While working on Glific and thinking about how chatbots work it suddenly stuck to me that if the conversations can be automated why not anything else that I work with. In every automation, there is always a pattern that emerges and we automate based on that pattern. Thinking about these…

Planning the database schema for the new Plio infrastructure was easy. Or that’s what I thought initially. The previous structure of Plio used to have various JSON files, each representing an entity on its own. For example, a typical user’s JSON file would look like this: So, creating a database…

It all started when our frontend lead Shamoon decided to go with D3 (and not with Chart.js or Google Charts!) for a project that aimed to help organizations run ad campaigns more smartly. A big part of the project focused on providing visualizations to enable customers see important trends and…

Code linting, though a very small & basic thing, often gets ignored by many people in many projects. Probably because it’s small. There’s a problem that I’ve been facing consistently during code reviews. I, personally, can’t ignore incorrect indentations, and often when I found one, I keep looking for them….

About Glific Glific is an open-source two-way-communication platform. It is a simple to use tool, with a complex setup of Whatsapp business API, Gupshup, Google cloud storage, BigQuery, etc running behind the scene. Tides is the SAAS platform for Glific, hosted by ColoredCow, which NGOs subscribe to and use for…

Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication method through which users can log in to multiple services by being authenticated only in one of the services. This free business from the need to hold passwords in their databases, login troubleshooting, and decreases the damage a hack can cause. One of the…

It’s been a while I am working on an EdTech platform where we provide online communication for institutes and students. For this, we were using the Zoom platform and availing the Zoom recording to students once the session is over. For Zoom integration, we were using a Laravel package named…

Re-captcha is a world-known technology used to distinguish human beings and bots. For businesses running on WordPress websites, we see it as a remarkable asset for a healthy website.Recently, we came across a lot many challenges and issues around the websites we cover for a Creative Marketing Agency. Some of…

This is a short story of how I, as an outsider, saw Glific get going, evolve and finally start to solve meaningful problems. I’m hoping there must be others who may share the same story. The beginning It was around May 2020, that I first heard of Glific (I think…

If you have an educational domain e-commerce website and you are facing difficulties to increase the sales, or users are facing issues while browsing the products and buying them, then we can help you in increasing your e-commerce sales by creating packages from the products. Whenever a user visits the…

Split a Money in the real world or offline is easy but splitting money without human interaction and in the online world is a bit challenging while you are working for a startup and entrepreneur. As we know Money plays a very big role in business. We solve this problem by…

One of the primary needs of an online education platform is the need for a discussion forum. A discussion forum is similar to Quora but different in that there is only one thread of answers/comments for each question. So in terms of an educational portal a discussion forum is a…

It’s no secret that discounts can be a great way to make your customer happy and help increase sales. Coupons are the most common way to offer discounts to customers. However, if your business model is a commission-based one, things can get a bit in some cases. To clear things…

A growing business requires taking crucial business decisions from time to time to improve the application in a way to better target customers and increase reach. Taking these crucial decisions can be a make it or break it decision and therefore requires a lot of researching, analysis, and forming various…

We recently got a problem statement from one of our clients. They have an education platform for which they are using Zoom to provide online tutoring and are availing the Zoom recording to students once the session is over. They started with few institutes, but as the business grew up,…

If you are planning to host an online education platform, offering classroom based or one-to-one digital tutoring, you definitely need to think about maintaining video recordings and give serious thinking on allocating storage budgets. Here’s a quick calculation of how much average data a small-scale education portal needs to store:…

At ColoredCow, we’re fortunate and proud to say that we’re always hiring. Even in times of pandemic, we are looking for talented people to join the team. We’ve been receiving several applications every day. That’s good, right? Well… not really. The world is facing a huge business discontinuity due to…

Here is the list of the very basic questions that come to mind for marketing through a website: How would it interact with the target audience? Will there be an exhausting delay in viewing even the front page? How much secure would it be for users to share their data?…

As we are going to discuss the projection, growth, and effective decisions making and its importance for a business, let’s start with a question.   What is the most important resource an organization can have to grow its business? There could be different answers to this question, but what I…

Businesses with multiple vendors (registered in different countries across the globe) may suffer from double-taxation when the money is distributed. For instance, if you, the business owner, collect all the amount paid by the customer on your end first and later disperse it to your vendors, you might be paying…

Realize and discuss the common constraints of such projects with the clients Low budget Evolving requirements Abstractions High-cost sensitivity Deal with abstractions at an early stage. Requirements clarifications and detailing prior to moving forward. Freeze requirements before moving ahead. Utilizing popular and open source services for cost-effectiveness. Laying down the…

There are some fields in our job and internship application forms that we’ve made mandatory. These are “Why you do you think you are fit for this job?”, “Why should we pick you?”, etc. You may also find these in job forms of other organizations. As someone filling the form,…

Talking with NGOs and understanding the processes they are using to communicate with their beneficiaries and the challenges they were facing, we were set on a path to create an application that would empower non-profits communication with their beneficiaries. After spending months and working on design and implementations we were…

Glific aims to empower non-profits to take their communications to the next level through seamless integration with WhatsApp. While the larger goal is to help various organizations solve severe social problems like illiteracy, climate changes, gender oppression, etc, we also need to make sure that the tool is getting utilized…

If you build websites on WordPress for businesses, you may have a list of go-to WordPress plugins that you use for most of them. If you don’t, this one’s for you.  Having built a ton of WordPress websites and plugins we realised a set of go-to plugins help in avoiding…

In ColoredCow, we all are aligned with the thoughts of solving the problem with technology. For the last few years we are providing tech facilities to the social sector also. From these years, the one major challenge we faced with the social sector to provide the solution under the budget…

Product-market-fit. These three words will change your approach to design. They’ll leave you puzzled, and at the same time so empowered. It’s not just for product leaders and managers. Read on to know why every designer needs to know this.  You may have heard about many products that connected with the…

