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27 Critical Apps That Shaped My Life

2022-08-26 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 27:02 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Tools, apps and tech (also: Learning and studying, Business and entrepreneurship, YouTube, writing online and creators) · mode: Personal story · tags: His medical past, His own numbers, His own products discussed, Aimed at students, Family, Sponsor segment present

In a Tech Club episode Ali goes through 27 apps that shaped his life from about 11 to 28: Notepad, Dreamweaver and Photoshop taught him to code and design websites, Anki, Forest and Notability carried him through medical school, and Ghost, Notion, Twitter, Skillshare and Scrivener built his website, channel, business and book.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Tech Club intro: 27 apps that shaped his life from 11 to 28

  • ★★ Ali discovered Notepad at about 11 and learned to code with it, teaching himself HTML and CSS from the website W3Schools. — 00:00:29

00:00:36 — Notepad, Dreamweaver and Photoshop: learning to code and design websites, freelance work and design skills

  • ★★★ Ali still thinks learning to code is really valuable: for anyone interested in a side hustle or making money on the side, learning to code and make websites is a remarkably useful skill beyond software engineering. — 00:00:58
  • ★ Ali first learned to properly design and code websites in Macromedia Dreamweaver at about 12 or 13. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ From 13 Ali built his own website projects as side hustles at school and worked as a freelance web developer for small businesses, making five or ten dollars here and there. — 00:01:57
  • ★★ Ali says the bug of entrepreneurship he caught from making his first dollars on the internet has served him for the rest of his life. — 00:01:57
  • ★ At about 13 Ali got a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and taught himself web design to make logos, banners and forum signatures. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Designing medical technology apps got Ali hired in medical school as a freelance app and user interface designer, charging about a hundred pounds an hour. — 00:03:24
  • ★★ Ali says his love of design made his YouTube channel look legit even when he was starting out five years earlier. — 00:03:24 · YouTube
  • ★ Ali still uses Photoshop to design websites and thumbnails and to mock things up for his channel and business. — 00:03:24

00:03:46 — Adobe Creative Cloud sponsor read

00:05:16 — World of Warcraft, Kindle and WordPress

  • ★★ Ali played World of Warcraft for three years, about three and a half hours a day, and through it became good friends with his school friends Chris and Omar, still his friends. — 00:05:21 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ World of Warcraft helped Ali appreciate why gaming is fun; he has lost touch with gaming since university but wants to dabble more and try Elden Ring on his PS5 once he finds the time. — 00:05:21 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ Whenever Ali gets a book recommendation he buys it on Kindle and starts reading it immediately on his phone, Kindle, iPad or Mac. — 00:05:50 · Kindle, iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali likes physical books but thinks the conveniences of an ebook far outweigh their benefits, and recommends starting to read ebooks. — 00:06:19 · Kindle
  • ★★ Reading on his Kindle and in the Kindle app on his iPad and phone lets Ali read between 50 and 100 books a year. — 00:06:19 · Kindle, iPad Pro
  • ★ Ali says the website builder WordPress powers around 30% of the internet. (hedged) — 00:06:42
  • ★ As a teenage freelance web developer, Ali usually bought a WordPress template from ThemeForest and edited it to make a client's website. — 00:07:12
  • ★ Ali's first business, SixMed, was built on WordPress websites and themes. — 00:07:41 · 6med
  • ★★ After years of working with WordPress, Ali does not really like it any more and prefers Ghost. — 00:07:41 · Ghost
  • ★★ For anyone who wants to moonlight or side-hustle as a web designer or developer, Ali says learning WordPress is a really useful skill that makes you highly employable. — 00:07:41

00:08:10 — Medical school: Anki, the Pomodoro technique and Forest

  • ★★ Ali used the flashcard app Anki extensively at medical school: its spaced repetition algorithm made memorising facts much easier. — 00:08:10 · Anki, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali recommends Anki, a free flashcard app, to anyone with a lot to memorise or learning a language. — 00:08:10 · Anki
  • ★ At university Ali worked with his friends in libraries around Cambridge using the Pomodoro technique. — 00:08:57 · Pomodoro technique, Cambridge
  • ★★ Ali says the Forest app, a Pomodoro timer whose tree dies if you get distracted, really helped him focus while studying for his medical school exams. — 00:09:56 · Pomodoro technique

