Budge: Product (soft) launch, tech blogs, and future plans.
I am excited to be back!
The last time I sent out the LDT News issue was a year and ten days ago, and since then I never uttered a word, until today. The reason being - rethinking that involves a lot of overthinking. Rethinking about the definite path to build Let’s Do Tech. I have been addressing questions like - whether it should be a solo peaceful venture or an investment marathon? what does Let’s Do Tech mean to me? What do I want to do with it? etc.
The good news is, I have some clarity and made a few promises to myself around this. I may not be 100% sure of what I want to do, but whatever 20% is fixed is quite concrete. And if you are a fan of 80:20 rule - you get the jig. IMO, it is difficult to make such promises, and one has to be careful. Carelessness is the other way, and it works, but not my cup of tea.
This does not mean that I did not do anything apart from thinking. I just chose to shut my mouth until I reached a point where my position made sense to myself. I have not published anything, anywhere, not even on my personal social media pages. But trust me, I have worked on quite a few things in the meanwhile and I am excited to share them with you, in LDT News series.
As far as this newsletter is concerned - I want to send out issues, but only when I have something substantial to say. That doesn’t mean I will be silent for the next one year. I will be sending out blog post updates where I often write about product dev, system design, architecture, and perhaps starting this year - AI. I would also shed some light on certain decisions I made to run LDT in a specific way, so that others can benefit from it in some way.
Product launch: Budge - for the traveller in you
I launched Budge (v0.1.1, now v0.1.2) in January this year. It is a basic travel app to help you to cut down on your research time for the things to do at the destination you are travelling to. You can also maintain your Budge profile which caters to the question we all get - Where all have you been? You can find more information about the app on the website, or in this blog post.
This is the first time ever I have done something like this. First time building the mobile app, first time releasing it to the app stores under the LDT banner, etc. Am I happy with the app? No. I made a lot of mistakes, and there is still a long way to go. But I learnt a lot of things while doing this. I realise that Budge is a very large project in terms of “could be features”. For now, try downloading the app and feel free to let me know any feedback you may have.
Backstory
I have been a backend guy for all of the 14 years of my career. Even though I know a lot of cool stuff there, I always had to struggle with frontend simply because I could not afford to spend more time. This also kept me from launching my own products. I know - it doesn’t make sense to do everything by myself, more over its not even scalable in the long run. But more on that later.
Blogs
I have started publishing again.
And I never stopped learning. Somewhere in the past I made a post about “Why learning K8s is important“. Amongst other things, I followed my own words and got certified in the October of the last year. Continuing the tradition, this year I plan to learn and work on “AI/ML stuff”. Apologies, but as a newbie I don’t have better words to choose. But I will of course keep publishing blogs on the Cloud and DevOps. Here are some blogs I published recently.
Intro to gRPC and Protocol Buffers using Go
gRPC had been on my radar since a long time, and honestly I never got to explore it fully. The blog post above provides a quick introduction to gRPC and the example will help you realise what it would be like working with gRPC and get you up to speed.
Implementing SSL/TLS Auth in gRPC
Ever since I dealt with certificate based auth mechanism, I have been a huge fan. One can never say not to secure communication these days. SSL/TLS based auth IMO is the “easiest best” way to secure machine-to-machine gRPC comms. It supports other auth mechanisms as well, which I will cover in later blog posts.