We are living in the world of digital data. Healthcare is one of the fields that is extensively utilizing electronic health records in everyday healthcare operations. The electronic health records include insurance information, medication and treatment plans, and other personal information of patients. The digital age of healthcare allows for…

Something caught my eyes when I opened up my GitHub account a few days back. In the spotlight, GitHub was flaunting the launch of version 1.0 of their CLI. As a command-line fanatic, I knew I have to check this thing. And that’s exactly what I did, I installed it…

This article is co-authored with  Manish Manohar, Tech Lead, Saajha Saajha has been working with government schools since 2014 primarily focusing on Parental Partnerships by building leadership capacity of Parents and School Management Committees (SMCs), mandatory bodies consisting of parents, teachers and community members to ensure accountability for children’s leaning…

The Glific project is being built by a distributed team, working across timezones. In addition to that, we have sub-teams for frontend and backend applications. This results in short release cycles, where we fix issues and release them quickly. To allow for quick integration and assessment of the work, the…

Social Sector organizations are slowly moving towards using more technology to create large scale impact. React Native’s significance for the social sector in this regard has been ever increasing. With a mobile application, people working in remote areas can manage all operations smoothly. Building a mobile application in react native…

When we started with Glific, we had a bunch of feature ideas in mind and a goal to achieve for the NGO end users. As is the case with all products. It was about solving a challenge, our users being the non-profits. There was not much form to that goal…

Glific v0.1 arrives Communicating with the beneficiaries is as important a part of an NGO’s work as running their impact programmes itself. For some, it may even be the main mode of improving human lives for domains such as education, healthcare or livelihoods counselling etc…  These needs led to many…

While we’re building Glific, we are staying open to feedback from the stakeholders. We’re open for the possibility to iterate it and get things right. We’ve been showing our product concept and the progress to NGOs and taking their inputs to build it further. Especially during the early stages of…

On their mission to empower farmer groups, Digital Green has been relentless in finding the best methods, tools and technology. In our previous conversation(coming soon) with Digital Green, Glific team learned about the various communication programs run by them to impact the farmers. Some of these included running pilot cases…

“Alone, we can do so little; together, we can do so much”, I couldn’t agree more and this phrase became reality when I started learning elixir(a dynamic functional programming language) to work on Glific(an open-source project that helps NGOs in a two-way communication). Although my experience of learning object-oriented programming…

GitHub badges, a consolidated way to present concise pieces of information about a project. These badges help in increasing the readability of the readme file because they provide metrics about the repositories that help the readers to get a clear idea of the repository very quickly just by scanning the…

We are working on a communication system, now the requirements was to set up some automation with upcoming messages. So let’s say we have a message with some greeting keyword like hi/hello we need to respond to the user as a welcome message. This is a very simple example but…

The strength of a building is heavily influenced by its construction process. Planning and plotting of the site determine its fitment with the terrain and the society. Well, it’s the same for software too. Like buildings, the foundation of software determines its longevity and adaptability in the world. To sustain,…

When you learn anything new or push yourself to do extra, you need to work on abstraction. You have to get out of your comfort zone and cope up with decreased productivity. However, this doesn’t last long. I faced two similar situations where I targeted doing extra and my efficiency…

Many plans have been interrupted this year. As a matter of fact, our lives as we know it has been interrupted. This can truly be said for most things, but not all. Our interns in the summer of 2020 are proof. Having already spent the lockdown period with us they…

“What’s in a name?” I find myself chanting over and over. It’s 3:37am by the clock. A visual dictionary is opened next to me, to a chapter on 17th century architecture. I’ve already gone through the chapters on space, human anatomy, molecular chemistry. A thesaurus by the side is stuck…

It’s been almost a month I’m working on the open-source project with Tech4Dev. Prior to this, I had been a part of many enterprise applications in several domains including the social sector. With a deep desire to explore more areas, I found one of the interesting aspects of this project…

Q: You’re new to this project, where can you begin? A: First of all, we’re happy to know you’re interested in this project. By now, you might know that we’re building an open-source chatting platform between NGOs and their beneficiaries. It is a great opportunity for us to make an…

“TO ERR IS HUMAN” – It is natural for human beings to make mistakes.   Though it sounds ideal, you cannot (or must not) accommodate mistakes when people’s lives may depend on your software. Especially where users are interacting with your app in real-time and your code impacts their lives,…

The quality of information a person can access, can be a direct indicator of the quality of life they live. For some of the more vulnerable sections of society, it can play an even crucial role. In the most recent example of the COVID-19 pandemic, information became a matter of…

It’s been a week that our team has been interacting with various NGOs. Throwing multitudes of questions at them and learning everything we can about their interaction with their community of influence (or beneficiaries). They’ve been walking us through their processes which covers what they communicate and how. We’ve been…

We’ve struggled with communication. First, in about 80% of all interviews, we observe prospects failing at communication. Whether they are from reputed Tier 1, Tier 2 colleges or not so known Tier 3 colleges. Second, those who got picked showed large scope for further improvement. Third, when we internally evaluated our team,…

  ColoredCow believes that the hills of Uttarakhand, India have a lot of untapped potential. There are a lot of talented people in the hills. Particularly students from various engineering colleges. The terrain itself can be harnessed for a greater productivity and livelihood generation. We believe software development specifically can…

Non-Profits need funds to create impact and successfully run their operations. Organizations use different methods to fundraise but one thing that most social sector organizations still use is the offline method of collecting donations. We wondered why the shift from offline to online fundraising did not take place amongst many…

At ColoredCow, we love it when we receive resumes! However, many times these resumes don’t adequately tell the story of the person who wrote it. We know that there is more to it than that document. That’s why we wrote an article to guide applicants, especially freshers – what to…

ColoredCow has been working on Laravel for the past 3 years. In this time period, we have learned a great deal about coding from the way the framework is architected. We have also vastly grown in terms of processes around development following some of the practices that are built into…

