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👋 Welcome to today’s edition of Build & lead (formerly the CTO blueprint), a newsletter by Appolica. Every two weeks, we dive deep into the tech, product, and leadership challenges that keep founders up at night.

In this week’s issue, we explore how meetings kill engineering productivity. Then, we share our thoughts on Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM). Finally, we explain why we recommend Firebase Auth over custom solutions.

Today’s insights:

• How meetings kill engineering productivity

• Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM): the pros and cons

• Why we recommend Firebase Auth over custom solutions

• 5 AI tools to make you more productive

• Everything you need to know this week

How meetings kill engineering productivity

Nobody likes being stuck in constant meetings—especially tech people. When I was a developer 10 years ago, I cared about one thing: coding. My focus was on building features, merging pull requests, and moving on to the next task. Every interruption felt annoying, pulling me away from what I loved most—building the product. Back then, meetings seemed like “useless stuff.”

Over time, I started to see the bigger picture. As I gained a better understanding of business value and customer focus, it became clear: coding isn’t the end goal. It’s a tool—a powerful one—but just a tool. Our real job as developers is to solve customer problems, deliver a product that makes their lives easier, and, in doing so, help the business achieve its goals.

That’s how we create value. It’s also what keeps a company running and pays the salaries that let us do what we love. 

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Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM): where and when to use it

Back in 2019, we started experimenting with Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile (KMM). As huge Kotlin fans, we were excited by the idea of sharing code across Android and iOS without sacrificing the native experience. The promise of writing shared logic once and reusing it across platforms was incredibly tempting, so we've decided to test it out on a few smaller projects.

While KMM’s potential is clear, understanding its nuances and implementing it effectively is key. In this article, we'll share what we've discovered along the way—the capabilities, the limitations, and the lessons we learned from real-world usage.

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Why we recommend Firebase Auth over custom solutions

We certainly are guilty of having implemented custom authentication solutions in the past. It felt like the right choice—tailoring the details to fit the app’s unique requirements and having full control over the implementation.

But after seeing the benefits of ready-made solutions like Firebase Auth, we’ve come to strongly advocate for them. Unless you have a very good reason not to, Firebase is almost always the better choice. It removes much of the complexity while providing reliable, scalable, and secure infrastructure that has been tested in countless real-world applications.

Authentication is critical infrastructure; getting it wrong can expose user data, compromise security, and waste significant development time. With Firebase Auth, you can avoid these risks while simplifying your development process and focusing on delivering value to your users.

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5 AI tools to make you more productive

✅ Dezbor: Create dashboards and admin panels with AI, no coding required.

✅ Cove: Collaborate with AI in a shared workspace, combining your input with web data and precise edits to refine ideas effectively.

✅ Marqo: Rapidly prototype, iterate, and deploy AI models to build powerful search applications.

✅ Guidde: Create video documentation with AI, and turn workflows into step-by-step guides effortlessly.

✅ Napkin: Turn text into clear visuals, making it easy to share and communicate ideas effectively.

Everything else you need to know this week

• Mistral enhances AI capabilities: web search, canvas editing, and agents: Mistral is stepping up its game with major updates to its chatbot, Le Chat. The platform now supports web search with inline citations, a "canvas" tool for editing and transforming content, and the ability to process large PDFs and images, including data-heavy files with graphs and equations. New features also include image generation powered by Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro model and shareable AI agents for tasks like invoice processing and expense report scanning.

• Experimental Gemini model dominates leaderboards: Google’s Gemini Experimental 1114 has climbed to the top of the lmarena leaderboard, surpassing OpenAI’s o1 Preview and tying with the latest GPT-4o model. Available on AI Studio for developers, this experimental release features a 32k context window and is designed for reasoning tasks, albeit with slower processing times. While lacking search grounding, its performance fuels speculation that it could be a scaled-down preview of the highly anticipated Gemini 2.

• Elon Musk’s xAI secures $6B for Nvidia-powered AI expansion: Elon Musk’s AI venture, xAI, is finalizing $6 billion in new funding at a $50 billion valuation. Backed heavily by Middle Eastern sovereign funds, the investment will fund the acquisition of 100,000 Nvidia GPUs—key to powering xAI’s Memphis data center. With this move, xAI cements its position among the most valuable AI startups globally, leveraging Nvidia’s cutting-edge hardware to scale its capabilities.

• ChatGPT interacts with coding apps: The latest update to ChatGPT’s desktop app introduces integration with developer tools like VS Code, Xcode, and Terminal. This feature allows users to collaborate directly with coding platforms, eliminating the need for constant copy-pasting for coding assistance. Marking an early glimpse of agentic AI, this functionality is set to expand further with the launch of Operator in January.

• Google debuts LearnLM 1.5 Pro Experimental model for AI Studio: The task-specific AI model designed for teaching and learning applications is now available in the preview section of AI Studio. Built on learning science principles, the model can act as an expert or guide for educational tasks and shows early promise in chain-of-thought reasoning.

Build and scale your startup’s tech

At Appolica, we build the technology that powers startups at the pre-seed, seed, and Series A stages. Specializing in these crucial phases, we've helped over 75 ventures scale rapidly, with $500M raised collectively. You can learn more about partnering with us here.

Thoughts on today’s issue?

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Thanks for reading & until next time.

Best,

Martin & the Appolica team