

Show HN: I neglected my med school finals to develop an iPhone app in two months - kalbaba
https://medium.com/p/835a921b1dea

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kalbaba
Hey everyone, I'd love to hear why you think of my app. It's an agnostic
personal tracker for the Quantified Self—you can create a tracker, and decide
to log numbers, text, boolean values, times and scales. Once a tracker is
made, it'll show up on your home screen where you can add a record—they'll all
show up in a timeline view on the Records page. You can also add default
values—for example, I usually take 300 milligrams of krill oil at a time, so
that's set as the default dose. That then allows me to simply swipe to the
left and record it—no need for pulling up Excel and wasting too much time.
There's also CSV export—visualization and analysis will hopefully be coming
soon.

The link above is a post explaining the app and my motivations behind it. I'd
love to hear your thoughts, and I'm willing to answer any questions—whether
quantified self, learning iOS development, Quantime or even medical school.
Let me know what you think!

EDIT: Just a quick clarification—school is fine, it's 100% my main focus, just
thought some hyperbole might be welcome after the "30 apps this year" post
last week. I'm definitely sticking with it, and I'm definitely getting my MD.
I'm too far in to stop now, haha. Like I mentioned to danso, main interest is
in radiology, which is a tech heavy field, and I hope that my background in
technology will help me push medicine toward the innovation it needs.

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danso
Nice page and explanation (though you'll need your own domain)...I'll have to
echo what notastartup said...this is probably a textbook case of when _not_ to
go on a hacker binge and the concept of "there's a time for everything"... A.
Because of the timing of your finals, and B. the idea you have, while useful
and well-thought out, is one that is going to take some time to gain traction.
Quantified-self is important, but not that many people get it, or would know
what to do with it.

Even if your intention was to go all into tech, it probably would've been
better to just spend your off hours on this project, and keep your focus into
med school....even if you had no intention of ever being a doctor. Because
this:

"Use this iPhone app built by a doctor!"

sounds better than:

"Use this new iPhone app!"

You probably didn't want this to turn into a discussion of life choices, but
that's the tradeoff you make when you use a title that is meant to generate
interest like that...

(note: since you're only a second year student, it's probably not that bad to
quit now, if that's what you really want to do)

\----

edit: that said, the medical profession is in great need of doctors who grok
what you do. Even if this app doesn't become the kind of hit that lets you
quit med school, you'll obviously have talents and resources not available to
the standard doctor.

As Atul Gawande said:

"If you count something you find interesting, you will learn something
interesting."

[http://books.google.com/books?id=DepE_UwgkSQC&lpg=PA255&ots=...](http://books.google.com/books?id=DepE_UwgkSQC&lpg=PA255&ots=htch5cddvF&dq=%22If%20you%20count%20something%20you%20find%20interesting%2C%20you%20will%20learn%20something%20interesting.%22&pg=PA255#v=onepage&q=%22If%20you%20count%20something%20you%20find%20interesting,%20you%20will%20learn%20something%20interesting.%22&f=false)

~~~
kalbaba
Hey, thanks for your comments! I have a teaser page at
[http://quanti.me](http://quanti.me), I just like Medium as a blogging
platform and thought it might be useful for this.

You're right, I'm mildly regretting the title, but school is my number one
priority and I intend on obtaining my MD. My main interest is in radiology,
which is a tech heavy field, and I hope that my background in technology will
help me push medicine toward the innovation it needs.

I really do appreciate you taking the time to talk about life choices though,
as unintended as it was.

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notastartup
ohhh man....I would've taken the med school finals first to secure a firm
footing on path to upper middle class, and then hire some Indian app developer
to make it in a few days to test the market fit and then hire more developers
to grow it and work my way up to high class society.

~~~
kalbaba
Haha, I've given the outsourcing thing a shot on a couple of projects
before—it's never worked out, and it's actually the reason I started learning
to program.

The title was a bit hyperbolic—I was only working on it during my evenings,
and a lot of it was Thanksgiving/Winter breaks, so finals went fine (P=MD
anyway!). I don't regret the amount of time I put into it, and hopefully I'll
figure out the product/market fit soon!

