Apple Watch preorders shipped this week-ish (Apr 24), and one of our designers got one day-one (imported via a cousin in the Valley — the traditional Indian supply chain). Office consensus after passing it around: gorgeous, laggy, and nobody, including Apple, whose ads show it doing forty things, knows what it’s for yet. My favorite genre of product: shipped confident, purpose TBD. The iPad was this too and figured itself out. The watch gets two years of patience from me.
Star Wars dropped The Force Awakens teaser with Han and Chewie and grown engineers in this office made sounds usually reserved for production incidents. Nostalgia is the most reliable API ever shipped.
Champions League semi-finals are set: Barcelona’s MSN trio (Messi, Suarez, Neymar) are playing football from ten years in the future, fluid positioning, rapid transitions, pure joy. My Dota friends and my football friends have merged into one group chat that argues about Messi’s playstyle using MOBA terminology (“he’s building pure agility and cooldown reduction”). Convergence complete.
The bigger fight is at home: India’s net-neutrality moment has arrived. TRAI’s consultation on licensing apps and zero-rating drew a million-plus emails after the Save The Internet campaign (and one comedy collective’s video) explained the stakes to the whole country, and Flipkart walked away from Airtel Zero mid-backlash. February taught me the vocabulary; April taught me the local stakes.
Work note: our React dashboard rebuild shipped. First big project where I was the lead reviewer instead of the reviewed. Terrifying. Then fine. Then… good?
TIL: optimistic UI updates, showing the result before the server confirms, rolling back on failure. The watch lag taught me why this matters: perceived speed is speed.