2021

Here is a fairly rough checklist of things you should think of when building an email/password authentication system for a fairly sensitive application. This assumes the basics like securely hashing passwords, proper session management, and transmitting data over SSL are already covered. For a more comprehensive list, see the OWASP Cheat Sheet on...

I have been moving a lot of Engage’s architecture to Kafka of late. Even though the monolithic side has been winning the microservice vs monolithic debate in recent times, I am still a big fan of serverless microservices—using PaaS (we use Google Cloud) to host microservices. To be fair, what we do is more of a serverless architecture than a...

A lot of content around data wrangling talks about dealing with structured data—data with a well defined schema. You can clearly define your database columns based on this schema to fit the incoming data. Most apps deal with this kind of data, so I understand. But for the other few, Engage for example, dealing with unstructured data is big work....

2022 was rough. The year started with lots of energy - a new baby, Engage growing, and then new realities started kicking in. I watched Engage’s runway drain as we struggled with reaching product market fit. We tried many ideas from the playbook - inbound sales, community, socials, and ads, but conversion growth was slow. The reasonable choice...

Features like avatars look trivial in products with user profiles, but most times, they are not. (Is anything actually trivial?). It’s even more interesting, as with Engage, when users can’t upload their profile pictures themselves. Where do we get one from? Gravatar! If you are familiar with this, this would be your answer as well. Gravatar is...