“Don’t be afraid to change the model.” — Reed Hastings

Introduction

What I got wrong about Startup Growth

Consider a successful startup: let’s say AirBnB. As a novice, I would look at their website, their mobile app, and their business model (a marketplace), then come up with an “innovative” entrepreneurial idea and sell it as: “The AirBnB of <whatever industry sounds hot and interesting>.”

But if you actually watch the real history of AirBnB, you’ll notice they were more interested in:

1. Paying their own rent than building a startup.
2. Selling cereal boxes than adding payments to their website.
3. Taking photos of their existing customer’s apartments than finding new customers. …

Cybersecurity roles are expected to grow 750% in the next five years [1][2], now, if you are expecting that colleges, companies, and governments bridge the knowledge gap to fulfill those jobs, you’ve learned nothing from tech-history.

Those more than 5 million future jobs will be filled by high-driven individuals looking for a $99,730 yearly median-salary, in the US. [1][3]

But besides job stability and good earnings potential, there are plenty of good reasons to engage in a cyber-security related career:

• Work for a socially responsible organization: Companies that invest resources in cybersecurity are, potentially, better intentioned in protecting their customer’s interests, they care for the organization long-term sustainability, have a defined vision, follow superior ethical practices, and generally are nicer people to work with. …

I’m bewildered, I tended to look down upon sales as if it was lacking rigor, substance, or reproducibility. But I was wrong! Sales is a creative, disciplined effort to bring ideas to fruition.

Engineering does not scale, or why did I start sales.

Remember that first time you discovered the power behind Software Development? For me, it was in college, while studying Econometrics I stumbled on the Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng from Stanford. Suddenly, I realized I could do far superior data analysis using computer intelligent driven methods. I was at a dead-end.

After 10 years of developing software, the same doomed feeling arrived: unproductivity. Planning and designing a new project would only take about 5 to 10% of my time, the rest would be about execution, which at this point presented little mystery or challenge. I thought: if I were able to effectively do sales, and consequently, increase my resources. …

First off, state who I am?

I’m the start-up entrepreneur looking to build a community around my brand with limited investment capital, I’m the accomplished professional looking to expand my brand, I’m the freelance community manager aiming to professionalize and automate my services to earn extra income.

What do I normally do?

• Set, plan, and implement communication campaigns and strategies.
• Provide engaging text, image, and video content for social media.
• Respond to customers and build long-term relationships with influencers.
• Monitor, track, and report on feedback and online reviews.
• Coordinate with Marketing, PR, Development, Sales, and Executive teams.
• Stay up-to-date with digital technology trends. [1]

And where do I want to get?

Translate well-established practices from the DevOps community with little technical challenge. …

How to bring the most value to Startups’ stakeholders.

Ben Horowitz has a great quote about his time at AOL:

“After a few months, it became apparent to both of us (Marc Andreessen) that AOL saw itself as more of a media company than a technology company.”

Following that, Ben and Marc moved to found Loudcloud the first cloud computing business, as detailed in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Startups are hunted by a specter, it is that of wasted resources, with more than 90% of startups failing during the first two years, the only possible outcome of this is time & wasted resources. We’ve led to believe in myths such as disruptive innovation & failing fast, this, however, has not to be the case. …

Most Software Engineers would agree on the ineffectiveness of measuring productivity based on lines code, however, I’ ve seen that because of this, the industry has fallen on a cynism thinking that Software Productivity cannot be measured accurately.

Just because something is hard, does not mean it is not possible.

For some of us is quite often the opposite, we thrive on challenges and look to push the boundaries of innovation. As a Software Engineer, I see three main reasons why quantifying Software Productivity would be desirable.

1. For business owners, managers, tech leaders, or engineers looking to evaluate and get feedback on their work and/or project.
2. Open source users, to quickly assess a project before committing to it.
3. Data scientists recognizing that knowledge comes only after a hypothesis can be tested and validated. …

This article is for you if: you know what microservices are, have experience with them, and thus know, how difficult they are to develop and recognize that you can get better and it.

For simplicity, these are the characteristics of a Microservice Architecture:

1. The application is segmented by data domains.
2. Each service is the primary-owner of its data.
3. Business-logic sharing is discouraged between services.
4. Each service has its own CI/CD pipeline and hosting infrastructure.

Hexagonal Architecture.

Traditionally, services are shaped by the 3 tier Architecture (Presentation Layer, Business Logic Layer, Data Access Layer), or the MVC pattern (Model-View-Controller), both were designed to serve one client application from a single database. …

How many projects have you developed with a login/signup, forms, content views & dashboards? This is a problem when starting a business as you want to get the product as fast as possible to your audience.

You are excited about your idea, not your Sign-up page.

Bootstrap, Bulma, Material UI, and other projects are good, even great. But not enough. I like how they work actively with props, and their API allows for great flexibility with a nice API to HTML and CSS.

Atomic design is a methodology for creating systems. Similar to nature, it sees five distinct levels in atomic design: Atoms, Molecules, Organisms, Templates, Pages. In this view, CSS frameworks would operate in the Atomic & Molecule Level. While Asterix (React’s component-view library) would operate on the level of Organisms, Templates & Pages. …