 New Siri Shortcuts

I launched two new Siri Shortcuts this break; PowerUtil for Vision Pro and Natural Calendar.

If you haven’t checked them out already, I urge you to do so! PowerUtil is a popular iPad shortcut that allows users to check their battery statistics such as the cycle count and battery health, and I ported it over to work on Vision Pro! Natural Calendar is my first public automation that makes meaningful use of Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing, it allows users to dictate how they want their day to look like, and automatically processes that information to add events to your calendar.

I think both these shortcuts are absolutely incredible, and they’ve already accumulated over 42,000 users in combination, since their launch in June.

7. The iTech Everything Siri Shortcuts Collection celebrates a huge milestone.

While we’re on the topic of scripts, it’s also worth mentioning a remarkable feat that the iTech Everything Siri Shortcuts collection has achieved. All the shortcuts in the Siri Shortcuts collection have surpassed 300,000 users in total, just from the installs on my website alone. My shortcuts having been featured on various large tech outlets and YouTube channels likely means the true number is much higher. This makes the iTech Everything Siri Shortcuts collection one of the strongest and most popular Siri Shortcuts collections in the world, which is something to be really proud of. I’m so glad that I was able to make small automations for my day to day life that so many people around the world found useful. I plan on publishing more shortcuts soon, and updating existing ones to add more features as well!

8. Vision Pro Demos!

I also called over a few of my friends for Vision Pro demos, and went for lunches with them to have fun! One on one conversations with friends is something I always enjoy, and these lunch dates were no exception! I strongly believe it’s time well spent. P.S. I’ll be including some of their Vision Pro reactions on my channel when I do eventually get around to reviewing the Vision Pro.

9. Making Videos for Teachers!

As a part of my school's Student Council, I worked on videos on behalf of the students at the school that expressed gratitude for teachers that left our school that year. This was sweet to work on and to hear back from the teachers and see their reactions! We sent it to them on the day of Guru Poornima (The Indian equivalent of teacher's day), which they appreciated!

10. Visiting the Apple Developer Center, Bengaluru!

Perhaps the biggest highlight of my vacation was my visit to the Apple Developer Center in Bengaluru. I got the chance to meet some of the most brilliant Apple platform developers in India, and learn so much from them, and exchange ideas! I got to talk to Apple evangelists who guided us through the most important announcements at WWDC24. I would encourage you to read my detailed blog post about my experience at the event, but tl;dr: attending this was incredibly fun, and perhaps a life changing experience because of the friends I made, as well as the fact that this event completely got rid of any social anxiety that I had, I no longer feel afraid of going up to someone and talking to them after that event, and it has only made me more excited for more such events to come in the future.

11. Launching a new app: Pencilera

Over at Starlight Apps LLP, I launched an innovative new app called Pencilera that turns your iPad’s Apple Pencil into a camera remote. I’m so happy with how it turned out, and I had an incredible launch. The application went on to be ranked on top charts in the Photo and Video category as well as overall in all apps, across 50 countries worldwide. It went as high as #5 in Austria, which is insane to think about! The app was also featured by major tech outlets such as The Verge, 9to5Mac, Hindustan Times Tech, iDownloadBlog, Pocket-lint, and more. The app still has a bug as of today which prevents it from working well on the new 2024 iPad Pros, but I’m currently working on re-writing the app to change that for the better! Read this blog post to learn more about my entire experience!

12. Open sourcing all my apps!

One of the first things I did this vacation, on the one year anniversary of Starlight Apps LLP, is open sourching my apps! When I was building my own apps, open sourced software was an invaluable source for me to learn new things. Open sourcing my own apps is a way for me to give back to the community, and for up and coming developers to more easily find solutions to problems they're facing.

13. Getting Featured on The Vision Pro App Store Globally

Since Apple Vision Pro also launched in new countries, I found out that Linkeeper, my bookmarking app, ended up ranking in the top 10 utilities for Spatial Computing in eight out of the ten countries that Vision Pro is available in! This was an incredible achievement, and I wrote more about the experience in July, on my blog.

