DEV Community: Jayanta Adhikary

TheStoicMonk: How I Shipped a Mindfulness App Amidst Deadlines and Burnout

Jayanta Adhikary — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 12:30:00 +0000

I’ve always believed that mindfulness shouldn’t be a luxury—it’s a way of life. That’s why I built TheStoicMonk, a minimalist meditation app designed to help you cultivate inner peace, clarity, and purpose. In this blog post, I’ll share the story behind The Stoic Monk, how I tackled development using React Native and Expo 49, and the lessons I learned while balancing a full-time job, navigating health challenges, and shipping a major update.

🧘‍♂️ Why I Built The Stoic Monk

A year ago, I released the first version of The Stoic Monk as a side project with a very simple goal: to create a calm space amidst the chaos of everyday life. I was tired of the overly complicated and gamified meditation apps that filled the market. I wanted something straightforward—a tool that I could use daily to get centered, plan my goals, journal my thoughts, and reflect on Stoic wisdom.

Core Features at Launch:

Meditation sessions with timer and ambient sound
Personal journaling to capture thoughts and emotions
Daily goal-setting to stay on track
Inspiring Stoic quotes and readings

⚙️ Tech Stack: React Native + Expo 49

I chose React Native with Expo 49 to get the job done quickly and maintain cross-platform compatibility.

But when Expo 53 introduced breaking changes in its router system, I hit a wall. Migrating required major refactoring I couldn’t prioritize at the time—so I stuck with Expo 49 to keep the project stable and shipping.

🚀 The First Launch & Lessons in Visibility

The initial version went live last year—but I didn’t market it.

It was more of a personal tool, and I wanted it to solve my own problems before worrying about traction. In hindsight, I wish I had shared the journey publicly to gather early feedback and build a community.

🔁 Fast-Forward to the Big Update

Despite holding a full-time job and going through a rough patch with my health, I pushed myself to ship a massive update last month.

✨ New Features

Ambient Sounds: Multiple calming sound options during meditation
Multiple Timer Options: More flexibility in meditation session duration
Revamped Pomodoro Timer: Better UI and customizable work/break intervals
New Readings Section: Explore the world of Stoic philosophy

🐛 Bug Fixes & UI Improvements

Fixed Onboarding Glitch: Auth state now handled properly
UI Overhaul: Especially in the quotes section + a new, cleaner app icon
Heads up: While the core experience is stable, there may be some minor screen layout issues (SafeAreaView bugs) on certain Android devices. I didn’t get to test thoroughly across all screen sizes—but it’s on my radar for the next patch!

This update wasn’t just about polishing features—it was about taking the app one step closer to becoming a true mindfulness companion.

🧠 What I’d Do Differently

Start Marketing Early

Sharing progress publicly builds accountability and feedback loops.
Implement Analytics From Day One

Know what features users love and where they drop off.
Avoid Technical Debt When Possible

Future-proofing your stack can prevent migration nightmares.
Be Kind to Yourself

Building while juggling work and health isn't easy. Pace matters more than speed.

📈 What’s Next

Premium Add-ons (if demand increases)
iOS Support (currently Android-only)
Smarter Recommendations & AI integration
More Readings + Journaling Features

🪷 Final Thoughts

Building The Stoic Monk has been both challenging and deeply fulfilling. It's taught me about mindfulness, not just in practice—but in the way we build, release, and reflect.

If you’re juggling a side project with work or health struggles—trust me, I get it. Just keep shipping. One small release at a time.

👉 Download The Stoic Monk on Google Play

I'd love to hear your feedback or any questions you have about app development, solo shipping, or mindfulness tech!

Thanks for reading 🙏

Installing LLMs locally using Ollama - Beginner's guide

Jayanta Adhikary — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 08:33:02 +0000

Large Language Models or LLMs are machine learning models trained on huge sets of data and can be used to recognize and generate texts. One of its most common use cases is Generative AI, ie, when given a prompt or a question, it can provide text in reply.
Running open-source LLMs in our system locally can be quite troublesome but thanks to a few tools like Ollama and LM Studio, it can be very straightforward. In this article, I would like to share how we can use Ollama to install and run LLMs easily.

Installation

Visit Ollama's website https://ollama.ai
When you click on the download button, you get to choose your operating system. Currently, Ollama can only be installed in MacOS and Linux. They are adding Windows support soon!

Run Ollama

After installing Ollama, you can go to your terminal, and use the ollama command to check if it has been installed properly. You will get the available commands and flags for Ollama.
You can use ollama list to view all the downloaded models. It should be empty if you are using Ollama for the first time.
You can download models using ollama pull model-name, where model-name is the name of the model you wish to download. Models downloadable from Ollama directly can be checked at https://ollama.com/library. I am using LLama2-Uncensored for example. You can download it using ollama pull llama2-uncensored. There are ways you can use models that are not directly available at Ollama, but that can be quite confusing for beginners, so, I won't share it in this guide.
After the model is downloaded, you can run it using the run command, ie, ollama run llama2-uncensored.
The model runs and allows you to send a prompt. Let's try asking a basic question such as "What is water made of?". It replies with an answer.
You can exit the prompt session using /bye.

This is how you can use Ollama to run LLMs locally on your system. You can also use Ollama's REST API which is served at localhost:11434, to run and manage models. I will explain how to use the REST API in a different blog to keep this post simple for beginners.
You can check out https://github.com/ollama/ollama to know more about Ollama.
I am very grateful to the creators of this project!

Have fun installing and running models locally!

