Posts
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Do I need a Product Manager in my early stage startup?
Not a controversial topic, but an interesting one persay because there really isn’t a straightforward answer. Ultimately the question to ask here is, who is leading your product? Is that you the CEO/Co-founder of the company? Or are you unable to do that for various reasons?
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Feature Flags is the new branching strategy
With modern software engineering practices, we no longer lean into complex branching strategies to help us with feature gating, but rather feature flags. While traditional thinking leads us to believe that this increases risk due to the lack of isolation, it actually does the opposite in my experience for the following reasons
- It creates a false sense of security to software engineers, leading them to believe that their codes will not impact production, hence there is less dilligence and more complacency
- It makes codes extremely difficult to merge later on, as you end up with tons of merge conflicts and potential merge errors and issues, creating more bugs, and delays in releases
- It creates unnecessarily complicated workflows, and confuses new joiners as it takes a significantly longer to explain how to correctly branch
- It can make it difficult to apply specific rules or contraints to your repository due to the limitations of the source control you are using (GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, etc)
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CMS/Website Builders
Here’s another post, specifically on CMS/website builders! In case it isn’t already obvious, i use my blog a lot to build a list of tools in specific categories for me to also utilize in the future. Here is the list of website builders that I have encountered and potentially used. You can of course build a website using just pure bespoke codes. However often than not you will need the ability for non-tech people to maintain your site’s content, as well as visual elements of the site, or even the entire site. Hence a category of products exists for this
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Hiring in Tech
I am going to do an unusual post that isn’t directly related to tech, but is very relevant to what I do at work. Hiring - while I don’t claim to be a know all expert, but having worked in this industry for a while now, working with recruiters and speaking to potentially hundreds of candidates yearly, I have developed my own opinions in this space
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Complexities of Event Tracking
For the most of us working on customer facing products, there is always a strong need to track events as they help us understand the users’ behavior and then utilize the information to further improve upon our product. There are many platforms in the market like Google Analytics, Mixpanel and many others but they all come with jarring one issue - over time, it can get very tedious to understand all the available events flowing thru the system and if they are correctly implemented. Ultimately many of companies still resort to very traditional excel or google sheets to list down all the events. Some of the key challenges I have found using this method are as follows:
- A level of overlapping/duplicate work in terms of maintaining events
- Inconsistent/insufficient documentation specifics around what fields are required, and what they should be named
- Difficult to validate/verify events that have been created in production and hence a lack of confidence if the events are implemented the right way
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IaC tools and platforms
This is a space that you would be extremely familiar with if you have infrastructure as code practices in your company
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Embedded BI platforms
BI/Reporting platforms are aplenty out there in the market. However one category that is on the rise is embedded BI. Here are some of them I have found thru my research that caught my attention, largely due to the use cases that I have at the moment
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Setting up mermaid diagram for Jekyll
I did not find any updated posts as to how to setup mermaid js for diagraming without usage of any plugins. I have tried to use several other samples I found but I could not get it to work as it required jquery and my site did not come configured with it
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The Rise of Distributed Frameworks
I have always had an obsession around frameworks. Primarily driven by my experiences in both an engineer and an engineering leader with many challenges faced and mistakes made. Hopefully this does not come as a surprise to many, since all we have been working on top of, especially in product and/or application engineering, are simply frameworks. If you are a Java developer, for example, you are working on top of the Java SDK, which in fact is a framework that is comprised of thousands of different functions and tools to help you in different areas. Hopefully no one doing application engineering has to write in assembly anymore
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I recently built a Voron 2.4r2
I was looking for a larger format 3D printer and decided to bite the bullet on getting a voron on the basis that it is a lot more moddable (vs a bambulab X1 for example). The key though is that it does not come assembled so you would have to do everything from scratch, and boy was it a journey to build given the limited time and often times frustrations with broken pieces and generally things that are not well documented as I have bought a kit that did not necessarily use all original parts. I also had to order 3D printed parts since I did not really have an enclosed printer to print ABS parts, and honestly ABS really stinks up the room quite badly
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Hi there!
Hello there! this is my first post in this new blog. I have decided to build this using github pages + jekyll given it is a low cost (free) option. Hopefully this will be a lot more permanent than the last 2 blogs that I had, given the improved reliability of this setup
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