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Work becomes taxing when it loses meaning. What did the meaning come from and what makes a job lose it?

A simple funnel that helps you validate where your feature is in the cycle of development and whether you've build the right thing.

Everyone keeps talking about AI taking everyone's jobs, but we're not asking where this fearmongering is coming from and why. This post touches on that.

Ever heard of "Analysis Paralysis" Spending so much time thinking that it becomes hard to take action. There's a certain level of discomfort one needs to be okay with in order to beat it.

Felt your heart race in social settings? Felt uneasy just walking through an avenue? Stayed with the wrong partner longer than you should have? Well it's all because of low self-worth. Let's dive in.

We're told that if we work too much, we'll burnout. Which is true to an extent, but there's somethign that causes you to burnout far faster than you realise.

We've been waiting for them for years? How close (or far) are we?

There are few Backend-As-A-Service products that have shaped the development of games as much as Firebase Realtime Database has. It walked so Firestore could run. In this post, we'll rebuild the Firebase Realtime Database server.

We'll build a Session Replay tool, a great utility in Product Manager's and Engineer's arsenals to debug user issues and understand user flows.

WhatsApp doesn't have APIs? As if that's going to stop me.

A lot of today's apps are spun up in seconds instead of a full day of commands executed one after the other that you have no idea about. This post is about building a tool that enables it which we have all come to love.

Not being influenced by Peer Pressure is the most amazing feeling you can get. Avoiding peer pressure can even propel you further if your eyes are set on something greater.

Of late, everything is "AI-Powered" and every company tries to show they're utilising AI in some form. Is this a hype train or is it valid?

Serverless has made deploying to the cloud simpler than it has ever been. This post dives into the principles of serverless and how we can build our own serverless platform.

Ever been in the driving seat of a decision? Basing your decisions on data is the key to minimizing guilt, and regret.

Learn how much goes into doing something as building, hosting and serving a static website. From the lens of famous providers such as Vercel and Netlify

In this post, we'll be looking at how the most annoying feature of your device works: Push Notifications

All apps start from a single codebase, this is even more true for a frontend web application. Over time, inevitably, you end up with more and more requirements that warrant you to split your app into multiple frontends.

Like the seamlessness of using your fingerprint to unlock your device and the apps on it? You can now do the same with a web application. Let's see how!

PlayWright is a great testing tool for running End-to-End Tests with various languages and frameworks. One thing that is not evidently clear upfront is how we can test end-to-end with a flow while persisting authentication and storage state between your tests.

CI Pipelines form the backbone of all the world's best apps. They take away the most tedious, mundane and repetitive part of a developer's day. In this post, we'll build a CI Pipeline runner from sratch.

The practice of associating the number of engineers to the size of a project comes from attempts to "commoditize". And it's a hazardous thing to do.

Although Firebase might take over a lot of headaches which you have to go through setting up your backend, it opens up a lot of avenues for annoying read leaks to creep into your app that you have no idea about or observability over.

Ever wondered how when you make a change to a file, your dev server causes a refresh to happen without a full-page reload? This post answers that question.

As you progress in your tech career, there's an important thing that changes, you work less on raw output and yet, the work you do tends to become more and more important.

"My goodness, everyone's smarter than me, I know nothing!" and "I'm not learning a lot anymore" are two contrasting thoughts every software engineer has at different points of their career, often indicating the two phases of the job.

Let's deploy a traditional Express app setup to a Cloud Function with minimal changes.

When building apps for a single platform, one really doesn't give a lot of thought to extensibility, in simpler words, the question: "How would my application have to change if I were to add a new platform?" Trust me it happens all the time, and in this post, we'll look at how to best structure your app to be much more flexible.

There are only so many people you can reach with an app that only caters to an audience that speaks a particular language or is part of a single culture. In this post, we'll look at how to create multi-lingual apps that can cater to a global audience

In this post, we take a jab at demystifying the dreaded audio and video using JavaScript. In the process, we'll look at how your video calls essentially function using some great JavaScript APIs.

If you're a web developer, I'm willing to bet you've used Lighthouse at least once. In this post, we'll build Lighthouse ourselves.

Even today I find it difficult to find posts and articles that discuss how HTTPOnly Cookies-based authentication can be implemented. This post is for all those who are finding it difficult to implement this great and secure authentication mechanism just like I was a few years ago.

Pocket helps you save blog posts, articles, and basically anything on the internet in your own reading list. In this post we'll look at how something like Pocket works.

Apps like Google Docs and Notion provide the highest amount of value to their users with the ability to work seamlessly even when they're offline, in this post, we will look at how to make your web apps work offline.

styled-components is an amazing way to style React components, in this post, we'll look at how it implements something that looks so illegally simple.

End-user support is an extremely important part of any application. There are inevitably times when you would have loved the access to the user's account to debug issues. We'll build a system for consent-based user account access in this post.

