249 - Neeraj Singh, Founder and CEO of BigBinary and Neeto

Sometimes you wonder how you made it this far without blowing your fucking brains out .

If only there were something happening out there , something in the real world that you could be a part of , something fun , something exciting , something borderline , illegal , something that gives you a sense of belonging and companionship , something that helps you get back that zest for life that you have forgotten how to feel because you haven't felt it in so long .

Well , ladies and gentlemen , hold on to your fucking asses . What I'm about to share with you is going to change your life . So listen up . I , jason Sweat , host of the Code with Jason podcast . I'm putting on a very special event . What makes this event special ? Perhaps the most special thing about this event is its small size .

It's a tiny conference , strictly limited to 100 attendees , including speakers . This means you'll have a chance to meet pretty much all the other attendees at the conference , including the speakers . The other special thing about this conference is that it's held in Las Vegas .

This year it's going to be at the MGM Grand , and you'll be right in the middle of everything on the Las Vegas strip . You got bars , restaurants , guys dressed up like Michael Jackson . What other conference do you think you can go to , dear listener ?

Or you can waltz into a fancy restaurant wearing shorts and a t-shirt , order a quadruple cheeseburger and a strawberry daiquiri at 7 30 am and light up a cigarette right at your table . Well , good luck , because there isn't one Now . As if all that isn't enough , the last thing I want to share with you is the speakers .

And remember , dear listener , at this conference , you won't just see the speakers up on the stage , you'll be in the same room with them , breathing the same air . Here's who's coming Irina Nazarova , oh yeah , here's who's coming For Freedom Dumlao Prathmasiva , fido Von Zastrow , ellen Rydal , hoover and me . There you have it , dear listener .

To get tickets to Sin City Ruby 2025 , which takes place April 10th and 11th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas , go to sincityrubycom . Now on to the episode . Hey , today I'm here with Neeraj Singh . Neeraj , welcome to the show . Thanks , jason . Yeah , good to have you here . So you are the CEO and founder of Big , binary and Neato right .

At that time also , I was doing some Rails contributions and at that time we were using lighthouseappcom and we make the patches and attach the patches and send it and then download the patches . And when I talk about it people's mind is starting to wander because they can't even relate to what I'm saying . So I just shut up .

So yeah , so I have been around the blog and three years ago started building Nito on the side , which is a product . So BigBang is consulting . This is products . We are building a bunch of products under the umbrella of Nito .

And that's how we actually ran for the first like , say , 10 years , but the last three years I , because sometimes good opportunities come and people are not available . The question is that now , if I go down that strategy , what will people do when they are on bench ? Right ?

So that's why we started building some of the products and since I'm not innovative at all , like I cannot figure out , oh , let's build something new . So I said , well , I'm using these softwares , or my clients are using this software , and just feels a bit too pricey , expensive , and I think that it should not be that way . Let's put test the theory .

So that's how we started building it and currently , all the products that we are building , these are the products we use . If you are not using it , we are not going to build it for you . And we are . And we don't care what the product is . For example , we uh , it's one year ago . We got out of written github actions .

We have our own n CI which we have not publicly made available . It means that you can't use it , but we have been using Nito CI for the last one year , which is much faster and all those things saves money and time et cetera , and I've not publicly mentioned it , but last month we completely got out of Heroku .

So all our applications are completely running on Nito Deploy . So Nito Deploy is our Haruko alternative . By the way , nito Deploy is the hardest project that we have as a company . Nito we have built because it all has to do with DevOps and things like that , and besides that we also have Calendly alternative , nito Cal Loom alternative , nito Record .

We have Nito Chat , nito Desk that's how we do provide support to you . Nito Invoice or desk that's how we do provide support to you . I need to invoice . That's how we have been invoicing um for consulting site . So bitcoin is a client of nito for sending the invoices and things like that .

And it took kb for because you have a chat and desk , so somewhere you need to write things . Uh , so you took a . B is like so anytime I say their intercom alternative . Well , it's a podcast . You can't see , it's under quotes means it's a lightweight alternative . Um , obviously , you cannot replace notion with it , okay , but some people have done , including us .

Uh , we don't use certain part of the notion and main thing is writing okay , and we are competing on price , which is , uh , slightly contrary , and again , all business books tell you it's a race to the bottom and you don't want all these people and things like that and I welcome those people . Uh , because , why ?

And first of all , I'm not innovative , so I am building the clones of the existing applications and I believe that that's how .

