Timing
Two cryptocurrency exchanges came out early on from Y Combinator. One is 2012. One in 2013. One returned 1500X to early investors. The other one ceased to exist after 2 years. What happened?
Real vs Theoretical Engineering Productivity
Software engineering at its core a job that involves thinking and the ability to convert that thinking into meaningful code that a machine will understand.
Too much documentation is harmful
As code changes, documentation becomes stale over time. This happens at big companies. This happens at small companies. Unlike code, documentation is not compiled or tested. The code is executed. If the code execution fails or produces incorrect results, it […]
Engineering stack
Most startups think of the engineering stack as if it is a single cohesive thing. However, I believe that there are three different engineering stacks that are loosely coupled to each other.
Engineering Guardrails
Guardrails are meant to protect us from tripping over. The same can be said about engineering guardrails.
VCs are anti-personas for a B2C startup
The early adopters of Instagram were not VCs.
Bad and good ways to test code
Writing tests at an early-stage startup is always heatedly debated. If a function has one call, adding a unit test doubles the number of calls, this not only doubles the current work but even slows down future code changes 2X! […]
The different layers of a web applications
There are three mandatory layers of any non-trivial user-facing web application. Storage, compute and view. The view is the front-end website and the mobile app(s). The storage is the database layer like MySQL or Mongo DB. The compute layer is […]
The biggest impact of ChatGPT
In the decade of the 2010s, after Facebook became mainstream, social became a building block for websites. A lot of websites added a concept of user profiles consisting of a name, a display picture, a profile description, and the ability […]
Social media and burglar bars
Houses in many major cities in Latin America have burglar bars. So, is in India. Very few cities in the US have burglar bars.