274: Managing People Versus Servers with Arpit Mohan Greater Than Code

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.


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