There's nothing wrong in that , nothing wrong in the sense that , uh , especially on reddit and other places , you will see , oh , most of the sas applications , especially on Reddit and other places , you will see , oh , most of the SaaS applications today , are clones of other applications and the tone , underlined tone , is pejorative , that , as if that's a bad thing .

And I , I don't know . My favorite example . I start with that one guy , one freaking guy , built a car , henry Ford . And then what ? I mean , everybody needs to stop building the car just because one guy built it . You don't want to build the clone , and I see that the cloning is the essence , what drives capitalism . How ? Let's look at the grocery stores .

There's a grocery store and there is a clone of grocery stores , because somebody in the society sees that , hey , jason is making a bunch of money selling cucumber .

Well , I will go after jason , right , you will build another cucumber store and then there's price competition and that you start selling , besides cucumber , cabbage , and then you will add cabbage and you will learn from each other and compete . So this notion that building clone , because I get a lot of questions why build a calamity clone ?

Why build intercheck , intercom clone or Zenders or FreshTab there is plenty of them out there too , but I feel like still there is room for one more player . And the reason why one more player is not because these markets are not being served properly from feature-wise . Feature-wise they're being served .

That's why I'm saying that we are not doing anything on the feature . What I think , in spite of before Nito , I listed on our own blog 30 calendar alternatives . But if you have 30 calendar alternatives , it's a commodity . If it's a commodity , why the prices are not doing them ?

Um , whenever there's like a piece of conventional wisdom , I love to question it , um , and , and I like to say well , what if I do the total opposite , or something like that . So , like , conventional wisdom is , um , don't compete on price , and you're like why not ? I think that's fine .

Um , conventional wisdom is don't compete on price , and you're like why not ? I think that's fine . Conventional wisdom says that when you build a product online , it has to be novel , but you're saying it can just be a clone , and I find that really interesting . And I also want to go back to what you said about having people on the bench .

That is something I've never encountered before in all the agencies I've seen , but it seems really smart , because anybody who knows about agencies knows that they go through a boom and bust cycle where business is great , they're making money hand over fist and they have to hire a bunch of people because they have these opportunities but they don't have enough staff

to meet the opportunities . So they have to hire people , um , but then naturally things wane and they have to let people go , because they have all this payroll now and no income . They let people go and then some period of time later the business comes back and they have to hire people again , and it's just terrible .

And so I don't imagine having people on the bench makes that problem entirely go away , obviously , but it probably makes those waves a bit easier to ride out at least .

Now , because of this internal clock that is ticking for you , you see that , oh , this person has been on bench for four weeks now let's take this project , even though probably the billing rate is not what you expect it to be . So you , because of your desire , what's happening is that you're compromising on your billing rate and things like that .

And I suspect that you don't look at it exactly that way , because when there's a developer who's not being utilized for client work , they can be utilized for other things like product work and stuff like that .

As you mentioned , we met at the Rails world over there . I came across Valky . I had never heard of them before . They had a store . I talked to them . They are like a default Redis before certain number .

The other thing I came to know about the Rails looks like the whole Rails ecosystem has been taken over by SQLite , so we are benchmarking , okay what are ? So it's a fun things to work on .

So I'm not saying that the product development is the only thing , but if all your team members , all your staff members , are continuously all the time they are engaged , then you don't have time for these kind of things , and I consider these kinds of lightweight technical marketing things which , as an agency , you need to do that you might not do that type of

marketing you . Another way of doing it is that you take the client work , take the money and give that money to google . Fine , I'm , that's another strategy . There's no right or wrong strategy . Each agency for themselves . I just hate giving money to Google . Why , I mean , that's a topic for another discussion . We can talk about it , but I just don't like it .

I feel like , rather than taking that money and invest in yourself , write a good article , make some video , learn something which will last a bit longer .

And then , quite frankly I'm sure you're aware of this Most agency owners , as far as I can tell , don't make all that great of money . They might make something that's about comparable to a job , but not meaningfully better .

And so I thought like , okay , if , if that's the like reward for for all this stress and work and stuff like that , then that's not super interesting to me . I know that's not the necessary outcome , but that's what I saw a lot of the time .

The biggest pain point is always for the last 14 years . Number one is always the same thing hiring smart people . The hiring process is so difficult , so stressful , people are so clunky . I mean you have to interview so many people to get one decent guy .