From our experience of having interacted with hundreds of students and many academic institutions, over the years, the hard truth established is that there’s a gap between the talent/skills the industry needs and what the education system is imparting. On industry’s part, it is tough to prepare the students for…

How to prepare, manage and succeed in your Google Hangout/Skype Interview. Your interview creates your first impression for people you want to work with. You start a new journey and open new possibilities with an interview. When it is so important then why not give your best in it. With…

Quick background Small businesses like us face the following problems: Our data is fragmented across various tools. There’s no connection between them. Finances are managed at one platform while hiring at completely different. Difficult tracking organizational activities. Small updates in emails and Chat/Slack are getting harder to track as data…

What’s needed to fulfill the mission to do great work and be successful? It’s not only the skills, but also how you behave, your attitude towards your work that makes it great and leads you to become successful. Your behaviour is highly influenced by your environment. At ColoredCow, we believe…

For any software application, security is an integral part of the package that the customers must receive. It is one of the vitals of an application instead of being an afterthought. Security risks such as data loss, data theft, malicious activities or coming under an automated attack are a reality…

Being connected with the clients To understand the business requirements and align with their product goals. To resolve the abstraction of converting business requirements to working features and creating a smooth delivery model for it. We hold regular calls and meetings to discuss the progress and share the achievements. We…

Many practices in the US continue to use paper based methods for billing their patients and filing for claims even though their other management areas are electronic or cloud based. The case might be because of complicated medical billing process and too many components to handle. This article offers a…

Ever since I’ve been working on the Employee Portal, I haven’t felt more amazed about Laravel. There are various things Laravel provides out of the box. Many popular third-party integrations are built-in and don’t require anything extra than setting proper configs. However, the best thing about Laravel is its documentation. The…

We’re collecting a tribe of people who are driven to build meaningful ideas and solve challenging problems of the world. This can only happen with the right people who care for their craft and are passionate to contribute with their skills. And we’re really excited to see it happening at…

Just like SesPress came out as a result of our effort towards sending event-triggered emails cost-effectively, we have initiated Employee Portal to channelize both our internal and external operations.   The need Like any small business, we started our journey by adopting various tools for our operations. As our activities started…

Our journey started when we were invited to our partner’s annual event in Mumbai – a gathering of people from the social sector to share ideas and create a stronger NGO community. A two-day trip allowing us to immerse into the experiences of the social development sector. We got to…

“NGOs are in the business of trust” streamed the bold voice of Annabel Mehta, President, Apnalaya. This statement struck a chord with the diginatories from the social development sector, who all had gathered in the Wodehouse Gymkhana hall in Mumbai for ToolBox’s annual event ‘Out of the Box’. The event…

A community grows through the people who are passionate about the subject wanting to share their knowledge. And when there are new generations of people to follow this lead with their contribution. Example, Stack Overflow or TED is an ongoing phenomena because of its strong community of contributors. Growth of…

We started our journey with Laravel 3 years back and yesterday we took an important step towards being an active part of the community and meeting fellow Laravel Enthusiasts. We believe conferences are a great medium to know about what is happening and also to make connections.   In our…

Have you ever gone over an application codebase and felt that it should be refactored because it’s poorly written and just doesn’t make any sense? However doing so feels like an enormous task? Read on to make sure your application doesn’t end up like that, Legacy. Lately, I’ve been consulting…

Laravel has a beautiful support to include packages. This allows us to extend the functionalities of the framework to the project needs. With this we can easily have support of packages generic for PHP or specific to Laravel. One such PHP package that comes out of box with Laravel is…

Laravel offers the Illuminate\Support\Collections as an ultimate powerful tool to work with arrays. Also the results of all Illuminate\Database\Eloquent queries are the instance of the Collection class. This makes collections a very important component of the Laravel ecosystem. I have couple of times performed operations in Collections which were too complicated to…

This time we’ve covered another milestone. After all the effort made by the team to reduce our overall emailing cost and build a custom WordPress functionality, we’re happy to release it to the public as a WordPress plugin titled SesPress.   This is one of the first open source projects…

ColoredCow started the CodeTrek programs to help others understand our passion for software development. With this program we wanted to share it and empower like minded people to do the same. We wanted to share our willingness to walk the extra mile for building software the right way. Currently CodeTrek…

I didn’t go directly into making web applications in Laravel. And I don’t think anybody can without having some prerequisite knowledge about some concepts and tools. This blog is basically about the things I knew or had to know before I could say I was eligible to get onboard into…

I am a huge fan of the Homestead development environment. Among all the other benefits that it offers the robust set of pre-installed packages makes working with it a huge delight. Also the peace of mind that comes with it being a complete separate installation not affecting resources on other…

ColoredCow started with the dream to solve problems of other startups in a meaningful way using technology. We wanted to not only do the problem solving, but also do it the right way. This required the combination of right tools and using them in the way they were designed. It…

We were using Mandrill for quite some time. The amount of sending event-triggered emails for us was very low. We are a small and cost-conservative organization. So we decided to stick with Mandrill’s Free Plan until it fulfills our needs. We sort of made Mandrill a standard in ColoredCow. Since it’s…

Laravel has over the years built a reputation for making developers productive. Built with Convention over Configuration, it enables developers to focus more on the application logic over all the other routine work that goes into building an app. Am I the only one that kinda wants this short-cut to…

Events provide a simple architecture and better code organisation. They open up a whole new dimension of interaction with the application code.   In Laravel, we have Eloquent model events which are fired when we perform some operation on the model.   For simpler understanding I usually classify them into two…

  Isn’t this a perfect screenshot?… Umm… I’ll take your vote as yes. Being a developer or any other professional, it’s important to make things happen. What’s more important is to make those things happen the right way. When I started out on WordPress, I didn’t care about how good…

I have been working on a Laravel based healthcare project. This project covers couple of states in US and handles a huge number of patient. It also has a huge network of practices (clinics). We recently got a request to add a feature that would suggest patients that are near…

Availability and responsiveness is often an issue when working with remote teams. Timezone different plays a vital role in the responsiveness of the team. However, other factors like team motivation and attachment with the project also plays an important role. While working with remote team is a vary lucrative business…

In the past, we consulted startups on hiring remote development teams for their digital products. Hiring a team over building one from scratch in-house product can reduce costs and save time in early years of business. From years of experience, we generalised these 5 pointers that books often don’t talk about….

