Recently, when I was reading K. Nadh’s blog (The CTO of Zerodha), I am a big fan of Kailash Nadh, his philosophy, and his life in general. Zerodha, being one of the most successful bootstrapped companies, still runs on a 40 people engineering team. His motivation to still do open source contributions and tinker with technology has been my constant motivation.

In one of his blogs, he mentioned a book called Getting Real. I opened it, and it was the same team that wrote Rework and many other books that I had read earlier. The title of the book was “How to Build a Successful Web Application.” Generally I dont like computer books it feel it gets too technical at a time, there is no point in reading that because everything is almost available at google all the time. But since the book was on Nadh’s blog and I loved the book rework, I thought of giving it a try.

Firstly, the E-book is freely available to read on their website. It really gives me a good vibe when someone makes a book freely available on their site. It shows authenticity, and you know you are not doing it just for the money. The one thing I can say about this book is that it's a bible for knowledge workers. Be it a designer, Developer, marketer, or business owner, it does not teach you the technicals or how-to stuff. It teaches you the philosophies behind it.

Here are some of my biggest take-aways from this book.

Build less and ship faster.

When you think of an idea, you get loads of features in your mind, and you want to integrate all of them. But you will continue building it until the point of motivation, and then once the motivation phase is passed, you leave it. This happens because you initially made the scope of the project so big that you couldn't do it and felt like it was too much work. This book taught me to just create the most important feature/page with which you got the idea in the first place to build and deploy it. Put things out in the world as fast as you can. You can always add more things and scale later.

Less is more

The books strongly suggest we should not hire more people just because we can. After a point, it becomes a nightmare to manage all the people and impossible to get anything out of them. I have worked in MNC’s and have realized that all they do is create documentation, have meetings all day, and hardly get any work done. The project manager and team leads just take updates and justify their work up the ladder. It does resemble Nadh’s philosophy of how he is still running a 2000 crore plus profit company with only 40 engineers. It also highlights how you should be an all-rounder and not too specific with your skills; if you are a developer, you should also understand design, QA, and customer support.

Software is more than just code

If you are building a web application, This book covers how your approach should be towards deployments, customer support, and building a community around your product. Your software should not do everything; It will make your user run away quickly (Remember clickup). I still hate that product because it does too many things project management, time management, to do lists, content management, and what not. I love Todoist, where they only do one thing manage your to-dos and only that in the best way. The first goal of the software is to be as simple as possible. As humans, we like to complicate things just to look smart, but if you are building for users, it has to be straight-forward.

These are some of my biggest takeaways from the book, but I can assure you that the book is more than that, and not just in terms of web applications. Some parts of this book will always stay with me, as it taught me the approach, the mindset, and the hacks to building anything in life. I really love these people, their books, software, and philosophies. You know what they say—the work has to be great if the people working on it are great. I would highly recommend this book to any knowledge worker who builds anything in software, design, or business.

Here is the E-book Link