I mean because , just because I'm just taking an example of react , because we were interviewing somebody last week just because you know use effect and you make some pitch , come alive , you think you're a reacting to you . Similarly , for it's , you know , has many comments and now you're a bills , a build . Okay , you have five years experience .

They say five years experience but out , but in reality they have one year of experience five times . So it depends on the definition of five years experience and if you make a bad hire now , there's a lot of trouble . I mean , obviously you don't want to just fire people immediately , things like that . You need to have the market reputation .

But if you put them on the client project etc . Then well , that client is never going to . If they don't have a good outcome with the person , then you lose that client forever . They're not going to give you the second chance that , because they have other

choices . Why would they work with you ? So it's just so . Yeah , it has its own layer of stress . Yeah .

And I thought it was pretty funny because it's like , yeah , not to be mean about it , but everybody sucks It's- .

So we want the person to be able to speak English properly Nothing , high five , so that we can communicate effectively . So what happened previously ? We saw that a lot of times we'll have the meeting and within two minutes , not two and two minutes 30 seconds . We saw that a lot of times we'll have the meeting and within two minutes not too many 30 seconds .

We know that person is not able to speak properly , where the clients would be able to understand them properly . So now to screen that , we added that auto screening process , which means that we ask that you make a two-minute video of a need-to-record video of like we have a big video page how we work . We just wanted to say something .

Then people say what do I say ? Except us ? We said , okay , how we work , there's just a page . Say something , whatever , just read that page , that's fine . And people do that . You guess what is the percentage of people ? And we say that's a required thing we say three times at the top , in the middle , that we .

I'm telling you one more time that most of the people are rejected because they don't post the video and guess what happened in for this uis thing ? once again , the ratio is 50 . We got 38 applications , out of which 20 applicants they said na test , I will have a call with you in the zoom and etc . And things like that .

Why go through the trouble of filling out the form when I'm time and again saying that , dude , I need a video , but you will not post a video . I need to hear you speak , so I'm just telling what that ? And go to the market . Everybody dude . Technology field is crumbling .

I'm not able to find the job and I'm offering a job here , right , and people are applying . Why are you applying ?

That's basically no extra work and the majority of people fail to do it . And it's like well , you're disqualified . Right there , obviously , Exactly .

How would I know beforehand what the culture is over there ? Do they pay attention to the code or quality or not , like I cannot ? Only when I get into the project , then I will know , right . So that's another challenge of the consulting work which you are not , which people don't often talk about it . When you're building the product , it's much easier .

You control things . You know what . When you're hiring the person , you can tell the person what you're getting into . We care about these things . What the client cares about . Some clients are very like you know what documentation . Somebody is very particular about tests . Somebody has , okay , they're very um inel about something else .

And some we come across plans where the quality is not necessary . It's a whole thing is a shit show . Ci is always broken test . Who cares about test ? Okay , now , coming from big money thing , when we put them , they're not comfortable , they don't like working there . Now what do we do ?

We have taken the client project and now , once you get in the project , then you realize that they don't care about the test . They have some test , flaky test , sometimes it passes , sometimes it , but they say no , no , no , we need to work on this feature , okay . So these are challenges of running into like working on a consulting project .

Everybody has this problem of wanting to hire good people and not being able to find enough good people , but nobody seems to want to give much thought to how to address this problem .

So I think about it like you want people to work at your company , and often in the job ad it says in your , in your cover letter , tell us exactly why you want to work specifically for us . It's like , well , I don't fucking know , I don't even know who you guys are um , exactly you have like no distinguishing qualities whatsoever .

Um , you know , it's like if , if you're gonna go to the dance , you should like put on some makeup and a nice dress and stuff like that and make yourself attractive . Otherwise , like you're gonna to go to the dance , you should like put on some makeup and a nice dress and stuff like that and make yourself attractive .

Otherwise , like you're going to be just like every other girl , and why is a guy going to want to dance with you , you know ? And so something that I've encouraged some of my clients to do in the past , which has I think never been taken up is like do something . Do something to set yourself apart from everybody else .

I know that Big Binary does this because long before you and I have been talking right now , I've seen Big Binary's blog posts shows up on Reddit and the Ruby newsletter and stuff like that . I went to RubyConf , india . There were big binary people there wearing big binary shirts .

There's probably big binary people giving a talk , I don't remember for sure , but big binary is out there making themselves known . Evil Martians also does a great job of this . If you're involved with the Ruby community at all , you see them everywhere and so you know .