We all have read at some point of time how meeting is a waste of time mostly. There are so many suggestions and tips to make it better and more efficient. I observed one flaw with all the tips. They all centred around making the them efficient, but no one…

From here:     To here:   And we were able to do that with a few code changes that literally involved rearranging a few lines. Don’t believe it? Read further.   When I found out that the home page of our site was 1.8MB, I was shocked. Literally. Even…

Last week I had a very great experience. We got a task to fix some vulnerability in the project. The project was in a PHP Framework and the codebase was not compatible with the latest framework. Our client used an online tool and got some vulnerability pointers which should be…

Most of the times in our exchanges with the vendors we feel helpless. We feel we could get more out of the exchange. It ends up with a feeling of being settled for less. Well, as customers we have onus to be diligent and not make the lives of the…

Building a website is about killing an abstraction for a business. It is about figuring out the business challenges and solving a purpose. Most of the times when people need websites built, initially they see it as a face for the business and as a web presence. But soon after…

When I first thought of the idea to start by a career in we web development, I was very confused. With so many technologies coming up every day, it was very hard to choose the right one. Most of the job requirements were listed in terms of technologies like PHP,…

For the past few days I was working on a solution for one of the product that I take care of. We were launching a new feature and for that we needed to run some scripts. I finished the development and after doing some review and testing we were ready….

It’s human to feel funny on revisiting our old work. And it’s full of “did i really make this” moments. And occasionally there will be “wow, i made this” moment. It’s bittersweet. And you feel there’s so much more you could have done with it and so much more you…

Many times, while working on various tasks, you must’ve got stuck between options and cannot decide which one you should do. The easiest and most obvious route is you do the research and probably take consultation if needed. Many people manage a list of pros and cons and based on which…

We started of with a new project recently. We had done the initial very high level requirements for cost estimations. Now it was time to start on the road to execution.   The marketing team of our client had done there research. They had come up with a general requirement…

Many times, envisioning a product can’t seem to start without design. For the products that don’t start with design, will need design soon enough. The scope touches designing the technology around it, designing its interface, designing its experience. The product has to be conceptualised on these parameters based on the…

Learning new things brings happiness and confidence. I personally feel very good when I get the chance to learn new technology and features. As I like react native for mobile development I started learning the testing capability of this framework.There are various articles and tutorials available on the internet here…

There’s always something new to learn and know about. It could be anything in your personal or professional life. New things always add a thrill, making you hyperactive around these tasks (well only if you’re interested). I always look for new technology and development practices. Recently, I dived into Continuous…

There is a little coffee shop close to our office, BiziBean, and we visit it very oftenly. They brew some great coffee. We’ve been going there for over 2 years now. We know the value and experience we’re going to get there, and that’s what keeps us coming back. Which…

In life we all have our days of success and failures. Somedays are good when do our tasks perfectly while on some days we are barely able to make it halfway through. The world always expects the best from us, but that doesn’t mean that if we fail to give…

Frameworks are a boon to the modern web development. A framework provides easy to follow guidelines that can be utilised to remove a lot of complication.   However, we all must understand the difference between using and following a framework. I remember when I started with Laravel. Given my heavy…

Throughout our lives, we aspire for remarkability in everything we do. It is the unanimous cause of passion behind our work. But sometimes we get so fixated to create that perfect masterpiece that we forget that remarkability comes out of habit, it’s a feeling that should be exhibited in our…

One of the most important parts while creating websites is to understand the vision of business owner and craft it as per the vision. There are so many failed projects and unsatisfactory work because there is no common understanding between the executioner and the website owner. The real need is…

Recently, we got a project that is built on a popular PHP framework. We soon realized that the codebase wasn’t compatible with the latest framework version and needed to be updated. The project had come to us for a new feature with fresh requirements. That time, we can’t say to…

I read The Cathedral and Bazar by Eric S. Raymond some time back. The author talks about the contrast between two very different delivery models. He also specifies the advantages of the Bazar model in an open source project. The essence of the bazar model is to ship features out…

Everyone knows that Reading is a good way to help you grow further. From last few months, I am also finding it very useful and interesting. It’s helping me to improve my personal and professional skills. I am sharing my thoughts on how reading is helping me to increase my…

From the time of our birth our life has been a journey of experiences. With more experiences our mind expand and so does our abilities and capabilities to connect with the world. It’s strange how even after so many years of learning new things, we haven’t mastered its art. The…

We must from time to time look back at our work, how to deliver better value to our customers and level up the game by another notch. Improvement is the only way forward and there are two ways it can happen. One, as an everyday betterment-through our micro interaction with…

We as human, want to be the master of our work and look forward to appraisal and recognition. Due to this primitive nature, we often tend not to communicate when required. We want to be the one to solve the problems of other, and come out as heroes. If there…

Recently, we got a project that was already built on one of the popular frameworks. We realized that the project had become a legacy application. The code was written on the initial versions of the framework, wasn’t up to date and compatible with the latest framework version. Probable guess: the…

I’ve been juggling with the thought whether interviews are a good match making technique for companies and candidates or not. I conclude that it can’t be a means to an end for the purpose. Being a startup, it is more important to know if a person can work under the…

The perfection in multitasking is what everyone wants. Everybody juggles between multiple tasks and everybody wants to master the art. Not everyone works on large-scale applications. These applications have full-time dedicated resources constantly fixing bugs, building new features and maintaining the environments. These applications are rare. Not everyone owns a…