Once you have more than one repository in your org, you'll inevitably find the need to share code between them. This post deals with sharing code from the place you already push your code to, your Git Provider.

Software is the sum of all the rational and irrational decisions, big or small tradeoffs through the process, all the hours of thought, all the debugging sessions, all the bugs and all the production incidents, and yes, all the legacy code, put together.

We'll create a framework to trigger an E2E tests suite from an admin dashboard, run them on the cloud on demand using GitHub Actions and stream their logs in real-time to the dashboard using Firestore (bonus).

Let's try building a solution similar to Firebase Performance Monitoring, and also add a few bonus features on top of it.

Building something is hard enough already, it doesn't have to get more complicated.

File Uploads are essential to web development. However, it is a very less understood part of the process. Often abstracted away using middlewares. In this post, we'll look at how file uploads and body transmissions

If you're a dev working with React, chances are you've heard of the amazing SWR from Vercel! We'll try to create it ourselves in this post.

While working on projects, we often end up with workflows where in order to deploy your project, you will have to follow a few steps. May it be deploying to an EC2 instance from your GitHub Repository, deploying to a Kubernetes cluster on pushing to the main branch or even running tests for your codebase to ensure before pushing to production, the steps are clear and automatable.

Logging is an extremely important part of every application out there, especially user action logs. Storing them in a database isn't ideal for various reasons, it's advisable to store them in a Data Warehouse like BigQuery or RedShift for analysis and access later.

Serverless is awesome, but sometimes the way things are priced can come back to bite you in the back!

An issue relating to Cloud Functions I faced was that there was no alerting to tell you when your functions started deploying, finished deploying or failed to deploy. As a result, most of the time when we would push functions to stage or production via our automated pipelines, we would have to manually check back every now and then to get an idea of the deployment and which functions failed to deploy.

There are patterns in programming we appreciate only when we've been programming for quite some time. I wanted to highlight a fundamental pattern that makes the experience of programming beautiful.

If you're a developer who's been working with the JavaScript ecosystem for a long time, you know real-time online development environments are an indispensable part of the development experience. We'll build a service to do exactly that in this post.

UPI is amazing, the seamlessness and convenience it provides are great. However, there are a few problems I noticed with UPI that we'll be looking into in this post.

One of the tradeoffs that doesn't have a good solution is the problem of preview or version controlling your Firebase Cloud Functions. In this post, I'll be sharing knowledge about how to run your Firebase Cloud Functions in an Express app's shell and use them as a preview build for your Cloud Functions.

A Software Engineer's prime responsibility isn't to code, that's something anyone can learn to do, but rather, to build products, solve problems and have business impact. Coding on its own is pretty useless unless applied to a use-case where it adds value.

React is a really popular library for creating amazing and interactive frontend apps, a new pattern that's gained steam recently is creating Isomorphic React apps.

Webhooks are automated messages meant for communication between two services, usually an external service with your app. It's a push-based system where you as a customer subscribe to receive updates about a specific action (Like a user of yours completed payment on that service).

Over the past few months, we at Unacademy have been relentlessly focusing on improving the load experience and time for our end users. Given that Unacademy serves users all over India and has a critical mission of delivering quality education to every single Indian, we're happy to share the outcomes and insights.

A new startup comes into the landscape, raises funds, and then goes on a burning spree to acquire customers, giving huge discounts, cashback, coupons and incentives for users to start using their product. Sounds familiar right? Let's assess in this post why that approach is flawed and why just incentivising users doesn't actually work.

We see stories of hyper-growth startups using bleeding-edge infrastructure all the time, I decided I'll provide my insights about all you actually need for getting to as many as 100000 users on your app and even more, without having to worry about downtime.

Server-rendered React apps are amazing, they open up many possibilities that are not available to us with purely Client-Side Rendered applications, most importantly, SEO. But even more importantly, they make your site more accessible and discoverable.

"Move fast and break things" is a phrase synonymous with "breakneck speed of growth" in startups, the upper management will throw it around whenever they need a line to motivate a group of engineers that are working 12 hours a day already, to release a product that the CEO needs by tomorrow. There are, however, severe consequences of the "move fast and break things" approach to getting features developed and rolled out.

I'm a fan of Next.js and Gatsby, both great options for building static sites and dynamic server-rendered sites as well. So I decided I'll give my own site generator a try.

The `call`, `apply` and `bind` functions are extremely helpful functions in JavaScript that allow us to bind and invoke functions that can be binded to a different object and change the value of `this` inside them. Let's create the inbuilt function prototype methods, call, apply and bind ourselves.

Having been part of so many early stage startups, this post encompasses my experience of having been part of building 0 to 1 startups and the challenges and good parts that come with it.