If Evil Martian says , hey , we're hiring , they will probably get higher quality candidates than just some no-name place who doesn't do any of these things . When I was a manager and hiring people , I had a bit of an advantage . To be honest , not as much as I would have expected .

The people I hired were all already like fans of , like the podcast and stuff like that . And so by the time we were talking like , they were already sold on me . It was just is it a good fit , and stuff like that , Whereas most companies they're interviewing a candidate . If the candidate's any good , they're going to be interviewing other places too .

And so you're going to have to make a case to them why they should choose you over somebody else . And again , if you have no distinguishing features , then there's really no reason for them to choose you .

Okay , this is a high talent density company , which means that you're more likely to learn over there . Well , you're more likely to learn over there . You're more likely to survive there , and and things like that . I'll try to survive .

Um , you know I I can't speak for everybody , but I think one of the biggest things that drives smart people away is stupidity so if , if you're an organization and you're doing everything in a stupid way , that's that's not gonna a smart person's not gonna want to work in that environment . That's what's driven me away many times .

Like you said , the thing about CI is always broken . There's tests that are always red . Yet we need to build this new feature , not work on this stuff . That's stupid , because what you could do is you could make a small investment and get a huge payoff , but what they do instead is they I call it eating the seeds .

You know like , instead of taking your bag of seeds and planting it and having a bountiful crop , you just eat the seeds directly and then you have no crop . That's what most places do , and nothing will drive me away faster than than that kind of stupidity . Exactly that's true that is true , yeah , um , but it's .

It's also hard , um , because not everybody , not everybody , can just make a decision to . Okay , with attracting people , you can do things , you can start today and start building that , but with making an environment that a good person wants to stay in , you are carrying the baggage of your past .

Because if you have , like a legacy code base , it's a tragic situation because once it gets past a certain point , nobody wants to work on it and you're going to have turnover and you're kind of stuck .

Please know that Anytime I work on a client where they have a legacy code , I always say to them that this is a ticking time bomb . You don't know what is going on , because even Rails whether you're using Rails or Django , whatever they have only a limited number of things to which you can go back and fix security .

Community might come and might not come , and things like that . Security is extremely important . Second thing is that you say that you care about performance . Well , guess what ? The fastest way to get performance everything is just upgrade Ruby and and reps , because each new version they have some extra features , but also things get faster .

This is free things , which makes your code run faster . Why would it be stuck on ruby 2.1 when the world has moved on to three ? And they will say , oh , we never got time and the person has left and I said okay we are here . Let's plan in a calculated manner , let's put some time and budget for it , but and and . All that sounds good .

But when I propose the budget , they say , oh man , two weeks .

is ever going to be hounding you to to do these things . Um , and it's hard in , you know , in people's personal lives too . Like , uh , my truck needs new tires . Like nothing bad is going to happen if I don't get new tires today . Nothing bad will happen if I don't get new tires tomorrow .

But I got to get new tires at some point , so I just have to pick some arbitrary time and make it a priority .

So I tell , at least when the big money of people here we talked a lot about that , like education and computer science and all the things have become homogenous all around the world . All the way from manila to mumbai and from minneapolis , what's like an average computer science student is graduating with the same amount of more or less technical knowledge .

I mean obviously subjected to the college , but curriculum is pretty much has become homogenous around the world , right ? So now the thing is that I give example of this Burger King is that the if I give you all the inputs is all the inputs are given to you and all the inputs are known to you , you will produce an output .

So the guy from Manila to Minneapolis to Mumbai will produce the same output , right ? So then what is your contribution ? Like ? How are you differentiating yourself ? Right , you have become a commodity , right ?

So your opportunity to shine in any organization , whether it's a big binary , whether it's a tiny binary or mega binary , you go wherever you go right's a tiny binary or mega binary . You go wherever you go right , whichever binary you go , because you're in tech field , so you will be in some binary .

Your opportunity to shine is when there is ambiguity , because when there's ambiguity in the sense that the input is not perfect , then it's not the way Jason will handle the thing and the way I will handle and the way Joe will handle the thing will be different . Right , because it's not a prescript solution .

The path is not exactly clear because inputs are a bit ambiguous . But shine in those moments . Otherwise you are becoming this Burger King the guy who's flipping the burger . There are two types of people in Burger King the CEO and the person who's flipping the burger . The person flipping the burger , the person who is flipping the burger .

