Victor Ekeocha-ibe

Its already 3 years I have been in the tech space it's been great, confusing full of bugs and errors, trying to be the best of both worlds, My journey has been fun but sometimes frustrating 😫🧵 Thread 🧵

be honest with me what's the thing you keep meaning to learn properly but keep putting off because it's not immediately urgent for me it was testing for way too long and the day I finally sat down and learned it properly I was annoyed at myself for waiting what's yours

there was a moment early in my career where I realized I was solving the same types of problems faster than I used to not because I was smarter but because I'd seen enough variations of the problem to recognize the pattern immediately experience is just pattern recognition built from problems you've already survived

most developers checking for unused npm dependencies are either doing it manually or not doing it at all Depcheck scans your project and tells you exactly which installed packages you're not actually using one command clean output no configuration needed the kind of codebase hygiene tool that takes two minutes to run and immediately tells you things about your project you probably didn't know

the version of building in public I started with was sharing finished things the version that actually grew my network was sharing things I was figuring out in real time finished things get likes unfinished honest things get conversations and conversations are where opportunities actually come from

most developers building multi tenant SaaS applications are either using complex row level security policies or separate databases per tenant neither of which is easy to implement correctly from scratch Nile is a Postgres platform built specifically for multi tenant SaaS tenant isolation, per tenant backups, tenant aware connection pooling built into the database layer not bolted on at the application layer the infrastructure complexity that usually takes weeks to implement correctly handled at the platform level

the React developers who understand the event loop write significantly better async code than the ones who know how to use async await without understanding what's happening underneath async await is syntax the event loop is understanding you can use the syntax without the understanding but the bugs you produce will be the kind that take three hours to debug because you don't know what you're looking for

most developers working with AI APIs are making raw fetch calls to the API handling streaming manually managing conversation history themselves building retry logic from scratch Vercel AI SDK abstracts all of that streaming responses, tool calls, structured outputs, multi step agents all handled with clean abstractions that work with any AI provider not just OpenAI the developers building AI features without it are writing significantly more code for the same result

your app's empty state is a conversation most products treat it like a design afterthought the empty dashboard with no data the inbox with no messages the list with nothing in it those states are the moments where new users decide whether they understand how to get value from your product or whether they leave and don't come back design your empty states like they're the most important states because for new users they are

the developers building things nobody asked them to build on weekends and evenings are not workaholics they are people who found the thing that doesn't feel like work when they're doing it that is the luckiest thing that can happen to a career and also entirely intentional if you go looking for it

one of the most expensive problems in product development is the communication gap between people who build things and people who decide what to build developers speak in systems founders and clients speak in outcomes and the translation between those two languages costs more time than most teams account for the right tools close that gap dramatically Excalidraw free open source virtual whiteboard produces hand drawn style diagrams that feel like sketches not specifications which matters because sketchy diagrams invite feedback polished diagrams make people afraid to suggest changes for architecture discussions, user flow mapping, and early stage planning the informal aesthetic is a feature not a limitation Eraser.io has a feature most people miss you can write code and it generates the diagram describe a system architecture in text and Eraser draws it the reverse of what most diagram tools do for developers who think in code this is the fastest way to produce a diagram that communicates clearly Whimsical for user flow mapping specifically the flowchart tool built for product thinking faster than Figma for flows more structured than Excalidraw for complex processes the sweet spot for mapping out how a product works before deciding how to build it Mermaid.js for diagrams in documentation write diagrams as text in markdown they render automatically in GitHub, Notion, and most documentation platforms for developers maintaining technical documentation diagrams that live next to the code and update as easily as the code does Tldraw for quick collaborative sketching similar to Excalidraw but with more flexibility the remote whiteboard that doesn't feel like a video call afterthought the common thread is that these tools remove the friction between having an idea in your head and making it visible to someone else that friction is where miscommunication lives

prefetching is one of those things that feels like a small detail and produces a disproportionately large improvement in perceived performance when a user hovers over a link you can start loading the next page before they click by the time they click the page is already loading or already loaded the experience feels instant not because it is instant but because you started before they asked

the founders who are most dangerous to compete with are not the ones with the most funding they are the ones closest to their customers who update fastest based on what they hear speed of learning beats size of budget in the early stages of almost every market

most developers building eCommerce or marketplace products are implementing search with basic database queries or paying for an expensive search service Typesense is an open source search engine fast enough to return results in milliseconds tolerant of typos by default self hostable with no usage based pricing the search experience that used to require Algolia's pricing available for the cost of a VPS

the client feedback that comes in at 11pm on a Friday is a test of character disguised as a notification the answer is always the same read it acknowledge it deal with it Monday protect your weekend like it's part of your performance because it is

@giladvdn Exactly my point , its crazy how the influence of the products that works well turns its users to volunteer ambassadors 🔥🔥

@Victor_dev1 yep and the experience worth talking about part is the hard part. referrals don't just "happen" - you have to build something people actually feel compelled to tell a friend about

the most powerful marketing tool most businesses have is their existing customers not their ad budget not their content strategy their existing customers a referral from someone who already trusts you lands differently than any ad you could write and it costs you nothing except delivering an experience worth talking about

@giladvdn Trueee because its no longer only you involved 🔥👍

@Victor_dev1 the word 'leaving becomes a team decision' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. collaboration leads to stickiness

I've been thinking about the products I use every single day versus the products I've tried and stopped using and the difference is almost never about features the products I stay in are the products where my work lives not where my work gets saved where it gets done there's a difference between a product you export from and a product you work inside export products get opened when you need to get something out work products get opened first thing every day the stickiest products are work products and the thing that turns an export product into a work product is almost always collaboration when other people's work is also in the product leaving becomes a team decision instead of a personal one and team decisions are dramatically harder to make Notion became indispensable for teams not when it got better features but when teams started using it together the individual user's value was moderate the team user's value was enormous because leaving meant losing the shared context Figma became the design standard not because it was better than Sketch in every way but because it was the first design tool that multiple people could be in simultaneously the collaboration made it irreplaceable before the features did the question for founders building products right now is not what features should I build next it is how do I make this the place where my users' work happens not just the place where they come to get something real time collaboration, shared workspaces, team features, multiplayer anything these are not nice to have upgrades they are retention infrastructure the products building them are the ones users stay in the products that don't build them are the ones users eventually replace with one that does

the most underappreciated thing about server side rendering is not the initial load performance it's the SEO a page that renders on the server sends complete HTML to search engine crawlers a client side rendered page sends an empty shell and asks the crawler to execute JavaScript to see the content some crawlers do this well some don't and the rankings difference between those two approaches on a content or product page that needs to be found is not theoretical

the difference between a founder who raised money and a founder who built a business is not ambition it is the decision about which milestone matters first a business that generates revenue validates the idea with money not with investor conviction and money is more honest feedback than any pitch meeting

most developers building Next.js apps with complex routing are managing breadcrumbs, active states, and navigation logic manually next-intl is well known for internationalization but its routing layer is one of the cleanest solutions for managing complex navigation state in Next.js type safe routing, middleware integration, locale aware paths the combination most developers are building themselves in a way that's less complete and harder to maintain

the developers I enjoy working with most have strong opinions and hold them loosely they'll argue their position clearly and change their mind when shown something better without making the change feel like defeat that combination is rarer than any technical skill and worth significantly more in a collaboration