Board Exams and a Play Store That Wouldn't Wait

February 2024 was the month my two identities collided hardest: student taking board exams and developer with apps in the wild.

I am not writing this to sound heroic. I wrote it because a lot of founders-in-school posts pretend you can do both perfectly. You cannot. You negotiate tradeoffs daily and sometimes you negotiate badly.

The Two Calendars

Calendar A: Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics. Sample papers. School attendance rules. Parents asking reasonable questions about ranks.

Calendar B: Crash reports from apps published under Strato Inc. A user email about a payment edge case. A dependency that broke because Google moved a target SDK deadline again.

They do not share a priority function. Calendar A punishes you in public results. Calendar B punishes you in one-star reviews and guilt.

flowchart LR
    subgraph feb [February 2024]
        B[Board exams]
        P[Play Store maintenance]
    end

    B -->|wins most days| Study
    P -->|wins some nights| Hotfix
    Study --> JEE[JEE pipeline]
    Hotfix --> Users[Real users]

What I Actually Did

Set a maintenance window. Not a formal SLA — I am one person. But I stopped pretending every bug was P0. Critical crashes yes. Cosmetic regressions waited until after papers.

Wrote release notes in my head instead of shipping them. The number of half-finished branches that February could fill a graveyard. Shipping less was the win.

Used boards as an excuse to say no. Friends suggesting new startup ideas got a honest “ask me in April.” That boundary was harder than any technical debt.

Kept one app stable on purpose. Not everything in the portfolio deserved attention. Pick the thing with real users and let the experiments rot quietly.

What Broke

Sleep. Obviously.

Motivation loops. Studying felt pointless when a bug fix would help someone today. Fixing bugs felt irresponsible when integrals were tomorrow.

Identity. “Founder” is a loud word in Indian family WhatsApp groups. “Student” is the louder one in February.

What I Learned About Building

Production does not pause for your life events. Users do not know you have a Chemistry paper. That is not unfair — it is the deal when you publish.

The skill I practiced that month was triage, not feature velocity. Same skill I would need later, in different contexts, with different stakes.

What I Did Not Do

I did not launch a new company. I did not write thought leadership about industries I had not worked in. I did not pretend boards were a “strategic pause” for investors — I had no investors, just apps and exams.

Takeaway

If you are building while exams are real: pick one calendar to win each day. Some days that calendar is school and you accept the guilt about GitHub. Some nights the calendar is a hotfix and you accept the guilt about sleep.

February 2024 taught me that sustainability is not a podcast topic. It is whether you can still open your laptop in March without hating yourself.

Boards ended. JEE was next. The Play Store was still there, patient and slightly broken, like always.