All the decisions have already been taken by the people superior to him or her . You need to press this button for 15 seconds and test this thing .

So here , input is very governed , output is also governed , but because the output is repetitively governed , the value addition is less and your earning potential is less if you're on this side of the spectrum and the CEO has . Okay , there's a lot of ambiguity . Should I do this ? Should I do that ?

Because Burger King has millions of dollars , millions of paths they can take , right , but in this environment , when things are not clear , has to forge a path . And if that bed face off , then you keep improving the company bottom line and things like that . If you get continuously your bets are off , then what happens ?

The company shy , strengthens and you yourself either the board will fire you or your potential to make future bets become less because the company is depleting money , right . So same thing applies for me as a big money , like if continue to make some bets which does not pay off , like nito is a bet okay . If it doesn't pay off , then what happens ?

So much time and money is gone . So now I have that much lesser number of resources . So I say to people that anytime when you get into a situation where things are a bit like , um , not very clear , you can get frustrated for a second . That's just fine in human nature .

Take a , but also realize that this is the opportunity where you can make a difference , because if everything is fine and perfect and the inputs are perfectly aligned , then everybody will do exactly the same thing . Right , because we are all rational more or less in the same way when it comes to technology and things like that .

But when the things are not very clear , I want to see what your take is right yeah , yeah , wow , okay .

Well , there's , there's one thing that definitely has been happening in the economy , in the economy over the last , uh , let's say , hundreds and , I suppose , thousands of years . If you go back to like caveman times , it's like the economy didn't really change for the first couple hundred thousand years or whatever , probably .

But if you go back to like the year 1800 , let's say , 90% of Americans were farmers . What's the difference between the wealthiest farmer and the poorest farmer ? Not all that much , you know . Maybe the wealthiest farmer is 10 times as rich . Fast forward 200 years to 2000, . You know Bill Gates at the time maybe he had $50 billion or something like that .

How rich is the richest person compared to the poorest person ? It's staggering . It's staggering Because technology has progressed so much that people can use technology as a lever to produce more value and the value can be distributed more efficiently and there's more people with more money and stuff like that .

And so if you imagine , like a graph , that graph in the 1800s would be kind of flat , but then in 2000 , like the , the left edge would stay maybe , maybe it would rise a little bit , but the right edge would rise exponentially yeah and I think it's been rising .

Obviously it's been rising for the last couple hundred years since the industrial revolution has started and I believe it's . I don't see why it would stop rising .

And I think what's happening now , as we see this like tiny little snapshot of the last couple decades or whatever , and if we zoom in on the software industry , I think a similar thing is happening where , like maybe the difference in 1990 between the least valuable programmer and the most valuable programmer I think it was still a lot .

I don't think programmers vary by like 50% or something like that . I think they vary by like a thousand X or something like that . But now it's like , if you're like not a very good programmer , it's like the threshold .

Below a certain threshold you're just useless , your net value is less than zero , and I think that threshold has been rising because now everything's more complicated , web applications have higher demands and expectations and stuff like that . You can't just .

I think we had this bootcamp wave that happened , but then people realized you can't just go to a bootcamp and immediately be a competent programmer and people will want hire you . So there's those people at that end . And then the more stuff we automate , you know , we add these things like containerization and stuff like that , it's better .

Containerized deployments are better , but it's harder , and so you need smarter people to do it . Um , so now , if you're really smart , you can be so much more valuable , and so it's like the the rich have gotten richer and the poor get poorer metaphorically , but it's like the intellectual haves and have-nots . I think that's happening that's absolutely happening .

putting in the effort in learning this new language , they are making themselves more valuable . And I don't know if it's a contrarian thing , except I think that absolutely . I'm against that . Against that in the sense that for your own career not as a company employer , as an employee like you want to maximize your chances .

See , if you go to a new language , it will take another six months to a year to understand the lay of the land . You are a beginner over there . Obviously it's good to know other things , but the real expertise , science , is that you learn over there what's happening .

Bring it here , because now that you have been in Ruby Rails for three years or four years , now you can go to the next level , which I feel like 90% of the people don't go . For example , start looking at what's happening at the real source code level . What's happening in , for example ? I will just give example that oh , you really want the hard problem ?

Let's just look at it Ultimately in Active Record . Whatever the query that you make , userwhere email is JSON . That is a walking the tree . It's the ultimate compiler design , or you're walking the tree and so on , and why and time to time you can look at Aaron Patterson and other people .

