HN user
https://srirang.in
https://x.com/srirangr
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” - Edsger Wybe Dijkstra
Just started maintaining the website from 2026 onwards. I intend to publish on a weekly cadence going forward.
This imitation is so good, it almost feels like a satire and reflects on our collective preferences of upvoting articles in HN. Brilliant!
Oh man! How did these guys even debug?
Congrats Paras! Great to see a bootstrapped success story from someone that I have been following for over a decade. Kudos!
Zype | Full Time | SDE 3 | India (Bangalore/Mumbai) | ONSITE
Zype is a personal loan app for millennials in India. We are growing fast and moving into a multi product setup. Looking for SDE 3s (both backend and frontend) to help us in this journey.
Checkout more about us here: https://www.getzype.com/
Please contact technology(at)respo(dot)co(dot)in with a subject line "HN refer" to get noticed on priority.
What you have mentioned are indeed the responsibilities of the "Head of Engineering" role.
Just when I learned how to build high quality, secure, and performant software I was pushed into the role of management. It took me some time to figure out where to draw the line between being an IC and being a manager. But when I realised that the success in the role dependent on the success of my team, I started investing my time in developing and growing the team to create a mindset of building high quality, secure, and performant software.
> The whole company is doing so much more than I could do as an individual
This realisation is important that as a company grows, you will not be able to do all the things by yourself. You would need reliable, high agency people to take care of things exactly the way you would have. Train them. Build them into next generation leaders. Slowly start delegating more responsibility. Allow them to reach their best potential. These are soft skills and building soft skills takes decades, but they are worth investing time in. Focus on taking high quality decisions and help make sure they are getting delivered while meeting stakeholder expectations.
If you start enjoying the above aspects, you'll feel less burned out. You may not be in a position to build software, but you'll be in a position to build high performing teams and be an invaluable asset to the company.
If you still think IC work interests you more, you should ask your management to move back into the IC role and help them figure out the right person who can take up the people management, process improvement job.
I hope this helps! :)
There are multiple ways:
1. Solve your own problem first: As you rightly mentioned, solving your own problem first is helpful. If there are millions like you who are facing the same problem and are willing to pay for your solution, you have a business. If it is a recurring problem, you have a bumper business.
2. Observe market trends: Changes in purchasing power, changes in expectations of needs and wants, changes in human behavior over time, geo-political events, climate change, natural and artificial calamities, etc usually create new markets. For example, having a smartphone was more of a "want" than a "need" a decade ago. But today it has become a necessity.
3. New technology on the block: Big businesses drive new technologies and the new technologies then drive small businesses. This has always been the case. We saw it in the mobile revolution how Apple and Google came up with the AppStore and the PlayStore respectively and we are witnessing it today in the LLM models. These marketplaces allowed several unicorn "app" businesses to flourish. In fact, just adding a GPS tracker in smartphones, ended up creating more value in the business world than the App Store and the PlayStore themselves.
4. Regulatory, Statutory, or Govt policy changes: A lot of times these changes create unexpected new markets. For example, think about the EU mandating companies to adhere to GDPR guidelines in 2018. It must have suddenly created openings for hundreds of thousands of data privacy officers. Any company that spent time learning the guidelines and providing training, coaching, and certifications would build a big business. The same goes for companies providing consultancy on implementation gaps, verification of controls, etc.
5. Taking bets on smaller markets: Smaller markets are usually not on the radar of the tech giants, but if you have a conviction that the market is going to grow rapidly, it is totally possible to build a big business in it. One such example is Uber. As per their first investment raise pitch deck in 2008, the predicted TAM for app-driven cab-hailing business was $4.2B[1]. Today Uber itself is a $100B+ giant along with several other players operating in the market.
This is a framework I use. If you think there are more such ways to identify business opportunities, please add them to the list. I hope you find this useful.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/uber-pitch-deck-2008/79...
Unreasonable effectiveness of simplicity and content moderation!
(Apologies for overusing the phrase but it just fits in the context)
Even I have been using it for the last 10 years and it's still the most important source of my information diet.
It's got to be Raymmar Tirado's "7 Reasons Why You'll Never Do Anything Amazing With Your Life"
https://medium.com/raymmars-reads/7-reasons-why-you-will-nev...
So, if you're tired of keeping up with the latest hot thing in tech, a management role can provide a well-deserved relief. Do keep an eye on what's happening on the tech side of things, but there's no urgency, and no need to get real deep.
