Tech-Thoughts

The early adopters of Instagram were not VCs.

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. Eventually, all the FAQ and knowledge-base articles would be replaced with a single box where users will ask a question in their preferred natural language. And then even the idea of actions would switch over to that one box, that users can use to navigate around and perform actions in the web applications. ...

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’s 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. It was called Roam Research. They had such an enthusiastic fan following that they decided not to even have a freemium model. I was tired of moving notes from one proprietary system to another. And decided not to use either Notion or Roam research. ...

I’m a big of serverless. In fact, in 2021, I believe that it should be the default choice and one should have a strong reason to deploy their own servers.

There are several nightmare stories on the Internet regarding Google’s poor handling of payment issues related to Google Fi service. Most problems arise because people buy a phone along with Google Fi SIM. Don’t do it.

Then Seed/Angel Series-A Series-B Series-C IPO Now

Google Play Music was great. Apart from one missing feature about the inability to upload music from the phone to the Google Play Music library, I had no other complaints. Then it was forcefully shut down.