What sets a winning team apart from others?   I remember watching a movie where the coach said how his players should not be concerned if they move ahead. Rather the focus should be on moving the ball forward. If the ball moves, they move forward automatically.   A lot…

Two weeks ago, I got the news that one of our team members has to leave the company (He was the key man in one of our main project) and I need to immediately take the charge of his project. Before leaving he has given his estimate and releasing dates…

Remember when we were children how we used to do some of the most irrational things like making a sand castle and creating a story around it or creating our own games with our rules and storyline. If you would recall then you’ll realize that how these things don’t fit…

Learning is a lifelong activity and it never ends. But the journey does not start with learning. It starts with building.   When I was in college, a couple of my seniors needed a web platform to prepare for some online tests. I hardly knew HTML back then, let alone…

We all know that design patterns are very helpful and important in software development. Though It takes some time to understand and implement but, once you able to do that development becomes a very interesting job. I am working on a healthcare project. Though the project is doing well and…

When we work with startups to build their products, we don’t only design user experience inside the product  but also how it is shipped. This realisation came when recently, we were delivering a product to our client. We planned out how we should deliver it to them. To take them…

In reference to KD‘s blog Catalogue work to reduce the cost to customers, we decided that we’ll go forward and build Clive’s website by re-using our cataloged work. The exercise was quite a challenge as we hardly did this before and we weren’t clear on the site’s final look also. THE…

Every time I see a successful startup I know they’ve made it, through identifying the problem and solving it well. When I hear stories of how they were created in a dorm or from a one room apartment, I know they’ve built their business out of constraints. Their stories and…

A commitment is a promise made by someone to do or give something. And fulfilling those commitments enables a person, to build the trust of another person, in him. In ColoredCow, the whole team follows its one of the major value that is ‘commitment‘.   We follow this value because…

We as humans are driven by perfection. To become the best in our fields is something that the society has taught us to desire. But In order to deliver with perfection, we get stuck in a loop, discarding our less than perfect efforts. This at times doesn’t lead to any…

All of us, all our lives are always waiting for the best time to do something.   The Best time to start loosing weight. Best time to go on the trip you have been waiting for. To buy the gadget that you wanted.   Overwhelming and long shot examples? Here…

Recently I was working on a healthcare project’s assignment. Our client wants to have some integration with a third-party service. So I did my research and give the estimates to the client. When I started developing everything was going according to the plan. When I about to complete the task…

Some years back you would ask a fresh engineering graduate what he would do next in his/her career, the answers would be something like a masters degree, a government job, civil services, management etc. After that came the time when students added private sector jobs to their list. And now…

If we go back and think about the topics or subjects we are most comfortable with, we all will find this one particular pattern. In subjects where we went ahead to learn something by putting effort on our end, subjects where we practiced more and shared an active involvement, these…

Every time we introduce CodeTrek to students, professors, training placement heads, our friends or anyone for that matter, they at least once do come up with questions like these…   It is great that you have started an initiative like this, but how are you making money out of it?…

While coding a software, I sometimes found some situations quite challenging such as implementing a complex algorithm, new API implementation, customizing an already defined system etc. And I think there could be nothing more interesting than to solve these kinds of problems.   While working in our product CodeTrek, I…

Opportunity to create products is just about everywhere. If there’s respect and empathy for people, there are ways to solve their problem using the expertise one knows (for us it is creating softwares). When we received an assignment to design a coffee table book, our first instinct was to decline…

The blog title is derived from the book: Eat that frog. If you’ve read it, you must know what the content will be about. If you haven’t, fasten your seatbelts. The book talks primarily about managing your tasks and prioritizing them. A task is referenced to a frog and you…

A couple of weeks back the smoggy state of Delhi was the talk of the World. Reaching some unprecedented levels, the air quality showed dangerous figures. A lot of emergency measures were taken like closing schools, banning construction activity and quadruple increase in parking charges to reduce exhaust emission from…

“High-speed internet in rural and semi-urban areas across India.”   Can you believe this dream seems to be turning into reality with the second phase of BharatNet in action. BharatNet project is quite possibly the biggest initiative undertaken by the Indian government to bring the rural and semi-urban population under…

When I began working with ColoredCow, I was developing a new feature for one of our healthcare projects. It required me to understand how a certain part of the application works today and build the new feature on top of it. I was tempted to build the new feature as…

I started ’today’ with some hopes and motivation, and of solving my problem of getting from Dehradun to Delhi. My underlying motive was also to get some of my work done along the way, and so i booked the best bus which would give me enough seat space to work…

While working in CodeTrek from its initial phase, it brought me an opportunity to create a new system altogether. I started working in CodeTrek along with Adiba and Abhishek. When CodeTrek began to develop, I was only taking care of the coding part of development. But only coding the assigned…

The key to be productive at work is to have rough goals for the day. It helps in knowing what are your going out to achieve and also to measure your progress. However, most of us have issues keeping up with the day’s goal and often end the day with…

I love to do mobile development at my college. I developed some mobile apps for my college events. When It comes to technology I have always been doubtful of cross-platform mobile development frameworks like Cordova and ionic because they use the mobile browser or HTML 5 base engine to run…

When thinking about higher studies people usually opt for either of the two situations You go ahead to pursue it just after your undergrad You take a break to prepare or gain some experience   Now if you fall in the second category the path gets a bit rocky. A…

Read part 1 here Read part 2 here   At the end of the two days of the product design session at UPES, the students wanted ColoredCow to stay back more and continue the session further. They wanted to interact and learn more. It was really great to see them…

When students enter in college, it becomes important for some students to think about achieving a “great career”. Those are the students, who actually want to do something great in their lives. They put some great efforts to make themselves better. And I think the time of vacations brings out the best…

I had good decent grades in my college. While I was on my conquest to become a hardcore techie, my colleagues started freelancing in WordPress. Well, they didn’t have as good grades as mine, they started making money way before me. From there, words started floating that anybody can do…

