5 posts tagged with "Tech"

Alternate title: Ben's rant on NativeBase breaking everything.

I made Billy a few years ago, and I stopped updating it because I had trouble finding product market fit - until now. Apparently, petty cash management is an unsolved thing, unless if you're willing to shell out 100 USD for 10 employees. Even then, the functionality is buried inside a maze of ERP modules that your CFO has bought.

So I tried upgrading the React Native & Expo version for Billy, because despite its shitty UI, it gets the simple job of petty cash management done.

And then I broke everything. Specifically: NativeBase, the component library that I was using, broke everything.

I've been using Cursor and ChatGPT for a while now, and I've developed a decent amount of LLM-based features. Naturally, I wanted to extensively document my experience with using LLMs, but I've frankly given up at this stage. There's so much to talk about, and not enough time to talk about them all.

So I present to you: my short note on LLMs. Hopefully this would be better for you - o' dear reader - than me not publishing anything because, y'know, scope creep.

n8n is freaking awesome, and it's allowed me to prototype various MVPs without actually coding anything substantial. I don't have to think about infra, and I can use it as long as it's not directly user-facing.

Try n8n. I beg you. It's free, and you can run it on a spare VPS that you have (or on your spare gaming PC).

To setup n8n, you have 2 options:

1. Self-host it for free (preferably using Docker); or
2. Use the hosted plans on n8n.io and pay $20.

The former is what we'll focus on for this post. If you're using the hosted plans, then feel free to skip this post entirely (but thanks for reading anyways haha).

One of the things that people keep telling EMs - including me - is that they should protect their team's time. Do the shitty, boring, tedious work, so that they can deliver. Do the tedious work of "tag your resources so that your infra can be accurately billed" so that your team can focus.

There is a kernel of truth to this advice, but I think most well-intentioned managers take it too far. In fact, I've taken it too far as well at times.

Protecting the team is a spectrum; if you veer off the middle towards either the "I exist solely to protect the team" side vs the "who cares about the team" side, then you risk hurting your team.

NextJS is awesome. I used it to launch a MVP in 1 week (BikinKuis for Mondiblanc), and that's with figuring out how to deploy the infra side of things.

But - and this is a big but - there are big gotchas that no-one seems to talk about.