HN user

kevsim

1,412 karma

AI at https://clickup.com, formerly CTO at https//kitemaker.co

Posts24
Comments572
View on HN
developer.mozilla.org 3mo ago

Under the hood of MDN's new front end

kevsim
2pts0
kitemaker.co 3y ago

Fixing a 3 second lockup in our app by switching from Apollo Client to URQL

kevsim
18pts0
kitemaker.co 3y ago

How to write great one-pagers, PRDs, Specs, and more

kevsim
2pts0
kitemaker.co 3y ago

Lessons Learned from Moving to Recoil.js

kevsim
10pts0
kitemaker.co 3y ago

Issue trackers considered harmful for tracking product development

kevsim
29pts55
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

kevsim
266pts173
blog.kitemaker.co 5y ago

Empower Your Engineers

kevsim
2pts0
medium.com 5y ago

Great pieces on product development from 2020

kevsim
1pts0
blog.kitemaker.co 5y ago

Consider making your web app offline first

kevsim
4pts0
blog.kitemaker.co 5y ago

Consider making your web app offline first

kevsim
2pts0
blog.kitemaker.co 5y ago

Consider making your web app offline-first

kevsim
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: Does your organization track metrics like velocity and burn down rates?

kevsim
2pts0
medium.com 5y ago

Scrum Is Evolving

kevsim
2pts2
www.scrumguides.org 5y ago

Scrum Guide

kevsim
3pts2
medium.com 5y ago

Work isn't issues, and teams aren't assignees

kevsim
4pts1
blog.kitemaker.co 5y ago

Building a rich text editor in React with SlateJS

kevsim
1pts0
blog.kitemaker.co 5y ago

Our CSS isn't scaling so we're hoping Tailwind CSS can help

kevsim
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: How are you generating documentation for your GraphQL APIs?

kevsim
2pts0
medium.com 6y ago

Engineering managers – foster debate in your team

kevsim
3pts0
medium.com 6y ago

You need to get your team talking

kevsim
1pts0
medium.com 6y ago

The hardest part of finishing something? Starting it

kevsim
2pts0
kitemaker.co 6y ago

Show HN: Kitemaker – A fast and delightful alternative to Jira/Trello

kevsim
20pts6
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Does your team plan work in sprints/cycles?

kevsim
2pts5
medium.com 6y ago

The hardest part of finishing something? Starting it

kevsim
14pts0
Prompt Caching 2 years ago

How is the Anthropic stuff on Bedrock in general? We're using OpenAI stuff on Azure right now and it's frustrating how slowly stuff gets rolled out in our region(s).

CSS Grid Areas 2 years ago

The main reason I tend to reach for grid is responsiveness. Makes it way easier to change the layout at different screen sizes.

Render most of the frontend server-side and just use JavaScript for the dynamic bits only, I guess? I personally haven't done it like this since the advent of SPAs, but I'm guessing lots of things are still built like this.

When we built Kitemaker [0] we elected to not use CRDTs. We built our sync engine after reading the blog article Figma wrote about they didn't need CRDTs because they have the server arbitrating any conflicts. We ended up taking the same approach. It's worked out very well for us though in a tool like our "last one in wins" generally works fine and doesn't lead to a lot of surprises.

For documents, we had to do something more sophisticated. At the time we built our collaborative text editing, the prevailing opinions were that CRDTs were inferior for text editing so we ended up going with Operational Transforms. That took a LOT of work to get right and is still problematic from time to time. If we had it to do all over again now, we'd definitely challenge that decision (and may do so in the future anyway even though we have a system that works).

0: https://kitemaker.co

As a fresh-out-of-university engineer in the earlier 2000s, I had a ton of fun working at Nokia and the sheer number of devices was actually part of that. It was a blast having a stack of all of the weird and whacky devices on your desk at any time. I remember visiting some sort of internal museum in Finland at some point where you could basically see all of the devices they'd ever made. Mind blowing.

Of course getting to the software we were working on to actually run on the things was a different matter...

Is this Rama solution similar to the kind of thing you can get with Kafka with KTables?

If so I'd be curious how they've solved making it in anyway operational less complex to manage then a database. It's been a few years since I've run Kafka but it used to kind of be a beast.

After relocating from the US to Scandinavia, people here are always give me crap for having worked in a cubicle farm. And I always tell them I'd go back to that layout in a second compared the open landscape nightmare we have everywhere here.

Congrats on the launch! For teams that are using something like customer.io, how does this fit into the picture? Is it a replacement or a companion?

And to nerd out a bit - how was working with Lexical? We chose Slate.js for our editor in Kitemaker.co but it's not as actively maintained as it once was.

We used Webflow for our company's landing page for a while but for our uses it was more "slow code" than "no code". To get the layouts we wanted you still had to understand the quirks and intricacies of flex/grid so it was just a clunkier interface than writing code.

That being said, it got us up and running quickly at a time where we didn't have much time to spend on that stuff. I think it's a reasonable progression to start out with something like a no code tool and switch to code when you've got the time/people.