This is such a poor advice. In any company that has a dozens customers, your team is likely to face technical problems. When your team faces a problem and you are unable to solve it, your team will notice that and they will stop looking up to you. In fact, any engineer who solves the problem will be the hero everyone admires. The approach mentioned by the author makes you a good "boss", but not necessarily a good "manager" or "supervisor" or "leader".
Life of an engineer is relatively relaxed. If you don't have anything urgent, you can go lay on the grass for half a day, thinking about the future of your project or something. You can miss a few meetings on short notice, no questions asked.
In which company does this happen, I wonder!
I found "From Certainty to Uncertainty" by David F Peat to be a amazing read.
A combination of RAG and FineTuning will be much more useful IMHO.
Think of LLMs as generic models that can answer anything but with lower accuracy.
You fine-tune them to learn specifics of a particular domain. This way LLMs can provide more factual answers to domain specific questions.
Finally, you can add RAG on top of fine tuned models to get answers in context of your organisation or specific documents.
How all this will pan out remains to be seen, but surely there are interesting applications to come out of these technologies.
Great answer!
You can read books by master story tellers too. Those will never be boring and will be full with twisted facts and interesting relationships. You can start with Crime thrillers, Murder mysteries.
Adding to the above list:
Jeffery Archer and Dan Brown present some very interesting books in the form of "Kane and Abel" and "Angels and Demons".
Another good book that you might find interesting is "Flatland - a romance of many dimensions" by Edwin Abbott.
slice (https://sliceit.com) | Backend, Full stack engineers, Engineering Managers | Full-time | Bangalore
slice is India's best credit card challenger to pay bills, manage expenses, and unlock rewards. Our members love us and swear by us. We're reinventing how traditional credit cards work by offering a simple and transparent app to help our members transact easily. We have about 4 million registered members with an average age of 23, making us a market leader in a niche and growing segment.
* We are looking for Backend SDE 3 and SDE 4 engineers who have are interested in building large scale distributed systems.
* We are also looking for Engineering Managers who have experience in managing small teams of 5-7 engineers.
You can find more openings here: https://www.sliceit.com/careers/
More news about our recent round of funding can be found here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/28/slice-220-million-fundrais...
Note: Please mention that you are applying in reference to this post in HN. :)
Not all projects are of the same duration or complexity. Most of the features get developed in a 2 week sprint, but from time to time, there are projects that take a month or so. When there are multiple teams with different working schedules, feature flags add a lot of value during deployments and reduce the dependencies on other teams. The business/product benefits that arise from feature flags are equally valuable.
slice (https://sliceit.com) | Backend, Full stack engineers, Engineering Managers | Full-time | Bangalore
slice is India's best credit card challenger to pay bills, manage expenses, and unlock rewards. Our members love us and swear by us. We're reinventing how traditional credit cards work by offering a simple and transparent app to help our members transact easily. We have about 3 million registered members with an average age of 23, making us a market leader in a niche and growing segment.
* We are looking for Backend SDE 3 and SDE 4 engineers who have are interested in building large scale distributed systems.
* We are also looking for Engineering Managers who have experience in managing small teams of 5-7 engineers.
You can find more openings here: https://www.sliceit.com/careers/
More news about our recent round of funding can be found here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/28/slice-220-million-fundrais...
Note: Please mention that you are applying in reference to this post in HN. :)
But how Do it Know? The Basic Principles of Computers for Everyone - J. Clarke Scott.
slice (https://sliceit.com) | Backend, Full stack engineers, Engineering Managers | Full-time | Bangalore
slice is India's best credit card challenger to pay bills, manage expenses, and unlock rewards. Our members love us and swear by us. We're reinventing how traditional credit cards work by offering a simple and transparent app to help our members transact easily. We have about 3 million registered members with an average age of 23, making us a market leader in a niche and growing segment.
* We are looking for Backend SDE 3 and SDE 4 engineers who have are interested in building large scale distributed systems.
* We are also looking for Engineering Managers who have experience in managing small teams of 5-7 engineers.
You can find more openings here: https://www.sliceit.com/careers/
More news about our recent round of funding can be found here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/28/slice-220-million-fundrais...
Note: Please mention that you are applying in reference to this post in HN. :)
slice | Backend, Full stack engineers | Full-time | Bangalore
slice is India's best credit card challenger to pay bills, manage expenses, and unlock rewards. Our members love us and swear by us. We're reinventing how traditional credit cards work by offering a simple and transparent app to help our members transact easily. We have about 3 million registered members with an average age of 23, making us a market leader in a niche and growing segment.
* We are looking for Backend SDE 2 and 3 engineers who have hands on experience in Node, Express, MongoDB, TypeScript, AWS.