React Native vs Flutter: My Opinion

Jayanta Adhikary — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 03:42:42 +0000

In the current age of modern innovation, React Native and Flutter are the two most popular cross-platform technologies. While React Native is developed by the people at Facebook, Flutter is created by the people at Google. While both are powerful cross-platform app development frameworks, each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. In this article, I try to share my opinion on which one I would prefer and why.

React Native

React Native is an open-source cross-platform framework that uses JavaScript and React. It allows developers to create applications for both iOS and Android using a single codebase. React Native leverages native components, providing a native user experience. It also supports hot reloading for developers to quickly view the code changes in the application. It has a robust ecosystem with a very strong community, allowing access to native modules for platform-specific functionality. Few companies using React Native are Facebook, Instagram, Shopify, Disord, etc.

Advantages

Large Community: React Native has a well-established community resulting in a lot of resources, libraries and third-party packages.
Familiar Language: If you have experience with JavaScript and React, you can easily transition to React Native.
Strong Native Integrations: React Native has a strong emphasis on native integrations, which allows it to take better advantage of platform-specific features such as push notifications, camera access, and location services.
Quick Development & Hot Reload: It offers rapid development thanks to its vast library of third-party packages, and familiar language. It also supports hot reload which allows us to view quick changes we did to the code in the application.

Disadvantages

UI Customization: Achieving highly customized UIs can be more challenging with React Native than Flutter due to reliance on native components, but can be easily rectified with the help of third-party libraries and packages.
Platform-specific code: When integrating a few features that are platform-specific, you might need to write platform-specific code.

Flutter

Flutter is an open-source framework based on the Dart Programming language for building natively compiled cross-platform applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. It provides an amazing set of highly customizable widgets to create beautiful user interfaces. Flutter offers near native performance through AOT (ahead of time) compilation. It has a growing community with strong support from Google. Few companies using Flutter are Google, BMW, Alibaba, etc.

Advantages

Highly Customizable UI: Flutter has a great set of customizable widgets, making it excellent for creating unique and beautiful user interfaces.
Consistency Across Platforms: Flutter ensures a consistent UI and user experience across various platforms
Performance: It compiles to native ARM code, delivering high performance.
Strong Widget library: It comes with a comprehensive library of widgets reducing the need for third-party packages.

Disadvantages

Learning Curve: Dart is a less common language, so the learning curve might be steeper for developers who will have to learn Dart first, and then move on to learn Flutter
Smaller Community: Flutter's community is growing rapidly but the React Native community is stronger and larger (thanks to the JS and React community💪🏻). A smaller community means fewer resources and packages.
Large App Size: Flutter apps tend to be larger in size compared to Native apps or apps built with some other cross-platform frameworks.

My Choice (with Justification)

In my opinion(don't hold grudges🙁), I prefer React Native over Flutter. Here are a few reasons through which I justify my choice -

JavaScript/React Expertise: If you already know JavaScript and React, you can easily pick up React Native.
Access to larger Community and Ecosystem: The larger community and ecosystem help the developers find help, participate in discussions, and find more third-party libraries and packages to use.
Wider Industry Adoption: React Native has been adopted by numerous large companies including Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft, and much much more. It makes it more compelling to learn it.
Better for Large Projects: React Native is better suited for larger projects because of its better performance with large codebases. React Native uses the Virtual DOM, which allows it to render only the necessary components, rather than rendering the entire app with every change, resulting in better performance for large-scale applications.
Stronger Native Integration: React Native has a stronger emphasis on native integrations, which allows it to take better advantage of platform-specific features such as push notifications, camera access, and location services.
Maturity and Stability: React Native is a mature framework with a well-established release cycle and strong backward compatibility. This can be advantageous for projects that require a stable environment.
Platform-Specific Optimization: React Native provides a robust bridge allowing you to easily access platform-specific features and APIs. This can be crucial if your app requires deep integration with device capabilities.
Seamless Web and Mobile Integration: If you're working on a project that requires a smooth transition between web and mobile development, React Native for the Web allows you to reuse code between the two platforms.

Conclusion

In summary, React Native might be better if you have existing JavaScript & React Expertise, have a larger codebase, need rapid development with a wide range of third-party libraries, or need stronger native integrations. However, it ultimately depends on the specific requirements of the project and the development team's expertise. I personally would go with React Native as I am more comfortable typing code in JavaScript/TypeScript rather than using Dart and a few other reasons that I mentioned above. No doubt Flutter is amazing and has its advantages as well (rich widget library, better performance), but the final choice of which one to use depends upon the developer.

Why I like using Vim

Jayanta Adhikary — Wed, 25 May 2022 13:30:52 +0000

My friends keep on asking me "Why do you use Vim?". And my reply to this question is simple, to boost my productivity🤷‍♂️

By using Vim we force ourselves to use the keyboard every time we perform some action in our code. By not moving our hands from the keyboard to the mouse, we save a few seconds⌛️
These seconds are very minimal but when you see the amount of work you are able to do by just sticking to the keyboard, you will know why many people like using Vim💻
If you are coding and you have to move your hand to the mouse, your productivity is affected. Whereas if you just use the keyboard and focus more on the code, you might enter the flow state which will help boost your productivity👨‍💻
Now I don't use Vim directly and am more of a Vim extension user. I use Vim extensions/plugins in both VS Code and Goland(Golang ide by jetbrains).
In VS Code you can just search for "Vim" in the extension section and download it.

For Jetbrains IDEs you can download "IdeaVim" from the plugins section.

These extensions and plugins will help you to run your code in your code editor by using Vim commands. This will help you become more productive while keeping the features of your favourite IDEs.
Have a happy and productive programming!!👋