Techletter #60 | February 18, 2024
Vercel’s path to product market fit
When your product solves a huge pain, you should see pretty fast growth almost right out of the gate. It’s hard to get the product ready, but when you release it to customers, you should see rapid growth.
Building trust as a software engineer
First impressions matter a lot. If you’re working with a new person, or joining a new team - I believe it’s worth going above and beyond to ensure you build a strong streak. Reliably delivering on expectations is more important than doing a ton of work, or doing something tough.
Focus on being a dependable engineer. Build and maintain your streak of reliability at all costs. Gently increase your output and difficulty, but all while holding rock solid on your dependability. That’s what is required if you aspire to become more senior, and that’s what your team needs of you.
Improve your SQL skills
In today’s app because of ORMs, we don’t write pure SQL/MySQL queries. However, knowing how to write raw queries can really help in increasing the performance of your app.
Writing raw SQL queries is one of the most useful tools for 3 main reasons:
- You’ll be able to answer business questions. This skill can be super valuable for your connections with people from the commercial side (and PMs).
- Most technical designs start with data. While you don’t need a high level of query-writing to create and understand ERDs, it can still help you to get a sense of the correct situation and the DB, and how things are connected.
- The effort/benefit ratio is huge! SQL is easy to master. It can be your ‘Ace’ skill, being the go-to person for complex questions/queries.
By Seth Godin, author/entrepreneur (from Be a Better Liar)
Marketers (and all human beings) are well-trained to follow the leader. The instinct is to figure out what’s working for the competition and then try to outdo it — to be cheaper than your competitor who competes on price, or faster than the competitor who competes on speed.
The problem is that once a consumer has bought someone else’s story and believes that lie, persuading the consumer to switch is the same as persuading him to admit he was wrong. And people hate admitting that they’re wrong.
Instead, you must tell a different story and persuade listeners that your story is more important than the story they currently believe. If your competition is faster, you must be cheaper. If they sell the story of health, you must sell the story of convenience. Not just the positioning x/y axis sort of “We are cheaper” claim, but a real story that is completely different from the story that’s already being told.
How popular is typescript in backend development?
You need TypeScript when you start building application with clarity. Either it may be small or large project. I haven’t used typescript before. But, from past few days I felt a great need of types in order to build the app with less bugs. You can use JSDoc but still typescript will be a great tool to build efficient software.
Here is the reddit link, where people discuss on importance of typescript for backend development.