* We are also looking for Engineering Managers who have experience in managing small teams of 5-7 engineers and have experience in Node, Express, MongoDB, TypeScript, AWS.
You can find more openings here: https://careers.sliceit.com/jobs
Note: Please mention that you are applying in reference to this post in HN. :)
slice | Backend, Full stack engineers | Full-time | Bangalore
slice is India's best credit card challenger to pay bills, manage expenses, and unlock rewards. Our members love us and swear by us. We're reinventing how traditional credit cards work by offering a simple and transparent app to help our members transact easily. We have about 3 million registered members with an average age of 23, making us a market leader in a niche and growing segment.
* We are looking for Backend SDE 2 and 3 engineers who have hands on experience in Node, Express, MongoDB, TypeScript, AWS.
* We are also looking for Engineering Managers who have experience in managing small teams of 5-7 engineers and have experience in Node, Express, MongoDB, TypeScript, AWS.
You can find more openings here: https://careers.sliceit.com/jobs
Note: Please mention that you are applying in reference to this post in HN. :)
slice | Backend, Full stack engineers | Full-time | Bangalore
slice is India's best credit card challenger to pay bills, manage expenses, and unlock rewards. Our members love us and swear by us. We're reinventing how traditional credit cards work by offering a simple and transparent app to help our members transact easily. We have about 3 million registered members with an average age of 23, making us a market leader in a niche and growing segment.
* We are looking for Backend SDE 2 and 3 engineers who have hands on experience in Node, Express, MongoDB, TypeScript, AWS.
* We are also looking for Engineering Managers who have experience in managing small teams of 5-7 engineers and have experience in Node, Express, MongoDB, TypeScript, AWS.
You can find more openings here: https://careers.sliceit.com/jobs
Note: Please mention that you are applying in reference to this post in HN. :)
slice | Backend, Full stack engineers | Full-time | Bangalore
slice is India's best credit card challenger to pay bills, manage expenses, and unlock rewards. Our members love us and swear by us. We're reinventing how traditional credit cards work by offering a simple and transparent app to help our members transact easily. We have about 3 million registered members with an average age of 23, making us a market leader in a niche and growing segment.
* We are looking for Backend SDE 3 engineers who have hands on experience in Node, Express, MongoDB, TypeScript, AWS.
* We are also looking for Engineering Managers who have experience in managing small teams of 5-7 engineers and have experience in Node, Express, MongoDB, TypeScript, AWS.
You can find more openings here: https://careers.sliceit.com/jobs
Note: Please mention that you are applying in reference to this post in HN. :)
Cargo Cult Agile is a thing. A simple Google search will give you lots of perspectives on how many people have suffered because of the same :)
This is amazing! I'm hooked already. I'm going to tell people to use this to learn Rust. Great job guys!
I read 20+ books a year. I don't finish most of them, re-read some chapters from the old books. I underline stuff and I go back to the underlined things at the end of reading a book. I prefer reading hard copies and at any point if I've to look at the page number, I realise that the content is not worth the time. I skim through. If I still don't find it interesting. I leave it. It's okay to leave a book in the middle. Most books have a single point to make and the entire book is about examples around that point. If you understood the point already, there's no need to dig in further.
It's human tendency to forget things. So re-reading stuff I find valuable helps me more than reading lots of new books.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott is a nice little book. Abbott blends planar geometry and reality brilliantly. For example, every planar geometry object is a member of the flatland and as the number of points grow in the figure it becomes more wise; Circle is the wisest of all. It's funny how he describes personality types using isosceles triangles, equilateral triangles, and squares. In fact, he calls himself a square.
Be warned for sexist ideas and satirical writing.
1. Tell them what to do but do not tell them how to do it. (Just give a few pointers otherwise they'll be lost.)
2. Give them a playground to fail - Offload any non-business critical tasks and let them make mistakes. No one I know ever learnt programming without making any mistakes. Immediately tell them about best practices and how to avoid such mistakes in future.
3. Show them the impact of their work - There's nothing more motivating than seeing the impact of one's work.
4. Build curiosity - Answer as many questions as you can answer. Admit when you don't know any answers and start looking it up on the web right in front of them. People pick habits by looking at their superiors.
If it's absolute beginning to programming, this video is a great way to show how difficult it is to teach a machine to do something and how clear instructions can help get things done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDA3_5982h8
The most important software I've seen is Excel. Almost every new application I see is trying to replace excel in some domain or the other.
I keep practicing on https://www.interviewbit.com. Although it's meant for interviews, the quality of problems is really high. The whole site is gamified and the point system maintains an urgency to solve problems and makes problem solving fun.