I recently read an article on hiring. There was one of the hiring managers asking the candidates, if they are hard worker or smart worker.   I looked back at the working habits of people I have been around. There were some, who always appeared busy and deep into their work (the…

We have completed a solid chunk of development in one of our product ManageMyNGO. Now NGO organizations are putting their data into our system it’s very important for us to have a solid data recovery plan. Today  I have a discussion on DR plan activity with my team.  Sharing my…

Read part 1 here The session at UPES started with an agenda to create a useable design for a product in two days. That we would start with a real world scenario and design a final prototype to solve a problem for that scenario. This would give the students a…

After getting a Bachelors degree in any field, What would you opt to go for? Higher Studies or to get a job or start a business? Students who are in the middle of their courses must have started to think about there choices. I just want to share my understanding…

A strong organization is comprised of passionate people. And intense passion towards our work may convert us to a nerd. According to Google, a nerd is a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious. Well, most of us don’t fall on the first part of…

In the past, I have always written about the importance of having an open relationship with your clients and the benefits it has for the products. Having an open relationship helps to being in compassion and lets you think from your client’s perspective. It helps us to understand the needs…

10:00 AM Monday morning at ColoredCow, Gurgaon. The room is buzzing with the click-clack sound of the keyboard and slack notifications. My day has just begun and I have tonnes of programming assignments to complete by 5:00 PM today. To make things worse, I just realised that I forgot my…

Every product goes through a certain process involving multiple stages while its development phase. Software products are developed going through multiple cycles of Requirements, Design, Development, Testing and Releases and this whole cycle is known as a Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). But here the question arises that only following…

Sometimes we get approached for projects that does not go along with our true nature of the company. The body of this work can define a new arm of the company as it extends the business and sometimes it may feel like a gangrened part, because it can kill one…

Post-engineering I began looking for opportunities which could give me the freedom to explore, explore fearlessly. It was then that I got a chance to intern with Colored Cow, it didn’t take a lot of time for me to take the decision because I could resonate with the one of their fundamental element – ‘Passion’.

A success of an organization depends on several factors. It’s team, it’s products, it’s customer base and relationships, it’s tech and a lot more. These may vary depending on team size, the targeted audience and market. But the two things which are always there, irrespective of what the organization size…

Our latest weekend experience taught me that life is much simpler than we like to see it and it is much more fun when seen through one lens.   Last Saturday on a spur of movement we decided to travel Mawana, Prateek’s hometown. Why? Because we had heard so much…

One of the great challenges in building greater products is to build the greatest team to do it. People who are driven by the same sense of purpose and motivation to achieve the goals. All together. Whether building your own products or hiring a team to take your vision ahead,…

It’s going to be almost a year for ColoredCow to be working from hills. And it’s been a remarkable journey so far. Spending the summers in hills, a fantastic view of a huge lake, multiple treks on weekends and chilly nights. Who doesn’t want that? Life’s been perfect. But that’s…

Unexpected gifts, unannounced good news, a word of comfort, some support, some encouragement. Doesn’t, all of this add a fresh spark in life? Pushes you to do more, to walk an extra mile and be grateful for what you have.   I felt the same when Sarthak connected with me…

I remember reading about an analogy where life is compared to walking reverse on an escalator.   If you don’t move, with every passing moment you are going backwards. If you do walk, you’ll just be staying in the place that you were. But if you run and hustle, only…

Software development is a lot like how our world works. We all are good a somethings and not so good at so many things. In real world, we all collaborate and work together as an entity. We support each other and grow together.   In software development, we support each…

ColoredCow is soon going to be in UPES, Dehradun on 27 and 28 Nov, to teach and talk about product design. It’s never too soon or too late to share the knowledge and grow as a community. Ever since I joined the design community, I have learnt a lot through…

We are a small problem-solving organization. We need problem solvers, not developers or designers or marketers or managers. For an organization with a size of ours, if everyone sticks to their own domain, it’ll soon die. If a developer thinks he just needs to code and ship the tasks he’s…

In our quest to build impactful products, we are employing a problem finding approach to build the product the right way. As a part of this process, to strengthen the products and business, we increase our exposure of the problems by identifying the current state and the challenge we’re facing…

I’ve been doing a lot of cost estimations lately for the development effort. Being a developer, it does not lie in my comfort zone as there is always an anxiety of underestimating. After some practice, I realized that there isn’t any rocket science here.   Points to consider while estimating:…

There’s another way a product grows and gets stronger, which is by identifying new scope, new audience and new areas of expansions. I covered earlier how feedback feeds into achieving goals and better products. But as more target audience gets added and they’re included in the goal of the product,…

We often discuss how easy it is to build software development, if we get the basics right. Most of the time it is all about people and the relation we share among us. Working remote sometimes add to another level of abstraction and discontinuity between teams and often is a…

For any startup it is important that the products get adopted by the intended users and this happens more effectively if the users find their problems solved with the use of that product. In effect, startups are problem solving machines. What powers this machine is a key elements that is…

In a lifecycle of creating products, it is required time and again to look back at the purpose and the goals the product is meant to achieve and build it further through feedback. This can only happen once it is launched and people are using it to solve their problems…

Two things before I begin, a) I completed engineering and b) This is not about quitting but pursuing a calling. I was a mechanical engineering student before I became a full time designer. I guess it was in my last year that my heart started telling me full time that…

Our love for the hills and the desire to share our learnings took us to Dwarahat, a beautiful hamlet situated in the Kumaon valley. The Kumaon Engineering College (KEC) situated here is the Alma Mater of many of my colleagues. When they came to know that they will be visiting…

Form filling isn’t usually anyone’s favorite hobby, you don’t sit down one fine Sunday morning and decide, “It is a beautiful day, I’ll fill forms today!”.   Taking out time to write about yourself, what you aspire to do, the way you think is a conscious effort, so why do…

Learning has always been high on the list for us at ColoredCow. From start, we have believed that to grow as an organization it is important to both grow individually and as a group. Hence we keep finding new ways to broaden our perspective and outlook.   The aim is…

