How a product manager in Kuala Lumpur made his coding dreams come true
KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 7 — Among the things we often let go of as we grow older are our dreams; in Kaviraja Nalla’s case he decided, instead, to defer them.
Now a product manager at Air Asia, Kaviraja had a strong interest in computers as a child, starting as most children do with games.
“I’m always curious about anything to do with digital technology,” he said.
Despite his interest in and fascination with tech, he decided to focus instead on obtaining a degree in business administration, juggling his studies while working full-time at Astro and after some time eventually landing his current job as a product manager.
“My career is about product but my passion is coding.”
His job did however give him some useful insight on creating applications.
“If you want to build a certain function, it has to drive some business value, right? That’s very important so I try to balance things out.”
The pandemic gave him some breathing room and space to spend time on coding his own app. What he wanted to create was a journaling app that gave him the functionality he couldn’t find on the ones he encountered.
“I wanted free synchronisation across all Apple platforms,” he said, adding that the apps he found needed you to pay a subscription fee for that feature.
Kaviraja decided, why not make his own app?
It turned out to be a daunting proposition and proved to be a challenge to implement. Still he persevered and his app Journal 4U was born.
He used the Swift programming language to create the tool, teaching himself to use the program on an iPad and Apple’s free Swift Playgrounds app that taught aspiring programmers how to code.
Why Swift? Kaviraja said he had found out about it on the Apple website and said that Apple had marketed it well enough to pique his interest.
He had tried to learn Python but found it too difficult and decided instead to concentrate on Swift rather than learning something from scratch in another technology.
It helped that he found Apple’s approach and Swift’s scalability to be easy to grasp. Kaviraja took just three and a half days to figure out how to create a 3D map view for his app.
Finding time has been a challenge but he now codes on weekends while prioritising his full-time job on weekdays.
While it is not an easy task, Kaviraja has also worked to localise Journal 4U for users and support various languages. He first targeted users in South-east Asia and has already localised the app for users in East Asia (China, Japan, Korea).
“I’m trying to make it usable for all cultures, to people from all backgrounds,” he said.
Right now he is not focusing so much on marketing the app as he is on tinkering with it to add more functionality.
His advice to other aspiring coders is to persevere through setbacks, because there will be a lot.
“You have to have this mindset – I need to complete this.” He also recommended the YouTube channel Stack Overflow as a useful resource he himself often referred to.
You can download his app Journal 4U for free on the App Store.
