Startup on vnykmshr

Building with one other person

Wed, 25 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Our codebase has about a hundred JavaScript files and 96 Jade templates. Around 7,500 lines of server-side code. 352 commits – 228 mine, 123 Jyoti’s. The readme is two lines. The todo list has two items – one about image upload paths, one about a bodyParser() deprecation we never got around to fixing.

This is what a web application looks like when two people build the whole thing.

The split

I own backend, database, and the graph model. Jyoti owns frontend – views, templates, client-side interactions. There’s overlap in the middle. Routes are mine. The Jade templates that render those routes are hers. The res.locals object is our contract – I populate it with data from the middleware chain, she reads it in the templates. We rarely step on each other’s code.

Plans, not posts

Wed, 30 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve decided to try my own gig. Against the steady cheque, against the version of my life that was already working. Writing it down so I can’t pretend I didn’t mean it.

There are three of us, sketching the same thing on the same whiteboard. The idea is small and specific. Most of what gets shared online is opinion, or things that already happened. We want to build something where the unit is a plan – this Saturday, this street, this group, this thing we’re going to do. Friends see it, say they’re in, and now it’s on a calendar as a real thing.

Go Big or Go Home

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Monday morning, early. The door to the meeting room is unlocked and the room is empty. I like getting there first – it lets me see the room before it fills with the people I’m about to sit across from.

There’s a poster on the wall.

GO BIG OR GO HOME.

Text on a silhouette background, designed in-house by a design team that took this sort of thing seriously. Tastefully done – not a free stock-photo print, not a motivational-mousepad cliché, just a line in a clean font over a darker graphic that someone actually thought about. It’s there because someone wanted you to see it.

Flying Thru the Motions

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Three months in. Morning walk around the block with whoever’s up, ending at the tea stall. Tea at 7:30, maybe 8. Office by 9.

Delhi is already hot – April heat, the kind that sits on your chest when you step outside.

I write code. I take a call with clients I have never met. I ship a release in the afternoon. I debug something small and stupid by 5. I am a dev and a deployment engineer and the guy on the call at once, and it has stopped feeling strange.