00:10:10 — Sublime Text, the Laravel PHP framework and Stripe behind his question banks

  • ★ Sublime Text was Ali's text editor when he coded BMAT Ninja and UCAT Ninja, question banks for medical school applicants. — 00:10:25
  • ★★ Ali's business helping people into medical school made enough income that he did not really have to worry about money at university. — 00:10:49 · 6med
  • ★ In his second year at university Ali discovered the Laravel PHP framework and the tutorial website Laracasts, whose videos he watched over lunch. — 00:11:18
  • ★ Ali built BMAT Ninja and UCAT Ninja with the Laravel framework, and they made decent money. — 00:11:45
  • ★★ For anyone learning to code who might use PHP, Ali highly recommends the Laravel framework, still actively developed. — 00:11:45
  • ★★ Ali says taking payments used to mean hacking around with PayPal, a total nightmare, while learning Stripe and Stripe Checkout helped his business be profitable basically from day one. — 00:12:23
  • ★★ After a hard drive failure lost him everything, Ali has kept all his files on Google Drive since his first year of university. — 00:12:52 · Google Drive

00:13:06 — Google Drive, podcast apps, Ghost, Notability, Audible and Sketch

  • ★★ Ali set up a shared Google Drive for all the medical students of his college, where they shared essay plans and revision notes. — 00:13:21 · Google Drive
  • ★★ Ali encourages students to share notes and collaborate rather than compete with classmates: the more collaborative you are, the easier life becomes. — 00:13:50
  • ★ Ali started listening to podcasts in 2016, probably first The Tim Ferriss Show, in the app Overcast and later Castro. (hedged) — 00:13:50 · The Tim Ferriss Show
  • ★ Over five years Ali listened to probably over a thousand podcast episodes, which introduced him to many new ideas and thinkers. (hedged) — 00:14:19
  • ★★ Listening to podcasts by people who had started YouTube channels made starting one feel reasonable to Ali. — 00:14:19 · YouTube
  • ★ Ali found the Indie Hackers podcast, interviews with people who built profitable businesses from their bedrooms, super inspiring for his website work at university. — 00:14:19
  • ★★ Ali built his website on Ghost when he started taking it seriously in 2016, and six years later it still runs on Ghost. — 00:15:08 · aliabdaal.com, Ghost
  • ★★ Writing articles on his website got Ali over the fear of putting himself out there, and a year or a year and a half later this led to his YouTube channel. — 00:15:38 · aliabdaal.com, YouTube
  • ★★ To start a website or blog, Ali calls Ghost a very reasonable choice: a blogging platform simpler than WordPress, which has become bloated. — 00:15:38 · Ghost
  • ★★ When he got an iPad Pro in 2017 and went paperless, Ali researched note-taking apps and found Notability the most useful; he was fully paperless for his last two years of medical school. — 00:16:07 · Notability, iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali's video on how he takes notes on his iPad Pro with Notability was the first of his videos to go completely viral. — 00:16:36 · Notability, iPad Pro
  • ★ Ali, who discovered Audible in 2017, listens to probably many hours of audiobooks a week, mostly fiction. (hedged) — 00:17:05 · Audible
  • ★ Brandon Sanderson is Ali's favourite author; he has just finished re-listening to Words of Radiance, the second Stormlight Archive book. — 00:17:05 · Brandon Sanderson, The Stormlight Archive
  • ★★ Ali, who listens at the gym, on commutes and walking to his studio, recommends Audible wholeheartedly; it is not a sponsor. — 00:17:34 · Audible
  • ★ Ali says Sketch, which he used to redesign his business's websites and design medical app interfaces, has been superseded by Figma and Adobe XD. — 00:17:34

