Why and how I build and maintain multiple products simultaneously
Building a single successful software product is hard. Building multiple ones at the same time is extremely hard. Most people would suggest you should focus on only one at a time.
But is that the only way?
I run a small startup company, Launch Platform. As the name implies, it’s a platform for launching innovative software products. So far, I have launched and am maintaining two products:
- Monoline - a messenger-like app but only for sending self a note
- BeanHub - a beancount text-based accounting book based on git
Is there a good reason to build multiple ones instead of just one simultaneously?
You may ask.
Personally, I think while it’s not for everyone, the answer is a yes for me. Recently Monoline finally got its first paying customer. While it may not sound like a big deal, it is a big milestone for me. It validates the needs and proves that people are willing to pay for the product. Today I would like to share the reasons and my experience building, launching, and maintaining multiple products simultaneously.
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Read the full articleA repairable future
A while back, my mouse Logitech G502 LIGHTSPEED started malfunctioning. It seems to be the infamous double click issue. It registers double click randomly, which was very annoying and renders the mouse completely unusable. I got my replacement from Logitech quickly after contacting their customer support since it was still in the warranty period. After my new mouse arrived, I could throw away the broken one and enjoy the new one and then end the story here, but it seems silly to throw the whole mouse away as the only broken component is the micro switch.
We live in a world where electronic devices are expected to be extremely cheap, serve only a short period, and then be replaced with better, faster, and newer ones later. While we enjoy the exciting moment of unboxing new gadgets, at the same time, we feel guilty about making e-waste from throwing the old devices away. I love this mouse. I really do. It was one of the best I’ve ever used. But it’s a shame that it wasn’t built for lasting. I am an engineer, a software one, but well, my job is to build stuff and fix stuff. Why not I just fix it myself?
So I did.
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Read the full articleWhy build a messenger app only for sending to yourself?
Orignally posted in Monoline’s blog
My name is Fang-Pen Lin, and I am the founder of Launch Platform, a software company that builds and launches various software products. Today, I am very proud to announce that the company has launched its first app product – Monoline. This new app was just released and is available on the following platforms:
- For iPhone and iPad devices on Apple App Store
- For Android phones and tablets Google Play Store
- Web app
What’s Monoline, you ask. Monoline is your personal micro journal. Put simply, it’s an app that looks like and works like a messenger app; but unlike messenger apps, it’s only for sending messages to yourself. Here’s what it looks like:
Why build a messenger that can only send messages to yourself, you ask. Well, because:
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Read the full articleElliptic Curve Cryptography Explained
Recently, I am learning how Elliptic Curve Cryptography works. I searched around the internet, found so many articles and videos explaining it. Most of them are covering only a portion of it, some of them skip many critical steps how you get from here to there. In the end, I didn’t find an article that really explains it from end-to-end in an intuitive way. With that in mind, I would like to write a post explaining Elliptic Curve Cryptography, cover from the basics to key exchange, encryption, and decryption.
To plot the curve for writing this article, and also get a sense of how things work, I wrote a Jupyter Notebook for curve plotting and calculations in Python. The plotting library is matplotlib. And if you want to play around an elliptic curve and feel how it works yourself, lucky you! I made the source code open-sourced here on GitHub, one for real numbers and one for finite field:
You can find most of the article diagrams in the notebook.
Please note that this article is not meant for explaining how to implement Elliptic Curve Cryptography securely, the example we use here is just for making teaching you and myself easier. We also don’t want to dig too deep into the mathematical rabbit hole, I only want to focus on getting the sense of how it works essentially. So we will strip out many math details and only provide a reference read for it.
Now, shall we begin?
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