Now, coming to some exciting projects I got to work on….

14. Introducing the iMac mini.

This is one of my biggest 3D printing projects that I got to work on. I’ll be making a more detailed video on how this project came to be, and the entire process of building it, but it’s basically a scaled down version of the 24” iMac, that acts as a secondary monitor for my iMac or iPad, or the primary monitor for my Raspberry Pi. I’m so glad about how it turned out, it’s a simple yet really cool project, and I can’t wait to share more about it on my YouTube channel soon.

15. The Vision Pro Stand.

I also put together this Vision Pro stand for myself! Thanks to Christian Selig for the coming up with this design, and sharing the files with me for the Fusion 360 project for me to be able to make this. His version of the stand included a custom dowel and base, which would cost me about INR 1,500 to print. Instead, I got an iPad stand from amazon for INR 685 and modified the files I got from Christian to fit into this stand. I think it turned out pretty well, and it saves a lot of space on my desk when I’m not using Vision Pro, and also has a really slick look.

These are just some of my 3D printed projects, I’m going to have a lot more cool things coming up very soon, including a full breakdown of building the iMac mini!

16. Leetcode!

I also started solving one LeetCode problem a day before going to bed. I have fallen out of this habit now that my break is over because I have my IBDP assignments and syllabus to cope up with, but that was a good challenge I took up for myself that allowed me to strengthen my programming skills.

17. Machine Learning Specialization

I also started this Machine Learning Specialization course by Andrew Ng, offered by DeepLearning.AI and Stanford. It has allowed me to gain a much better understanding of how ML models work, and has given me hands on experience with working on these prediction and classification models as well as neural networks. I’m still in the process of completing the course, and should be done by the end of this month. I plan on implementing a lot of what I’ve learnt into my existing apps, as well as creating new and powerful machine learning driven experiences.

18. New OneTap Updates

I’ve been working on a new version of OneTap App, completely re-doing a lot of the interactions in the app, and releasing a new major version. I also got a chance to work with server-side swift with Vapor, and I talked about that in last week’s blog post as well. I can’t wait to share the stuff we’ve built for OneTap!

19. Another Freelance Project...

I also started working on another freelance project, I can’t talk much about it right now due to the NDA, but it’s exciting! (something related to Vision Pro!)

20. Giving a talk on how to learn how to build exceptional software!

I’ve also been working on this presentation/talk I’m going to be giving at my school next month about how to learn how to build exceptional software. I’m excited to share my journey and hopefully inspire some peers to start programming for themselves and build cool apps as well! If I’m allowed to record it, I might post it on my YouTube channel!

21. I gave in to Twitter Blue...

Lastly, I did something I never imagined myself doing, but I purchased Twitter Blue (or X Premium, whatever you call it). I realised that Twitter was basically suppressing anything I posted on the platform, and that I no longer had anywhere near the amount of engagement I used to have back in 2021 or 2022. I gave Twitter Blue a shot and engagement has been significantly higher for sure. It’s one of the reasons Pencilera’s launch was so successful, and that makes it that much worth it for me. I still think it isn’t money well spent until you’re getting monetised, which I am more than likely not going to be, but it was a fun experiment for myself. I’ll probably end my subscription this month or the following month, as I continue to slowly get less active on Twitter due to school and college applications.

Overall, I think this was a well utilised summer break, one that included a lot of personal growth as well as growth in terms of my skills. I got to work on a lot of fun stuff, some of which I couldn’t even mention in this blog post! I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on this break, because I really did enjoy my time a lot. As I head back into IBDP Year 2, I'm carrying all these experiences with me. I've got so many ideas brewing, and I can't wait to see where they'll lead.

So, here's to a summer well spent and to all the cool stuff that's yet to come.