They have come in because when I was paying much more closer attention to to real source code , that they will come and they will improve the performance . Right , it's not like the world is waiting . There's somebody to improve the performance , because performance is not that bad .

But if you can improve it or at least look under the hood , like what's happening , that's where you will learn a lot more things , because right now you are at the application level . Now you go to the framework level .

Try to do some open source contributions and things like that , because if you spend even six months making the open source contribution , you got five commits in . You are above 90 percent of the other rails engineers .

So it's better that you spend that six months looking at trails and making the contribution than trying to make yourself more available by learning elixir .

Well , elixir is good and I don't want to piss off the executive community and , once again , there's nothing wrong in learning , but first job for you should be your own financial well-being and financial security , and the path for that is , first , that between these two , let's say , because time is a constraint , like it is a limited resource , right ?

I would rather say and advise people that you go and take the six months and get five commits in over alexa , because if you don't do alexa in alexa you are a beginner and in rails you are an average three year old person with three experience .

So you need to rise above the noise to earn more winning , like exactly the thing that you're talking about that on the right side the graph is going up . You want to be participating in that , but you need to be wise about it , right ? Yeah , yeah , like breadth is good but breadth is not the same thing as depth and you get not .

I mean , some value will be added , but not that much . Like if I want a great PHP guy , I would pay a lot of money for a great PHP guy , not for a guy who's average PHP but knows okay , average Java and average Elixir .

And on the topic of like what should you learn , and stuff like that , I try to be a well-rounded person and go outside of even technology a lot and I find that it comes back Like I read a lot about like philosophy and science and I feel like a lot of that stuff is like so directly applicable to programming and learning about like history and psychology and

stuff like that . Basically like how does the world work , how do human beings work ? Stuff like that . It all is like so applicable . Most programmers , um , I find , are like fairly focused on programming exactly but if we would broaden in that way and learn more about how the world in general works , you can be so much more effective .

I recently finished the book about alexander because my kids were studying in school and I said they asked me at the dinner table discussion . I said , okay , I don't know anything about alexander . Okay , so I read the book . Then okay , went down the path and julie caesar . So now suddenly I know a lot more .

But I feel like , okay , I was missing out on that , I didn't know that . So does it apply to the technology ? Maybe , maybe not . But even if it doesn't apply , just go outside the technology time to time or all the time and carve some time out and read . Whatever is your interest Philosophy , biography , whatever .

I won't get it right , but it was like a model is like the way we think about a part of the world in order to make sense of it , or something like that . The way he worded it was way better and it was like this is perfect for programming . Exactly yeah .

Something that comes to mind is people come to me a lot and I invite this . People come to me who are looking for jobs and I like to help people find jobs because I think it's just good karma and that will come back and stuff like that . I can help people in the US , but often people outside the US .

I can't help , but it's occurring to me that maybe people in India can look at Big Binary as a potential employer . Anyway , anything you want to share about Big Binary and Nito and all that .

Because you're remote , well , you're in India and then some people have moved to , say , dubai , germany and other places for six months a year . So they're not technically in India , which we are OK with , but your bank account needs to be in India .

Otherwise we have to deal with a lot of tax and overseas tax and the accountants , and all this is quite complicated . As far as BigBinary and Neto is concerned , the best place to find all the information is bigbinarycom and netocom .

So yeah , I am guilty of not finishing the book yet , but whoever is listening , please check out the book . The book is pretty awesome .

And just remember that , because that was the first thing I said , because it was surprised that I didn't know that he was writing a book on testing . So when he gave me the book first thing I asked him that have you written ? So he flipped the pages and showed that particular point .

So go particularly pay that attention to that section , because we see senior engineers we hire senior , senior , they are phenomenal and everything when it comes to testing . They will implement the , they will test the implementation .

And when I ask and say , okay , I don't know how to affect , so it could be a bit tricky , spend time , find out , but there is no point testing . We are not writing the test to write the , to test the implementation , always the behavior . And book does a good job of covering that . So check out that section .

request approved . But this book , my intention , is to help you make a shift to think of testing as not just this extra annoying thing you have to do , but really as the center and the starting point of everything .

And it's not about having the discipline to write tests , it's about growing to a point where it would be unthinkable for you not to write a test . And it's again the starting point and the center of it Exactly .

It's like , yes , okay , you do need help with testing , that's right , but before we can even do that , it's like we need help with project planning and like developer habits and stuff like that . These like really really fundamental things because , like testing isn't independent of these other things .