BNPL companies have gotten extremely popular in the past few years, some became billion dollar companies in 2021. Although the concept of BNPL is not at all new, and there are already a lot of players in the market, it still makes a good personal project to create.

The belief that every problem has a solution in technology isn't exactly new, it's been there for decades, recently though, we have started seeing services popup that offer solutions to problems that don't actually exist. The state of today's economy and startup ecosystem has ensured that these companies don't go down without a fight or at least without raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, although these companies wouldn't have been touched by a VC with a ten feet pole just a decade ago.

Humans hate uncertainty, our brains are hardwired to run away from situations that do not guarantee a certain desired outcome. Let alone the future, people don't even like the present compared to the past. "The Good Old Days" everyone says, but there's a huge bias that everyone has while saying that and perceiving the past differently.

Would you care if your food order for 216 costs 220 instead? I know only my student self would. What do you do with the remaining 4 rupees? My mother would say put it in a piggy bank to a kid me. Let me tell you a piggy bank story.

Let's build a digital wallet from scratch for everyone who wants to understand how online transactions work. Follow along.

The more actively you try to swap opportunities, investments, the more volatile you make the entire setup. Great returns in life are not made by having too many bets, they are made by having a few good bets.

For someone who's worked exclusively in early-stage startups for almost all his career, switching to a big tech company was surely a task. This post describes the changes you'll notice when you switch from a startup to a big tech company.

Nothing is enough, is a famous adage, it tells that no matter how much we have, we will crave more and more. May it be happiness, money, status, power. This post explores how you don't actually need a lot of things to make life memorable.

In Life, there are a lot of times that we look for hacks, things that could get us something quickly, but there are a few things, that just can't be, and shouldn't be, rushed! This post describes such scenarios.

OAuth is a brilliant Authentication System, it abstracts away a lot of the insecurities present in password-based authentication. The users have to remember credentials for just one system and you have to ability to scope the access you provide to a third party, win-win! I have covered OAuth in a separate article, but in this post, we will be building an OAuth Provider ourselves.

Redux is a simple and intuitive state-management library for any framework. In this post, we are going to build a simple version of Redux ourselves, with support for multiple reducers, subscribers and dispatchers.

Slack is a very powerful tool for any team of any size, used and loved by everyone for it simplicity. What makes Slack even more special are its extensions, apps that you can attach to your workspace and extend the functionality of Slack to achieve anything you can imagine.

When starting out with JavaScript, there are only two scenarios: It either makes no sense, or it looks way too easy. However, there is a very common issue that pains new developers or even experienced developers at times. That's Closures.

Imagine a world where if you wanted to let an app have access to your contacts, you would have to provide it your username and password, sounds scary right? It isn't a wild thought for a lot of people, many actually had to do this in the early stages of the internet ecosystem, in comes OAuth and changes everything.

"You are paid by how hard you are to replace, not by how hard you work." We often find ourselves at the disadvantageous end of the negotiating game, may it be because of our negotiating skills, or because we don't have enough leverage. The best way to have leverage in any exchange is to be irreplaceable.

Our perceptions lock us into a subset of our true capabilities. However, we must strive to be better than those bounds we subconsciously put around ourselves, let our mind be open to whatever is good for us in the long term.

Extensive features, no matter how good they look on paper, don't always translate to conversions on the customer side.

While building products, we often tend to make our products almost exactly what our customers want, in an effort to do so, we usually ignore the possibilities that requirements can change tomorrow. Don't do that. This post will try to convince you why quick-fixes and carving business decisions into stone won't work.

To stand out, you just need to be slightly better than everyone else around you. Relative Views are a very powerful way to motivate yourself and to stand out.

It might seem that more developers in a software project equals more output. But it is not necessarily the case, more developers can hinder a project's progress. This article dives into the issues that arise with many developers at the steering wheel.

What's the most dangerous line for a startup? "I will take a look at it soon." or "I'll get this done this week" If you have worked at a startup where these statements are prevalant, then you are not working at a startup that's not making something new.

Firebase is a service I use and love. There are a few shortfalls however. In this article I discuss some of the things Firebase can build in order to make the service even more awesome for everyone.

Life is a series of solving problems, it's what makes it interesting. It often seems overwhelming when a problem arises and you can't find a way to solve it, but that's not the full picture. That's what this post is for, giving you a different point of view on problems.

Coding is all of a sudden considered an essential skill in today's world, and an entire generation is being lied into learning it. In this post, I tell why it's not for everybody.

There are two ways of approaching projects, first is building first and selling later and the second is selling first and building later. The second one, even though might seem bad is actually the better way out.

Over a million people are working in Tech in India, even if they don’t like it, while a million are added each year. Dive into perspective.

“A college graduate makes a million dollars more than a high school graduate over his/her lifetime!” But there's more to the story. That's exactly what I point out in this post.