GrandWorks, Author at GrandWorks

Work from home: The new normal for corporates

Posted on April 6, 2020May 23, 2020 by GrandWorks

The need for the hour is to protect yourself and others by practicing social distancing and timely personal hygiene.

Most IT companies have already initiated the daily routine of working from home. We need to act as a responsible part of our society and contribute to reducing the risk of being exposed to this potentially fatal virus.

Working from home can have its positives as well as negatives. If you’re thinking, how can an IT company function efficiently working remotely?

At GrandWorks, some in our team was already working remotely before the pandemic, while our main office is situated in a homely villa in Goa, some of us are working from home, or from other parts of the world. For us, our major concern is our employee’s wellbeing and health, and in such a critical condition we have taken all the required measures.

Here are 5 tips to help you be more productive and efficient when working from home. Let’s set up your workspace at home to get the right mood, enabling you to work more efficiently.

Get a proper system in place: We don’t yet know for how long this situation could last, therefore it’s very important to put a proper system in place for working from home. Develop an everyday routine and don’t fall prey to unproductivity. Avoid sitting in an overly comfortable place like a sofa, couch, or bean bag (it will only make you lazier). Maintain a proper work desk similar to that of your regular office. If you can allot a separate room for work, do so.
Set an every day to-do list: It’s very important to keep track of all the important tasks that need to be done when working from home. Get used to the routine of making a to-do list before you start working in the morning. Set deadlines, reminders to complete work on time, and avoid any delays. It’s more fun to get things done than building stress around not finishing your work.
Develop discipline and avoid multitasking: We often get distracted or lose focus. Work on one task at a time, especially when it comes to high priority tasks. It’s very easy to fall into traps of not working when at home and start focussing on doing home chores instead. Therefore it’s very important to develop disciple and a proper system to stay focused during work hours so that you can relax once your workday is over.
Make yourself at home: Take breaks regularly, spend quality time with family and loved ones. Don’t skip food breaks, this could be an amazing bonding opportunity with your family and loved ones. Stand up and go for a short walk around the apartment every half an hour or so, it will make you more productive and give you the energy you need to keep working.
Comfort Bonus: Now that you’re working at the comfort of your home, keep some snacks and tasty drinks around you, so that you have something to munch on to get your energy flowing. Play your favorite playlist, and above all, enjoy your time working from home!

At such a critical time globally, it’s necessary that we all do our part i.e stay indoors and avoid any sort of travel. Stay indoor, eat healthily, and be safe!

Google DevFest Hackathon in Goa

Posted on September 27, 2019September 27, 2019 by GrandWorks

The themes were as follows.

Climate Crisis Awareness
Gamification in Online Learning
Health Alert Application for a Region
App to report Potholes and Geolocation Tagging

The topics are relevant and affect us all in one way or another. We were super pleased with the turnout and are looking forward to seeing the solutions presented by the participants tomorrow.

@GrandWorksCo

The event will be juried on the 28th of September, 2019 at 11am.

Grand 2018!

Posted on April 27, 2019April 27, 2019 by GrandWorks

We really want to thank our awesome clients for putting their trust in us. Here are some of the projects we’ve completed this year.

UpCloud

UpCloud is one of the leading cloud hosting solutions, delivering the fastest cloud servers. We’ve been working with UpCloud before on Illustrations, but this time we got the task of creating their new website from scratch. We worked through their all-new design language and introduced brand new community section. It was a huge project which involved our whole team, from design, and front-end development, to back-end development. We’re very happy with how the website turned out. It was a great journey, the team at UpCloud is great, we couldn’t be more happy to be working with them!

DigitalSky

Another fun project we are super proud of this year is definitely DigitalSky, the official portal for drones in India, launched together with India’s new policy for drones. For this project, we designed the whole user interface and developed the front-end part of the website. We also built DigitalSky with mobile first in mind, making it more similar to an app, but still completely made for desktop as well, without the need to actually download an app.

OnePlus

OnePlus released two new smartphones this year, 6, and 6T which brought record sales to the company and positioning them as leader of the premium smartphone market in India and broadening their horizons to other parts of the world. Our founder Hampus Olsson created all the official wallpapers for the new phones, together with UI illustrations and icons for OxygenOS, OnePlus´s version of Android.

Ekspono

We designed the graphical profile and brand identity of Ekspono, a Swedish business creating a digital platform specialized to reap the full benefits of QIS index investing. We helped them with the logotype, website, business cards, graphical profile, and presentations.