Like there need to be healthy practices in place upstream of testing that flow into testing in order for healthy testing to be possible .

Human beings we don't like to change our mind about things very often , right , because my identity is attached to oh , I do this way and now suddenly I need to change , so that's what it's . That's why the bringing about the cultural change is really really hard , but well quality . That's why there are a lot of shitty software which doesn't work .

All the time you go and click on it and it's not working yeah yeah , and I hate to say it but .

I , senior engineers , I had I asked two questions about connection pooling okay , we have this . People don't know how the connection pooling is working and things like that . Another thing is security . Well , just okay . Well , uh , they do basic , because real does such a good job of protecting by default , but you need to know more than that .

You have now if you are trying to be , or does , such a good job of protecting by default , but you need to know more than that . You are now trying to be , or you are , a senior engineer .

Testing is another area where , rather than just giving the lip service , understand how to write tests , how to effectively write the test and make it your part of the culture . Forget about the company . First , you need to be uncomfortable working in an environment where tests are not passing . If you are comfortable , then speak something about yourself , right ?

Well , I said recently you find a company somewhere in europe where they were storing the plain password in plain text . So I said that this is the reason why you need to get into the habit of putting things on a password manager .

I'm not saying because of the big binary , once again , whether you're a big binary , mega binary or a tiny binary in your own personal life . Think about you are keeping the password . You're signing up for so many things . You're using maybe two , three passwords . One of those people , they have a password database , get hacked and you're using the password .

Now suddenly you're vulnerable , right . So pay attention what's happening in the industry .

Because it's so important , you obviously pay for coffee etc , get bitwarden , whatever , and it's like if you don't have a 2fa , then there is extra work , but if you will pay for all the services , if you think this thing seriously , if you take these things seriously and you should , but because if you don't secure it and I said that with the rise of the ai

things , more and more tools will be built . Well , kudos to the people . I'm not going to say that these ai , the people who are learning and building things fast is impacting .

In fact , that's wonderful thing , but those people do not know still a lot of engineering best practices , which means a lot of these new softwares that will be coming in , which are quickly built .

They might or might not be storing password and I'm keeping password , as an example , in plain text or insecure manner , which means that there is more likely that you will . You will become vulnerable in case the password gets hacked or the database gets hacked .

So if you use password or any password manager , you need to be disciplined only one time when you're creating the password , and the system also helps you that hey , you're repeating the password and things like that . So , yeah , I mean this is life has like . Being a professional means you need to be disciplined about so many things .

It's not just about building the feature .

But the part that I think about a lot is designing the feature so that it's as far as the code goes , so that it's understandable , so that it's going to be not prohibitively expensive to work with in the future , it's not a confusing mess , and stuff like that .

And then that even opens the can of worms of like product design and stuff like that , because the quality of the code base can never exceed the quality of the conceptual framework of the product .

Most code bases are a mess because the conceptual framework that makes up the product is a mess , and so people think it's about like function , size and stuff like that and it's like , yeah , those things matter , but even more so is the conceptual framework that makes up the product . Anyway , yeah , there's a lot more to it than just building the feature .

Now some people are saying that , oh , hr , people should not be able to see finance video . I said , ok , you're using it that way , then that's fine , like Google Drive . Now the question is we have at a video level some settings which you can see or not see .

Now the question is that once you put it in the folder , should you be able to see it or not ? Because the title might be revealing the the , the cover image itself might be revealing something which I don't want you to see . But the biggest thing is that if I search for something , because now I need to record , you can search inside the transcript .

Should this be included and not included ? And what is the complexity of sending it to last success and making sure it's right ? So ultimately we decided to do the security at a very low level . It's because if you promise a lot and you make a mistake , the cost is much higher .

So , that's why I see that the product design senior engineer me the same new to a lot of features , telling that , dude , engineering wise is . It's not just about the competency . We can all build the feature Is it maintain , maintainable , will it be actually work , or how easy or difficult it is to maintain ?

And these are all the complicated topics and these are the things that makes you again are you a senior engineer who can take on this kind of work or not ? Ability to say , dude , admitting that this is too complicated , let's hold on , let's discuss .

The product design is better to build things which works and easy to maintain rather than building a lot of things which , uh , half the time it works , half the time it doesn't work .

And the puppy is going to grow up and be big and eat the furniture and stuff like that and cost all this money .