What I'm Building in 2021

After working as a consulting CTO for several years, I've returned to being much more hands-on in software development with about 80% of my working time spent in codebases.

It's been a refreshing and rewarding experience which made me wonder about why I had left being hands-on in the first place. After some introspection I realized that it was burnout and disenchantment from the "hustle" culture in the startup ecosystem. I was happy to have left the endless stream of ideas, pitching and building to helping others build their products.

After a car accident, some time off and serendipity, I started working at BRIO in 2019 where I was knee deep in the codebase. The product is extremely interesting and the development problems are challenging which has reignited my passion for building products.

BRIO

BRIO is a platform for creating and delivering 3D, augmented reality & virtual reality experience. Thousands of creators use BRIO to deliver millions of views to their beautiful and engaging experiences every month.

Continuing to build and grow the platform will be my primary focus for 2021 as my team and I reap the rewards of architectural decisions we made to evolve the codebase. I'm also looking forward to learning from the mistakes of our decisions so we can continue to improve and build better.

The product is frontend heavy and the codebase is end-to-end JavaScript with sprinklings of C++ & Python. We've been aggressively transitioning to TypeScript while improving the core architecture in view of our long term aspirations. We are also using WebAssembly to deliver Ultra Render, a GPU-powered path tracing engine that is deeply integrated with our ReactJS application.

In addition to continuing our efforts on the application, we have several services and related infrastructure changes we aim to release in 2021. We'll build most of these services using JavaScript, NodeJS and NestJS.

Project V

As AngularJS was being sunset in 2016, I made the decision to build an enterprise SaaS product for one of my startups using the MEAN stack. Back then, AngularJS had a very healthy ecosystem that helped us ship several versions of the product rapidly. Unfortunately we didn't gain any significant traction and the product has since stagnated.

With the aim to experiment, I hope to revive the product by modernizing the codebase. My initial plans are to migrate to Angular and use NestJS alongside the existing Express application.

Project L

This is a platform to host third-party applications relating to the organization, utilization and workflow of different types of files. The project is in its inception and conceptualization phase so I have been researching and laying out the platform's architecture as requirements are developing.

While my go-to stack for building production solutions has been JavaScript, given the domain & the long-term goals of this project, I am planning to build it with Phoenix. I will likely use LiveView set up with Vite and ReactJS. The Elixir ecosystem is young but the technology and stack is amazing which will only continue expanding.

Project Z

An experimental productivity application that I had started to build with AWS Amplify. After investigating Elixir for Project L, Absinthe and Phoenix emerged as a better solution for the functionalities I aimed to implement.

To improve my UI development skills am also diving deeper with the Material & Carbon design systems.

JavaScript continues to be mainstay in the products I'm developing but Elixir will likely overtake its use towards the end of the year. I'll be sharing more details on these projects as they come alive in 2021 and beyond.