Dev diary
I have around 20 years of experience in Tech, having rotated through many roles, most notably that of CTO, it’s only natural that I’m frequently approached for advice. Nowadays, even non-programmers, with the help of AI, have managed to build things that look impressive. I never expected that people with no background in programming would be able to produce a complete product using only prompts.…
These days I've been doing some user interviews for our software, Numenon . What are user interviews? Well, for me, that's just a fancy way of saying I'm hopping on calls with users to watch them use the software. I walk them through the optimal usage of Numenon for their specific scenario, intervening as little as possible, to see where they naturally head. While doing that, I note things like…
Grab a coffee or tea, relax, and enjoy a journey through my thoughts on city-building games. This is the first part of a thorough analysis of the genre, a text that I hope will contribute to the genre's collective consciousness. My Journey with the Genre My first contact with the genre was a game called A-Train in the mid-90s. I remember being fascinated by watching my city evolve. I felt like a…
We are officially running our startup in Gleam! Our freshly written Gleam code is now live on our production servers. Not a single line of PHP. I am excited, and a bit frightened. Numenon is an ambitious knowledge base management system in its early stages. Our first closed beta release was back in May. Built with PHP and Laravel on the backend and Svelte on the front. I know, I have some…
We were building a page for our B2B services these past few days, and we were of course confronted with the eternal issue: To expand or not to expand? We wanted to describe our services and provide necessary info, but most people don't read texts (so they end up bouncing). Users often don't want to read more than a sentence. They just want the gist before they engage more with the content, if at…
For several years, I was a very active and passionate improviser. I spent a good 6 years learning, rehearsing, and performing as part of troupes, traveling around Europe to attend festivals, and generally living and breathing "Yes, and" . "What is improv?" you may ask. It’s perhaps the nerdiest, most captivating, extraordinary, and sometimes downright horrible theatre art form out there. Look it…
While building Numenon these past few months, we’ve been very strict and selective about which features we add. There were several we considered adding that could have been useful to a smaller percentage of users, but would take up precious space in this early stage of the app. Our priority now is that users feel safe, curious, happy to explore, and not overwhelmed by buttons, options, and…
I remember a scene from BoJack Horseman, when BoJack decides to start running. He climbs a hill, nearly faints, and another runner passing by, stops and tells him: “It gets easier. Every day, it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.” I think that line stuck with me because it reframes consistency. Instead of sounding like discipline…
About ten years ago, when we officially founded Radical Elements, we were uncomfortable with self-promo and tooting our own horns. Putting our faces on a website, talking about how awesome we were, not really our thing. A decade later, nothing’s changed. Consistency, right? Back then, while building our first website , we did what every developer does. We filled the work-in-progress with nonsense,…
Let's take for granted that AI is indeed capable of autonomously producing reliable codebases. This means that code production will skyrocket. We will be able to create more systems, more features, more tests, more processes, and the list goes on. One side effect that I recognize is that human ownership doesn't scale as fast as production does. This means that it will be easy for someone to create…
You've read or written a million times these industry clichés: Fail fast, fail often Fail forward Move fast and break things Pivot or die And the list goes on I don't know about you, but I'd be okay if I never read a similar phrase again in my life. It's not that they're wrong. They try to compress many truths into 3 to 5 words. But the compression isn't lossless, and the message can't be applied…
One of the most dangerous assumptions we can make about our clients is that they know what they need. Sometimes they do. But often, they don’t. More often, they know what they think they need, limited by a mindset shaped by the way they've always done things. They believe they know the solution to their problem, but they might not even have identified the real problem. Or they might only grasp 10%…
I read an article the other day called " Rocket Ships & Race Cars: The Dangers of Anchoring on Incomplete Data ." It’s about a Harvard case study, Carter Racing , as it was covered in David Epstein’s book Range . Students are presented with data on a fictional scenario and asked to make a decision based on it. Specifically, whether the company should race or not in the upcoming event. The article…
Somehow promoting my product has converted me into a full-time writer (exaggeration). That's absurd, right? I didn't plan to become an author. I am a maker. I do stuff. I don't like to talk about it. Talk is cheap. I have invested half of my life learning to make complicated worlds kind of work, and now I have to come back to plain English? Imagine you had learned to drive a spaceship and now you…
I didn't want to build Numenon. I didn't want to spend the winter reading doctoral theses and papers. I didn't want to write and delete the entire core of the program so many times. I wanted to use Numenon and have someone else build it. I knew very well that I have a need that isn't covered by the tools available in the market, and together with Elvira we decided about half a year ago to take the…
I was watching a very short reel on Instagram the other day. I don't remember exactly what it was about, but it was presenting an opinion, accompanied by some vague references to data or research to validate this person's point of view. It happened to be an opinion I already agreed with. So, when the video ended, I noticed in myself a sense of satisfaction, a quiet pleasure. And I thought, "A-ha!…