After Building TikkaMate, I'll Never Look at Apps the Same Way Again

How building changed the way we see everything

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There's this weird thing that happens when you've built something from scratch.

You open someone else's app — could be anything, a notes app, a food delivery thing, some random productivity tool — and you can't just use it anymore. You start noticing the decisions. The button placement. The way a form validates. The loading state that someone clearly spent time on. You catch yourself thinking "oh, they probably debated that" or "I wonder why they went with that approach."

It's like learning a language and then hearing it everywhere you didn't before.

Building TikkaMate did that to us. And honestly, we didn't expect it to.

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Before We Built Anything

Be honest with yourself for a second — before you've ever made something, apps feel kind of like magic, right? You tap a button, something happens. You fill a form, data goes somewhere. The whole thing just... works. Or doesn't work, and you get annoyed, and you leave a bad review.

That was us. Users. Consumers. People who occasionally complained when an app was slow without thinking for one second about what slow even means in that context.

We weren't curious about the seams. We just wanted the thing to work.

And then we tried to build TikkaMate.

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The First Time Something Actually Worked

There's a specific moment we keep coming back to. It was late — not dramatically late, but late enough that everyone was a little tired and a little punchy. We'd been trying to get a particular feature working for longer than we'd like to admit. Something kept breaking in a way that made no logical sense, and we'd gone through the usual cycle: Stack Overflow, documentation, asking someone, staring blankly, asking someone again.

And then it worked.

Not in a spectacular way. No confetti, no celebration music. The thing just... did what it was supposed to do. And we looked at it for a second and someone said something like "wait, that's it?" and then we all kind of laughed because yes, that was it, and somehow that felt enormous.

That moment changed something. Because we understood now — viscerally, not just intellectually — that every working feature in every app you've ever used had a moment like that. Someone got it working. Someone was probably tired. Someone said "wait, that's it?" and felt the same small, quiet thrill.

Apps aren't magic. They're accumulated moments like that. Thousands of them.

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What You Start Noticing

Once you've been on the building side, even a little, your perception shifts in strange ways.

You notice errors differently. Before, a 404 page was just an annoyance. Now it's a choice — someone decided what that page should say, what it should look like, whether it should be funny or minimal or helpful. Someone maybe argued about it. Someone shipped it anyway and hoped it was good enough.

You notice what's missing from apps too. The features that almost exist. The flow that's almost smooth but has one weird step that makes you think "why didn't they just..." — and now you know why. Because prioritization is hard and time is short and something had to ship first.

You notice loading states. This one sounds ridiculous but hear us out — loading states are actually a small act of respect toward the user. Someone thought: what does this person see while they wait? And then they built something for that in-between moment. Before building, we never registered loading states. Now we notice when they're good. When they're thoughtful. When they're lazy. When they're missing entirely.

It's like developing a new sense. Mildly inconvenient and also kind of wonderful.

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The Decisions Nobody Talks About

Here's what no one tells you before you build something: most of the work isn't coding.

It's deciding. Constantly, endlessly deciding things that feel too small to mention but somehow take forever.

Should this button say "Submit" or "Continue" or "Let's go"? Does that even matter? (It does, a little.) Where does the error message live — inline or at the top of the form? What happens if the user does something we didn't expect? What's the empty state look like before any data exists? What do we call this thing in the navigation — because the name we chose internally doesn't necessarily make sense to someone seeing it for the first time?

These aren't glamorous decisions. Nobody's going to write an article about our empty state copy. But they compound. All those small calls, made by actual people who had opinions and constraints and sometimes just made the best choice available at the time — that's what an app is, underneath. It's just a long series of human decisions wearing a clean UI.

We look at apps differently now because we know that. Every screen is someone's judgment call made visible.

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The Empathy Part

Maybe the strangest thing building gave us is empathy for bad software.

We used to get genuinely frustrated. Slow load times, confusing navigation, forms that didn't save your progress — we'd sigh, complain in a group chat, move on. We had no context for why things might be the way they were.

Now we have maybe too much context.

We know what it feels like to have a feature that works 90% of the time and you can't figure out the remaining 10%. We know what it's like to make a decision that seems obviously right and then see someone use your thing in a completely different way than you imagined. We know the specific exhaustion of a bug that only appears in one particular situation that you can't replicate.

So when an app is a little broken now, there's still some frustration. But underneath it, there's this new thing — a kind of recognition. Someone built this. Someone tried. Something went wrong or got deprioritized or just wasn't caught in testing. There are people behind every clunky experience, and they probably didn't want it to be clunky.

That doesn't excuse bad software. But it changes how you hold it.

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What TikkaMate Taught Us About Learning

We didn't expect a coding project to change how we learn. But it did.

When you build something real — something with actual users, even a few, something that needs to actually work — you learn differently than you do from a tutorial. Tutorials are comfortable. They're designed so you succeed. Real projects aren't designed for anything; they just present problems and wait.

And the thing about solving a real problem is that you can't skip steps. You can't move on until it works. You don't get to write "I understand this conceptually" and proceed — you have to actually understand it, because the code won't lie to you.

At IndianInstinctStudio, this is something we're still figuring out how to balance with everything else — SSC prep, regular school stuff, the rest of life. Building takes time. It takes the particular kind of energy that's hard to summon on a Wednesday afternoon when you've already been studying for three hours.

But something about it feels different from other things we spend time on. More permanent, maybe. Like it stays with you longer.

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The Part We Didn't Expect

Nobody told us that building TikkaMate would make us more curious, not less.

We thought finishing something — or getting close to finishing — would feel like arrival. Like "okay, we know how this works now, we've figured it out." Instead it opened up into more questions. About design. About how people actually use things. About what we'd do differently next time.

Maybe that's what building does. It doesn't close things. It opens them.

We can't look at apps the same way now. We probably can't look at a lot of things the same way. And sitting here, thinking about it — yeah, we're glad that happened.

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— IndianInstinctStudio | Still opening things, apparently

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