00:18:39 — YouTube, Podia, Notion and Twitter

  • ★★ Being a medical student who could design apps opened many doors for Ali, which he says shows that learning to code and design websites, apps and interfaces is a useful skill for anyone today. — 00:18:39
  • ★★ Ali started his YouTube channel in June 2017, and it completely changed his life. — 00:18:39 · YouTube
  • ★★ As he was leaving medical school, Ali turned his BMAT, UCAT and interview teaching into three online courses, hosted on Podia, because as a doctor he would have no time to teach in person. — 00:19:24 · 6med
  • ★★ To host an online course Ali usually recommends Podia, which he has used since 2017; alternatives include SamCart and Kajabi. — 00:19:53
  • ★★ Building content creation and repurposing systems in Notion let Ali put out one or two videos a week while working full time. — 00:20:22 · Notion
  • ★★ After his brother Taimur badgered him on their podcast Not Overthinking, Ali became active on Twitter in late 2019. — 00:20:51 · Twitter, Taimur Abdaal, Not Overthinking
  • ★★ Ali's Twitter account has grown to over 200,000 followers. — 00:20:51 · Twitter
  • ★★ Through Twitter Ali became friends with YouTubers he admired, such as Thomas Frank and Sarah Dietschy. — 00:20:51 · Twitter, Thomas Frank
  • ★★★ Ali tells his Part-Time YouTuber Academy students that Twitter is the single best platform for a creator to make friends, because every other creator seems to be on it. — 00:21:20 · Twitter, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★ In the last six months, as borders reopened after lockdown, Ali has met in person many people he first met on Twitter. — 00:21:20 · Twitter
  • ★★ Most of Ali's recommendations for books, blog posts, podcasts and documentaries come from Twitter. — 00:21:50 · Twitter
  • ★★ Anyone who sees Twitter as a pointless platform for complaining about the news is not following the right people, Ali says; follow the right people and it becomes a fantastic source of content. — 00:21:50 · Twitter

00:22:36 — Transistor, Skillshare, Slack, Frame.io, ConvertKit and Scrivener

  • ★★ Not Overthinking, the weekly podcast Ali has made with his brother since 2019, about three and a half years, is hosted on Transistor, as is his podcast Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal. — 00:22:38 · Not Overthinking, Deep Dive, Taimur Abdaal
  • ★★ Ali calls the podcast host Transistor, whose makers he knows from Twitter, a fantastic app for anyone who wants to start a podcast. — 00:22:38 · Twitter
  • ★★★ Ali's Skillshare classes, made since late 2019, earn his business about $50,000 to $80,000 a month from about 12 or 13 classes paid per minute watched. — 00:22:38 · Skillshare, Skillshare classes
  • ★★ When Skillshare took off, Ali's business revenue jumped from about $10,000 a month to about $70,000 a month within a few months. (hedged) — 00:23:07 · Skillshare
  • ★ Once Ali started hiring a team, Slack became the central place for all its communication; he spends a lot of time on Slack and Zoom. — 00:23:36 · Slack, Zoom
  • ★★ Since first outsourcing his video editing in late 2019, Ali has had editors upload videos to Frame.io for his comments; outsourcing editing freed up a lot of his time. — 00:24:05
  • ★ Ali's business switched to the email marketing platform ConvertKit about a year ago, and much of its revenue flows through its email list. (hedged) — 00:24:05
  • ★★ Having tried Google Docs, Pages and Word, Ali finds none as nice and distraction-free as Scrivener for writing a book manuscript, and recommends it to anyone writing a book. — 00:25:04

00:25:33 — Sign-off and suggested next video

00:26:08 — Outtakes from filming

In the description and comments

  • ★ Asked whether Quizlet or Anki is better for learning vocabulary, Ali says he prefers Anki. — creator comment · Anki

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

People: Brandon Sanderson · Sarah Dietschy · Taimur Abdaal · Thomas Frank

Projects: aliabdaal.com · BMAT Ninja (website) · Deep Dive · Not Overthinking · Part-Time YouTuber Academy · Tech Club · UKCAT Ninja

Works: Indie Hackers podcast · Oathbringer · The Stormlight Archive · The Tim Ferriss Show · Words of Radiance

Organizations: 6med · Kajabi · Laracasts · PayPal · Podia · SamCart · Skillshare · Stripe · ThemeForest · Twitter · W3Schools · YouTube

Concepts: Pomodoro technique · spaced repetition

Places: Cambridge

Products: Adobe Photoshop · Adobe XD · Anki · Apple Pages · Audible · Castro · ConvertKit · Elden Ring · Figma · Forest · Frame.io · Ghost · Google Docs · Google Drive · iPad Pro · Kindle · Laravel · Macromedia Dreamweaver · Microsoft Word · Notability · Notepad · Notion · Overcast · PlayStation 5 · Scrivener · Sketch · Slack · Sublime Text · Transistor · WordPress · World of Warcraft · Zoom

Only in the description or credits: Quizlet

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