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 is fixed with much higher urgency.
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.
Guardrails are meant to protect us from tripping over. The same can be said about engineering guardrails.
The early adopters of Instagram were not VCs.
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! Further, if the code is not finalized, it is legitimate to ask why even bother writing test code. Here鈥檚 a better way to write tests
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 actual backend service serving the web content and related APIs.
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 to see/follow the activity stream of other users. Slowly, this became the standard expectation. ChatGPT will have a similar impact. More and more users will get used to asking questions in natural language....
Houses in many major cities in Latin America have burglar bars. So, is in India. Very few cities in the US have burglar bars.
package.json is the standard package configuration management file used in the Javascript world. To call it terrible is an understatement. Here鈥檚 why.
I started using Google Notebook around 2008. Once I received a notice that it will shut down, I switched to Evernote around 2012. Unlike Google, note-taking is the central business of Evernote, I thought I would be fine. I was wrong. Evernote became terrible over time. Then I heard about a service called Notion. I deliberated and decided to wait out. Turns out a new cool kid on the block showed up soon enough....