It’s been a while since I last wrote here. Given that I finally entered the 4th decade of my life here on earth, I figured it’s the perfect excuse to share some things I learned along the way. Rather than boring you with a list of 40 items, I’ll just share 4 insights that have served me well throughout the years.
Last month, I was invited by a local university (UMS) to give a talk to their students about what’s it like being in the Tech industry. I decided to share 10 insights that hopefully can help them navigate their first steps into their Tech career.
Working on a product is something I truly enjoy. It’s a multi-disciplinary effort juggling between technology, design and business. You have to approach things from different perspectives and when everything aligns, you’ll create something extremely valuable.
If you have attended any hackathons or business pitching competitions, you might have been introduced to the Business Model Canvas. It’s a tool to help you structure and design your startup’s business model.
Almost a decade ago, Marc Andreessen penned the famous “Why Software is Eating the World” essay which was amazingly prescient. His arguments on why every company needs to be a software company becomes even more evident in our post-COVID-19 reality where companies like Amazon, UberEats and DoorDash are now considered essential services.
While I was mapping out the concepts around building software, I noticed a recurring theme across the world of bits and bytes. Almost everything is an abstraction of something else and this I believe, is the reason why software is bound to permeate across every aspect of our lives.
Ever since I discovered Foam, I was waiting an opportunity to try it out. It’s a personal knowledge management and sharing system inspired by Roam Research, built on Visual Studio Code and GitHub. It fits nicely into my development workflow, so that’s a plus.
Over the weekend, I attempted to build a personal workspace on Foam. Currently I’m using Notion.so for my notes, journals and personal information. The Graph Visualisation in Foam (screenshot below) is the main feature I wanted to explore.
Ever since the Alpha release, I’ve been focusing on making it easier for users to get started. Matrices can now be shared, cloned and user can also browse the template directory for pre-made matrices.
However, there is still one obvious barrier that I’ve been ignoring from the very beginning. In order to build and edit a decision matrix, you must sign up for an account first. If I wanted anyone to be able to quickly get started, the app will need to support the ability for guest to create and edit a matrix.
As the saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. In this case, no product assumption survives the first contact with real users.
I’ve been building Ruminate.io with the assumption users understand what a decision matrix is and how to use it. This may be true for some but it’s definitely important to provide some guidance for the rest.
After building the main user journey for Ruminate.io, I focused on getting it ready for its Alpha release. The objective of this release is to gather feedback from others using it so I can decide where to take it next.
As you can see on the screenshots below, I marked the non working parts of the app as coming soon so I can get the app out the door quicker.
It has been years since I’ve worked on a side project. So when I found some spare time and an idea that seems interesting along with the arrival of Phoenix LiveView, I started working on Ruminate.io.
This is the first of a series of articles to recount the entire journey of building this app. For my learnings of Phoenix LiveView while working on Ruminate.io, check out this article.
The release of Phoenix 1.5 with LiveView integration gave me the perfect excuse to finally build a LiveView App. I decided to build a simple Decision Matrix app named Ruminate.io. For a deeper dive into the app, check out this series of articles that recounts the entire product development journey.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Phoenix LiveView ever since it was announced by Chris McCord back in 2018. However, this is my first attempt in building an entire app with it and there are some interesting learnings, insights, mistakes and challenges along the way.