How can I learn new technologies? I know little about Software, how to enhance my skills? I feel like I am missing a lot in comparison to my friends who are studying from colleges in bigger cities and non-hilly areas? How to learn without impacting my studies?   These were…

Employability is the talk of the town, and sadly not for very positive reasons. Every other day new statistics keep coming up and we hear about abysmal facts like ‘Less than 8% Indian engineers fit for core engineering roles’ (Economic Times), ‘80% of India’s engineers remain unemployable in the software…

You spend a third of your lives at work. That is a lot of time. Time that impacts varied aspects of your lives and has the potential to greatly influence your identity, mental peace, and growth. If work is what you do the most then choosing it should be a…

We attended WordCamp Delhi 2017, held on August 19th at NDMC Convention center, New Delhi. We registered one month prior and were excited to attend the camp.   Quick Flashback When I joined ColoredCow, WordPress didn’t mean more than any other framework to me. I wasn’t even confident if it’s “the…

Hello Reader, I am a budding designer from School of Design Studies, Dehradun. Before telling you about my first internship, I would like to tell you something about my journey so far. Getting into college after 12th was not that tough for me but settling into a new environment was….

It is not every day you hear that someone decides to paint a ghost village with life lessons. Yes, you read it right, I am talking about painting an abundant village with life lessons of people who lived there. And yes, I agree you don’t hear that at all!  …

This morning when we all walked in our office, a pleasant surprise awaited us. To our delight, we were greeted by boxes of sweets! With sugar lovers in the house, it was a happy kick-start to the day. What added more to the sweetness was the reason for celebration. Vaibhav…

  Before we talk about ways to find an internship that can help your career. Let’s first pose a simple question, What is your reason for doing an internship?  Why would you go for one?   Is it about earning money, getting exposure or just getting a certificate of experience….

Sometimes while aiming for the higher rungs on the ladder we overlook the fundamental steps. Clarity of purpose, tends to be one such neglected step. A clear blueprint of what you wish to do and what would it take to be there increases chances of achieving it. So all the…

WordPress in recent times has become a hugely popular platform to build a variety of web apps. It started off as a simple blogging platform but very soon evolved into a lot of different dimensions. With recent updates, we now have support for API developments in as well. Currently, more…

A name, a word that creates an identity. An identity that we hold closest to our existence and which in turn forms the starting point of every introduction we make. The sound of one particular word that is so deeply engraved that we remember it even in a crowd. With…

“Some beautiful paths can’t  be discovered without getting lost.”  -Erol Ozan I am beginning with this quote. why?? It’s because I was lost once. After completing my graduation from THDC-IHET a college which is situated in a place as beautiful as paradise but with no promise of career growth at the time…

In a slow but progressive manner, we see organizations around the world moving towards a people-centered functioning. Making new policies and including different activities in their schedules to pave way for a healthy and motivational environment for their employees. The intent can be debated but if done genuinely a people-centered…

The world has seen multiple examples of successful mentorship relations. A lot of the most influential people in history were encouraged to succeed by some of the most well-known people of our time. For example, Oprah Winfrey, best known for her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, was mentored by…

Transparency by its fundamental nature tends to give way to trust. This can be with respect to any relation or dealings that one creates, in particular, if we talk about this with respect to an individual and his organization, transparency is highly important but most of the time not valued…

Take a second, go back and think about your first day in school, work or any new thing you started with. Do you remember that giddy feeling you had before each of those new events. Whether veteran or rookie, we all are graced by those initial moments of nervousness, those…

As humans, we are gifted with an evolved way of communication. We not only express ourselves through words and gestures but also through intricate ways like music, art, and literature. Each of these forms of expressions gives us an advantage of expressing what we think and feel with clarity. This…

Access control is an important aspect of any system dealing with sensitive content. At ColoredCow, we recently worked on a healthcare system and one of its key requirement was having an ACL system to enable secure and efficient handling of data.   Key specifications that we identified from the requirements…

“It is always the same with mountains. Once you have lived with them for any length of time, you belong to them.”   – Ruskin Bond (Rain in the Mountains: Notes from the Himalayas) Mountains have always had high importance for mankind. They have been considered the abode of Gods,…

  The inauguration ceremony is done, we have started working from our Tehri office, it has been a month and it still feels like a dream. Having a workplace on top of a hill feels no less than a natural retreat. In this serene environment, we have tried to blend…

  ColoredCow started its official journey 3 years back in Gurgaon, the Millennium City of India. The city that caters more than 250 of Fortune 500 companies and houses many Gen-Next entrepreneurs. We started our journey from this place, the place that inspires many from it’s ‘rags to riches’ story,…

The process or the phase of incubation fundamentally helps each organism to develop and be prepared for the external world, incubation provides right conditions to grow and be ready to survive. Inspired by the concept of incubation we have seen a lot of countries over the years using a similar…

Building a great product for you shouldn’t be about managing teams and coordinating its design and development. While you figure out the market, and develop the business plan for your product we empower you to do so with the following benefits:   Stand Out Differentiate your business with custom softwares…

RESUME SCREENING We at ColoredCow use this simple algorithm to screen resume, cover letters, google forms or linked.in profiles that we receive for hiring. So far this method has never failed us and every time we use it our conviction for the technique increases. To get shortlisted, a candidate should…

Thinking about all the new beginnings, all the first days of my life I was walking towards ColoredCow. Anxious and nervous, imagining all the things I can mess up in. Wishing that somehow it all goes normal and I don’t end up making a fool of myself. Isn’t that what…

There are two parts to building a great website (or any product for that matter). One, to explore the story behind that product; a story that brings the purpose in perspective. Purpose is generally constant throughout the project (unless the problem you’re trying to solve changes). This constant will keep…

It is great chance if your clients think the same way you do. The journey of working together becomes rewarding and enjoyable. Such was our situation with our client the Predictive Strategy Group. It was exciting to just hear about their product but after using it, I was a believer…