Happy Cities Summit

We created and managed the website for Happy Cities Summit of Amaravati together with Andhra Pradesh Government of India for 2018. Right now we’re currently working on the 2019 edition. The event for 2018 was a huge success, seeing the participation from 1,500+ delegates from 15+ countries, including eminent city leaders and urban experts.

iSPIRT

We launched the official website for iSPIRT, which is a non-profit organization in India, promoting policies, technology platforms and playbooks for product entrepreneurs in India. iSPIRT creates great products and solutions directly for the Indian Government and are handling IndiaStack and more.

We’re incredibly excited to see what 2019 will bring, and hope to do even better this year! We also want to thank everyone who has supported us this year, we really love you and can’t thank you enough! <3

Happy new year!
/The GrandWorks team

The grand journey

Posted on February 2, 2018May 24, 2019 by GrandWorks

Our background

Siddharth Ashok was born in a family who adopted Buddhism in a small but wonderfully friendly village in Varanasi, India, where he got to experience a culture of smiles, warmth, and spirituality. At an early age, he got his first computer, which made him realize the immense power this little machine opened up to the curly haired boy. When not playing games with the other kids, he spent his time learning to become a programmer, it was his dream. Siddharth left his village at an early age to pursue his dreams and has since lived in Lucknow, Mumbai, and Goa, working for various tech companies. He is an Open source enthusiast and contributes to several open source projects such as WordPress. He likes making friends and you are most likely to stumble upon him in the next tech conference. While working in Goa together with a Swedish company, he met Hampus and they have been friends ever since.

Hampus Olsson grew up on the other side of the world, in a small village in the south of Sweden. He was a small, blue-eyed boy with straight blond hair. He was born a creative and liked to build and make everything from small huts in his garden, to PC games on his computer. Growing up with a mom who was a Webmaster in the early 90s, he also made his own websites about his pets and movies he liked. He made his first games and websites at the age of 8. That was the time he also started his imaginary company called Girg. He loved to write music, build websites, games and make art. At the age of 20, he moved to New York City where he did his internship with Your Majesty on Broadway. He has since worked with several international clients worldwide like Spotify, OnePlus and GANT. He has a strong passion for traveling and has lived a nomadic life, traveling to over 17 countries.

Siddharth and Hampus worked together for five years in Goa, India. At the end of their fifth year, they felt something was missing. That’s when they decided to start GrandWorks.

What we plan to do

With GrandWorks, we want to build a platform for our various ideas and projects to thrive upon. We want to build the best possible experience and optimize our lives in a way where we can stay creative and happy while doing great work.
We want to challenge the way people normally do business. We don’t want to be stuck in a loop, working from nine to five where only a portion of the hours is actually productive. We want to experiment and come up with the optimal working experience so that we can learn new things quicker, and come up with something that motivates and inspire others.

Our Journey

We recently started our journey out of a great Co-Working space called 91 Springboard in Goa, from here we run our Grand Base. It’s a great place to meet other creatives and entrepreneurs, and a great place to learn new things from the various events and talks happening in the space.

We’re currently busy working with clients such as OnePlus, Spotify and Dalberg. When we’re not doing client work, we discuss our long list of ideas we want to make a reality.

We’re also building an app called Abstruct, natively for iOS and Android. Sign up for the newsletter to stay tuned.

Learning by Doing

95% of the things we have learned so far was made from experimenting and by simply trying something new. We know by now that if you want to improve your skills, it’s important that you don’t think too much about the process. That you actually just throw yourself out there and take the first step into unknown territory. If that is learning a new code language, or figuring out how to render your first 3D scene, you have to start by taking the first step, not by waiting for someone to teach you or tell you how to do it.

When we grew up, there was no one there telling us what to do. It was out of curiosity and craving the knowledge that led us to learn the skills we know today. Don’t wait to get into a good school, there is nothing better than feeling the urge and need to learn by yourself.

Being Nomadic

Living a sustainable nomadic life can be something you only fantasize about. Let me tell you, it’s entirely possible. At GrandWorks, we want to work with the opportunity to live a more nomadic life, without sacrificing work and productivity, but instead, improving it.

Solving Real-world Problems

We want to build products that help people do a better job, more effectively. We also want to reach into challenging industries, needing improvement.

Thanks for taking your time to read our story! Be sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter to stay up to date of what we’re doing. We’ll keep updating this journal with new, interesting topics. Stay tuned!

Author: GrandWorks