02:03 - Arpit’s Superpower: Tenacity

• Tenacious D

05:03 - Managing People vs Servers

• Establish Consistent Language and Shared Level of Understanding
  
  
  
  
  • Written Word
  
  
  • Following Up
  
  
  • User Manual (Persona Investigation)
  
  


• Consensus Algorithms: Single Sources of Truth & Responsibility


• Independent Failures: Build and Establish Trust
  
  
  
  
  • Conway’s Law
  
  
  • Somathesis – Collective Problem Solving: Music, Science, Software - Jessica Kerr
  
  
  • Reliability & Uptime
  
  

Reflections:

John: Meeting minutes and clear communication is a form of active listening.

Mae: Thinking about trust in terms of reliability and uptime.

Arpit: Collective Problem Solving: Music, Science, Software - Jessica Kerr

Mandy: Tenacity.

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Transcript:

PRE-ROLL: Software is broken, but it can be fixed. Test Double’s superpower is improving how the world builds software by building both great software and great teams. And you can help! Test Double is hiring empathetic senior software engineers and DevOps engineers. We work in Ruby, JavaScript, Elixir and a lot more. Test Double trusts developers with autonomy and flexibility at a remote, 100% employee-owned software consulting agency. Looking for more challenges? Enjoy lots of variety while working with the best teams in tech as a developer consultant at Test Double. Find out more and check out remote openings at link.testdouble.com/greater. That’s link.testdouble.com/greater.

JOHN: Welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 272 of Greater Than Code. I’m John Sawers and I’m here with Mae Beale.

MAE: Also here with us is our show creator, Mandy Moore.

MANDY: Thanks, Mae! I’m Mandy and today, I’m here with our guest, Arpit Mohan.

From unscrewing his childhood Tamagotchi to taking apart a computer, Arpit has always tinkered with technology. But while working on a mobile game that went viral seemingly overnight, Arpit realized he was on to something big: a way to put customizable app tools directly into developers’ hands. So he and two co-founders created Appsmith, an open-source project built by engineers for engineers. With Appsmith, Arpit can do what he loves most: using technology to help people accomplish more.

Welcome to the show, Arpit.

ARPIT: Thank you so much for having me. Super glad.

MANDY: We like to kick off the show by asking all of our guests: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

ARPIT: One of my superpowers is I am tenacious. I am really, really tenacious. You give me a problem to work on, you give me something, especially a measurable problem to work on, and I will ensure that it'll get done. I'll keep thinking about it. I'll keep chipping away at it. At some point of time, it'll get done.

Maybe because I'm a little competitive by nature and to me, it seems that most problems, or most things are accomplishable if you just kind of stick with the problem, you continue to work on it, and that's what I've done right from childhood.

So yeah, I think that's one of the things that I've always excelled at.

JOHN: You say that you've always had that from childhood. When did you realize that that was the thing that you were doing that was different from maybe how other people approach problems?

ARPIT: Well, once I graduated from university from my undergrad, that's when I started up our first company back in 2010 and while every startup founder hopes and wishes that you only have to ever start up once in your life and that's the one startup that becomes a unicorn, a billion-dollar company, gives you the exit so you can retire on a beach. Unfortunately, that did not pan out for us.

While the first startup was a mild success, lukewarm success, I would call it at best, me and my other co-founder, we kind of kept at it for about 12 years now and so, Appsmith is actually officially the third company that we are working on and maybe I think the 30th, or 40th product. I just lost count of number of products that we've built, we've launched, we've failed at miserably for a large part of them and seen a lot of success with some of them like the mobile game in the past.

So a lot of startup founders tend to start up once, or twice and then give up and maybe move on to a corporate job. But that's when I realized that if you keep at something, if you keep continue to do something, you start to fractured luck and at some point, lady luck does smile at you. So I think just the startup journey is when I realize that tenacity is something that a lot of people lack.

MAE: I love it. Arpit, I keep – are you familiar with Tenacious D?

Yeah, absolutely. Tenacious D, a fantastic movie. Love the music especially at the end where he kind of sings with the devil, I think. It's a really, really good song.

[laughter]

Although, I wouldn't probably tattoo on myself, but yeah, I love the movie and the actor. Jack Black, right?

MAE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I kept wanting to call you Tenacious A so, that's your name for me now.

ARPIT: Absolutely.

MANDY: So Arpit, we invited you on the show today because you wanted to talk about managing people versus servers and I'm interested in this topic because, because I want to figure out what do you mean by that?

ARPIT: Yeah. So as engineers, there's always a lot of mind space and thought that goes into how we write, or manage a code, manage our infrastructure, and manage our server. But managing servers is actually the easy part of up because if a server does not work, or it's not to your liking, you can always reboot the server. You can get a different server and with AWS, or Azure, or any other cloud, it happens with the click of a button.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, people are much trickier. You can't just reboot a person and that's what actually makes managing people, working with people, leading people a much more interesting experience and it also is a lot of learning that happens with everybody that you work with because the same person evolves over time.

So even if I'm working with you, Mandy, over here, we may be working together for 5 years, but the Mandy of 5 years ago is a very different person from what she is today. An Ubuntu system 16.04, you keep it on for the next 30 years, that is exactly what you will have.

So the amount of learning that you have when you're managing a server is constant, or it plateaus up after a while. But the interesting part about people is that there's always something new to learn about your colleague, your partner, or just humans in general. That's what I find very, very interesting about the difference between servers and people and why they might be two slightly different sides of the coin.

But I think there is a lot to be learned, or a lot to be derived from engineering principles when we deal with people. For example, there's a lot of literature around how to manage a distributed system. A distributed system is nothing but a cluster of servers, or a lot of servers that form a cohesive unit and operate as one. So when you do a google.com search, you are actually hitting some large cluster of servers posted by Google, but is presented to you as a single Google search. All these servers are operating as a cohesive unit.

We can derive a lot of learnings from how a company, or engineers manage these large clusters of servers and how we can cohesively manage a large group of people to act as one towards a common goal, towards a common outcome, and that is something that I find very fascinating.

MAE: I agree completely. I love and am fascinated people. And I would add to your list of always new things to learn as also about one's self. Like we too are changing and/or most people don't have a good lock on exactly [chuckles] who they're, what they're doing. So a lot of constantly changing variables is super fun place to be.

Have you, Arpit, taken this analogy any steps further of like – and so, there's this system upgrade that we apply, or I don't know, have you explored any deeper into this analogy?

ARPIT: Yeah, absolutely. This is something I've thought about a lot and something that I try to practice in our day-to-day job.

Appsmith is an open source project. We deal with a lot of people, a lot of contributors, and a lot of community users as well on a daily basis and we are globally distributed across the planet. So a lot of learnings that I've had as a distributed systems engineer, I've tried to apply it to Appsmith the project and to the work that we do on a day-to-day basis.

One of the immediate examples is that whenever you have a distributed system, a very important aspect of it