A website solves a business problem. It is not just a page for people to find your phone number and address. It helps you gain more customers by engaging with them, by telling about yourself and your product. It ultimately helps you sell a proposition. When people talk about you…

There’s something not right about handshakes. I mean, it is a good symbol of warmth and showing interest but it must not be used as means to an end. A good handshake holds a lot of responsibility, it should not be substituted for communication by overdoing it. I’ve seen people…

Small pieces of paper that carry information about how one could reach you but not about why they should reach you. What leaves the lasting impression of why one should get to you is the kind of service you deliver and the way you made your customer feel. If your…

To ship it is to let your work float out into the ocean. If you think you’ll perfect your work first and then send it out, you might end up taking forever. Imagine facebook’s fate if they had waited to launch their site till they had perfected the ‘like’ button,…

Money isn’t necessary to make us feel rich. People are precious jewels and much more treasure worthy than money will ever be. But people do not come with a red mark ‘X’ on their heads like those treasure maps. You have to be on constant journey with a shovel ready…

Perfection isn’t achieved in one go. This is the toughest fact of life because to accept this means you will have to work much more and much harder to get there. If you witness something perfect, and you know it isn’t a result of beginner’s luck or a fluke then…

Despite doing the work you love, there will be times when you start observing a pattern, regularity. This will be easy to overlook because you love your work. You wake up each morning, excited to go to work only to do the same thing you have been doing for a…

Hugh Macleod’s book ‘Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity’ comes from a great experiential learning. His ideas are profound and ripe and they made a connection with me. There was a lot of truth in his voice; I wonder why he preferred to call it ‘keys to creativity’…

I would recommend Rework to anyone starting their own business. What I think of the book: If you are running on a business model designed by your grand-father, or as an individual you strongly believe in one way of working and wouldn’t change it for the world, then Jason Fried…

If you are in a service sector and you deal with many clients, then work related turbulence with some of the clients is inevitable. There can be many reasons for this; you might fail to prioritize the tasks owing to the many clients, there could be some error on your…

There was a time in college when I would get mails from my professors and I had a problem in responding them. I did not know how to say to them what I wanted to say. What I mean is, I doubted myself if I was saying the right thing….

When you read, outside noise is suppressed giving way to your inside voice. It is like meditation. At ColoredCow, we give a lot of importance to reading. More than an advice, reading has become a part of our culture. We have a list of books that we want each of…

At school, the homework came with a due date and I had to adhere to it. There were times when I’d reach home with a huge load of work from all the subject teachers with very less time to finish it. I was forced to overcommit. I couldn’t argue with…

If someone asked me whether I wanted to learn something new every day, I would raise my hand every time. But there is more to it than just raising a hand which is the “HOW” of learning. Learning a new technology is a roller coaster ride, it is not that…

Companies these days are taking unconventional approach to impart values and culture into their people. We realized how one such approach was unknowingly building ours. Colored Cow is a small company and we prefer to cook our own food. We buy groceries on a Sunday and stock our fridge for…

It was 12 minutes past 8 in the night and I saw 3 women coming out of the meeting room, all of them from different age groups. I did not dare ask for their ages, they looked vibrant and enthusiastic. I should be crazy to have bound their energies by…

Have you always wanted to build eye-catching, making-dent-in-the universe user-interfaces? Flash Back – 2013 I had always wanted to get into web design and development. Fancy aesthetic user interfaces that make you feel cool. I applied my perfectionist approach to it and started collecting the stuff I need to know…

We have been sharing our thoughts on all things digital and a part of it covered digital communication. Prateek read a newsletter by 9 Clouds which talked about the same, so we decided to write our own post as a critique of the newsletter. Please read the newsletter before you read further;…

At Colored Cow, we’re trying to identify and build a community of people who are passionate about technology. We want to give back to this community all that we have learnt through our experience. We’re doing it by creating a platform for them. On www.meetup.com, we found a group of…

In one corner of the office I saw a bar stool standing tall with dignity amidst the business environment. Little did I realize that it was the chair that KD was talking about, the chair that ColoredCow got for him, for he is at his best when he is on…

I know a way to learn something new- jump in. Javascript and Ajax presented themselves to me as alien’s languages. Despite having an edge in object oriented languages I had an initial hitch when the time came for me to learn new ones. I leapt at the chance of learning…

KD, a friend of mine who is the lead developer at ColoredCow called me, saying that I should join ColoredCow, because the company was scaling up. He knew that I could code really well in Java and that it would be an awesome thing to explore whole new world of…

Thank You Mohit!   And this is how Mohit helped us:     -Abhishek

A common problem that one faces today is how to move from ‘Hello World’ problems to building world class integrated systems with complex use cases that are closely coupled with each other. Here is my story on how i evolved from “Hello World” to building two online marketplaces, starting a…

It started with an informal meeting. Post this meeting, Mohit Pawar, Gautam, Naveen and Deepti joined us for another discussion. The agenda was to give Mohit a clear picture of where we stand as a company, which would help him identify our shortcomings as a team and as individuals. After…

Or your business don’t need a Facebook page, or a Twitter account, or anything of that sort if you don’t have answer for the following question – What are the 3(at least!) most important outcomes that you wish to get from your website(Facebook, Twitter, etc)? Outcomes could either be actions…

You started your business with a dream of turning your greatest passion into creation of a road to freedom and independence. Unlike so many people who just talk about it, you put your neck on the line with a dream to grow and prosper. You’ve been running your business for…

Every business owner knows that it’s very important to know his or her customers. Even then in my last five transactions, I’ve done with local businesses, nobody tried to know me. Why? They don’t have time to make any effort for this! They don’t see any value in it! May…

My shopping patterns have changed significantly over the last few years. Thanks to the advances in the technologies, my experiences of getting things done is getting better and better. Like, for quite some time now all the books I’ve purchased were purchased online. I don’t remember the last time I…