Roles and Responsibilities
- Core backend team member.
- Designed the architecture for Locale v2 which is an Notes engine that runs queries on top of your conventional databases.
- Contributed to Locale v1 as well. But we decided to close it’s support shortly after I joined.
- Handled design, development, testing, documentation and deployment of the CLI.
I quit Locale due disagreements with the founders about the product and their wisdom to pivot to version 2.
Culture
- Hybrid attendance. Had to physically visit office at least 2 days/week.
- Small product team of 10 people. Including designers. Rest were engineers.
- Reported to an Engineering Manager, who in turn reported to the CTO.
- 2 week sprints.
- Daily standup calls.
- Tickets on GitHub Issues and Linear.
- Communication and coordination over Slack.
- Product demonstrations on Friday.
Stack
- API written in Java (Quarkus)
- Hasura as the core GraphQL engine
- Kubernetes for orchestration
- GitHub Actions for CI/CD
- GCP for infrastructure
Learnings
- Be careful in startups where founders panic due to rejections and low sales and decide to make a bad pivot.
- When you sense your company is running out of funds and a new round doesn’t seem to be going through anytime soon - it’s better to leave and move on to your next project, instead of waiting.