Eakan Gopalakrishnan

I was curious about the title - As your team gets bigger, your leadership style has to adapt. I am not Julie Zhuo, and I am not a Vice President of an organisation just yet. But as I started working at Kaluza, leading multiple teams, I felt like I had to evolve my leadership style accordingly too. The article was reassuring as I feel like I did get some things right. ...

I have been using Hugo-PaperMod as a theme for quite some time. It is pretty lightweight and yet flexible. For the past 4-5 years, I have been working with this Hugo based blog and I have definitely learned a lot about the structure of a Hugo website and made several modifications to the original theme but just on my blog and shared about it earlier. There was one thing that I hadn’t done for quite sometime. Primarily because I really don’t have the time to keep modifying themes. I barely have time to write about things I want to write. But today I bit the bullet and decided that I was going to do it. This is partly because my wife was reviewing the latest Resume page that I added and she told me that the navigation had to be scrolled horizontally! And as someone who has built user friendly platforms most of my professional career, this hurt. So off to work I went. ...

What is an internal developer platform? A suite of tools or applications, utilities or the likes that is tailored to the needs of developers of an organization that enables them to build, deploy and manage software in an opinionated way that is often considered as the golden path to building and releasing a product to customers. Companies generally invest in these as they start to scale. They tend to realize the benefits, which, I think, can be summarized as the following: ...

Starting a family Three years ago, my wife and I decided to think about starting a family. The decision to start a family was not made like let’s do it. It was more of a reluctant, if it happens, it happens. Fast-forward about 18–24 months, 2 miscarriages, and numerous emotional roller coasters and pain, both physical and psychological, especially for my wife as I feel like women go through a lot compared to men during pregnancy, we finally had our baby. ...

Introduction A recent conversation with my cousin, who was moving to London, highlighted a concerning issue: an unconscious bias that made him prejudiced. What did they say that made me feel concerned? “I am not racist but when I got out of the station, I noticed that it was mostly people of x community walking around. I didn’t feel safe at all.” This is unconscious bias in action. And as this bias made my cousin feel unsafe among a community of people of a race, and is therefore discriminating against a race, it is racism. The technical term for this particular bias is Perception bias. ...

Warning ...

Did you know Hugo has this feature called Modules? Apparently built on the same concepts of Go Modules, which shouldn’t be a surprise. So having used all my hugo themes so far as Git Submodules, I wanted to switch over to this method. Hugo modules are considered to be the building blocks of Hugo. It is the Hugo way of modularising your static website. Apparently you can create a theme as a module and content as another module and use them together in a third module to serve as your static website. I didn’t go that far just yet. ...

Background Any software that has ever been built has had a bug or problem of some sort. Generally, these bugs might be silly things that aren’t of any major concern - like a button looking odd or only clicking when the mouse is at a certain part of it. Some bugs, on the other hand, could have serious impact on the users of the software or those that are indirectly affected by the software - e.g. a problem with the billing system in an energy billing platform, could potentially impact the amount the customers have to pay - what if the bug resulted in final amount being multiplied by a certain arbitrary number! Imagine the reputation of the energy company who are clients of a Billing SaaS provider if such a bug were to happen. ...

I was recently re-reading, actually, listening to Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s path. In one of the chapters, Camille talks about some questions to ask when hiring managers. One of those questions was — What is your management philosophy? This took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought of it myself. How would I have answered that? What is my management philosophy anyway? Philosophy By definition, Philosophy has several meanings The study of nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning system of thought based on or involving such study an underlying theory or set of ideas relating to a particular field of activity or to life as a whole In this question’s context, it is the third definition that we are looking for from the prospective managerial candidate. ...

Background In my previous role, while working in the Insurance domain, we provided a mobile app to all customers who bought cyber insurance. This had some cool value added services that helped small enterprises check if their employees’ knowledge of cybersecurity is good enough to protect the organization from being compromised. Thus, we implemented a one-click phishing campaign solution, which enabled users to click a button and initiate a phishing campaign for the organization. This was a really fun thing to work on. This was when I invested some time looking into how email really worked. ...