Late Night Concepts

Essays around shipping beautiful software
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Brew your ideas lazily
28 Dec 2024 | original ↗

Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa achieved through the painstaking application of countless gossamer-thin layers of oil paint over the course of many years, many months. The sfumato technique which Da Vinci popularised, involved applying more than 40 layers of paint, each only 10 to 50

Deploying Home Cooked Apps with Rails
24 Nov 2024 | original ↗

As a Rails enthusiast, I've always wanted a better deployment solution to house my hobby projects. It was not that there was no good solution available: We have AWS, Heroku, Hatchbox, Fly, Render.io and various other such PaaS alternatives. AWS has been too complex personally to build

Brand treatments, Design Systems, Vibes
20 Sept 2024 | original ↗

The usual approach to a brand design system involves compiling a list of font families, typography guidelines, color palettes and patterns. However, this is falling short. We're missing a crucial piece in the jigsaw puzzle — brand treatments.

Can a thought be an algorithm?
17 Aug 2024 | original ↗

When you actively hold a question in your mind, you start seeing potential answers and questions related to it pop up in your radar. The question and the answer co-evolve in a gracious dance enriching our understanding of the world and space around us. Questions act as your personal radar.

How does AI affect UI?
12 Aug 2024 | original ↗

Our online conversations have been increasingly life-like, but yet life-less at the same time. The UI of apps have become more conversational and chat-like in nature. Not just apps, even websites have their own chat-like interfaces on the side.

Everything is a prioritisation problem
29 Jul 2024 | original ↗

When it comes to building a product, everything is a prioritisation problem.We might be building things right, but are we building the right thing?The journey of prioritisation begins way before the actual process of prioritisation starts. I would start by asking these key questions to the product leadership

Design that's so bad it's actually good
16 May 2024 | original ↗

Recently, a relative sought my help to tweak a badly designed poster on Microsoft Paint. This was meant to be circulated on Whatsapp as an advertisement for the handyman services his friend was offering in his locale.He wanted to ‘jazz’ it up and asked if I could

Better way to think about conflicts
6 Feb 2024 | original ↗

What's the hardest conflict you've ever encountered at your work?It's hard to avoid conflicts, but there are various ways in which we could mitigate conflict as much as possible. As a product person, apart from keeping the team running, working with stakeholders, shipping

The role of taste in building products
24 Jan 2024 | original ↗

Take Marc Lou, a familiar figure within the Twitter Indiehacking circle. He's garnered attention for openly sharing his journey as a product builder. This transparency has piqued interest in his projects well before their launch, as followers have grown to appreciate his distinctive approach. A notable instance of

World's most ancient public health problem
23 Jan 2024 | original ↗

From the place I come from, in Kerala, a baby is not given a name until he/she is 28 days old. And for marginalised castes/communities, the naming ceremony is delayed to 90 days. I never really questioned as to why this was the case. I let it become

Dear enterprises, we're tired of your subscriptions
23 Jan 2024 | original ↗

When you build a SaaS app, how do you price it? The first option which comes to everyone's mind is a monthly/yearly subscription model While building Clarity notes, I was stuck with a usual question when it comes to building a SaaS—How should I

Products need not be user centered
23 Jan 2024 | original ↗

Putting the user first has always been the golden rule in design. It’s so common that nobody really questions it anymore. We’re told, ‘The user knows best. Listen to them.’I’ve had my skepticism about the framing of the term —

Pluginisation of Modern Software
22 Jan 2024 | original ↗

Transitioning from Adobe to Figma was a big change for me in my design journey.At that time, the whole design ecosystem was revolving around Adobe. For image manipulation, you had Photoshop, Illustrator for vector graphics, Indesign for reports, XD for website or app prototypes and so on.

Insights are not just a salad of facts
6 Jan 2024 | original ↗

What is an insight?An insight for Elon was: “The most entertaining outcome was the most likely’. His tweet suggests that he believes in taking risks and embracing the unknown, rather than playing it safe.For Maya Angelou, the renowned poet and civil rights activist, it was:

Minimum Lovable Product
2 Jan 2024 | original ↗

We might have to rethink on the definition of the ‘Minimum Viable Prototype’.Especially since the bar for what’s viable keeps rising up, with the likes of Gumroad, etc being built in a weekend.Notion, Figma, Airtable, Superhuman and Discord with their extremly high quality

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