🗣️ Meetings 👥, Learning process 🧠, nodemailer 📩, building features 👨🏻‍💻

By Prajwal Haniya

Meetings

Sometimes meetings can be useful. But, the majority of the time you may not get out of it anything.

I can happily say that, for the past 2 years, the meetings that I have is only related to technical things. We only have meetings when we are stuck or building a new feature/product. So, I have never felt that meetings are useless.

Having long meetings without any goals can be exhausting, and must be avoided at any cost.

Learning process

There may be thousands of learning frameworks, but we can choose only those that fit us. So, one of the learning frameworks that fit me and I call this framework as “curiosity-based learning framework”.

If you are not curious about something in your field, then it becomes really difficult to process new information and adopt to it.

A man who loves walking will walk far than a man who loves destination.

I have written about this framework in my personal blog. You can check it out here

nodemailer

sending emails is a really tough process if you build your system from scratch. So, we have nodemailer an open-source library for nodejs for sending emails. And it’s 100% written using pure javascript. I felt it interesting and you can go through the source code if you are a backend engineer then this repo will be very interesting to go through.

Because the more code you read in a language and the more libraries you dissect, your understanding of that particular language increases.

Link to repo

What is the most useless project you have worked on?

The above question was asked in Hacker News. So here is my answer to it.

Instead of a project, I will mention here about the most useless feature that I had built. I can’t tell it’s “useless”, because I did learn a lot from it, but it was useless for the users.

In my present company, I did build a status feature, where a user can show that they are active, away, or idle. I did take a significant time for this feature because it involved frontend, backend, and database.

But, the irony of it was none of the team members cared about it. Because it didn’t add any business value to them or the company. So eventually we removed it.

You can check out many other useless things that people have built here.

Why build features that work for 90% of the cases initially?

This is solely my view on building a new feature. My experience has taught me that, you can’t usually build to 100% of the cases on day 1.

It is not just about building features, but understanding users well. Solve 90% of the user’s problems, they will be happy to use your features. And eventually, it can be made such that it works for all 99% of cases. Because you never know what you don’t know.