DEV Community: Galascribe

Your hard work got stolen. What would you do?

Galascribe — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 08:53:41 +0000

TL;DR: I led the rewrite of one of my company's most critical apps, and it shipped with almost no critical bugs.
A colleague who was better at communication got promoted for it, and I heard in a team meeting, days after others
knew. Ten years in, I wasn't short on technical skill; I was short on presenting and politics. I didn't fix that. I
took my strength where it gets paid: two months of preparation, 40–60 applications, one 40% raise.

The announcement

A colleague's promotion was announced in a team meeting. I'll call them X. The project behind it was one I'd led.

X was in the same room as me, with others dialled in on the phone. More than six years on, I don't remember the exact
words. I remember working out, somewhere in the middle of that announcement, that it had been known for a couple of
days. Others had heard. I was kept in the dark until then.

On the technical side, I owned it end to end: a full rewrite of a very complex, high-visibility app, one of the most
sensitive in the whole enterprise. It shipped with close to zero P0 issues. Moving it to microservices made it over 50%
more efficient, and many of the old version's pain points were eliminated in the design phase itself.

X was good at communication and at getting the ducks in a row. X got promoted.

It felt like my work had been stolen.

Ten years in, and stuck

It wasn't the first time. I'd watched others move up the career ladder ahead of me, and it wasn't always the strongest
engineer who went up. I was about ten years into my career and had only grown to Staff level.

I wasn't short on technical acumen. I was short on presenting my work in an interesting way, talking to non-technical
folks, and playing the political games. Someone had hurt my ego, and I was frustrated.

The usual answer to a moment like that is to give the job more of yourself: more hours than it asks for, and wait
your turn. I believe you need grit instead, and the nerve to question the rule that says you stay and wait. Most of
what stops you is in your head: what Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga's book calls the courage to be disliked.

The 11-year-old I'd lost

When I was 11, I helped my dad tally his numbers every day. He did it religiously, and he couldn't sleep peacefully
until every tally was accounted for. Around then I fell for computers and anything electronic: calculators, digital
watches, Walkmans. Then BASIC, C, C++, Visual Basic, Java.

Somewhere along the way that kid got lost in comfort, responsibilities and grievance. Looking inward, and finding that
11-year-old again, is the best thing I did. I reinvented myself around what I'd always loved.

My dad never went to sleep on a tally that didn't add up. I decided I wouldn't build a career on one.

Two months, on purpose

So I set a goal: a better job, somewhere else. From the end of January to the middle of March 2020, I put 15 to 30
hours a week into three things: data structures and algorithms, system design, and cloud architecture. I had support at home, and
I'm really thankful for it. When lockdown arrived in March, it even handed back the hours I'd been losing to the
commute.

The LeetCode grind.
Mock interviews with friends.
System design mocks on my own, with scenarios prepared in advance: the questions to ask, the assumptions I'd make, and how I'd justify each one.
Applications on LinkedIn, non-stop.

The funnel: 40 to 60 companies applied to, 10 interviews, 4 final rounds, two offers I went back and forth on, one yes.

2% or 40%

Pushing back from inside would have fetched me another 2% raise. At best, 5%. I left with a 40% raise.

I didn't fix my weakness first. I took my strength to where it gets paid.

That was my rebellion: not fighting the people who decided who moved up, but refusing to wait for them. Living well
really is the best revenge. It also pays better.

If you can't leave this quarter

"Just leave" is easy advice from someone it worked for. Maybe your visa, your family or the market says not now.

You don't need permission to prepare. Leaving is the last step; getting ready is the first, and nobody can stop you
taking it. In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne calls it a simple choice: "Get busy living or get busy dying."
Either way, you'll get busy.

So get busy on purpose, this week: one mock interview with a friend, one system design problem worked out loud, and a
date on the calendar for your first application.

The promotion went to someone else. What I got back was the 11-year-old who loved this stuff, and a 40% raise.

Six years later, I'm building my own company.

Has your work ever been credited to someone else? What did you do? Tell me in the comments.

Three hours on X, and the video that gave Galascribe its direction

Galascribe — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 03:37:00 +0000

Originally published at blog.galascribe.com.

TL;DR: One night in July 2026 I lost three hours to a feed, and Galascribe began as the fix: a slow place for writing, with no feed, built to respect attention. Months in, our pitch had drifted to "articles from your videos". A video by Sandeep Swadia on writing with AI brought me back, and gave us our motto: Sound like no one else. A writing platform should build healthy habits, not chase virality.

It was the last week of July 2026. I had just flown back from India, I was jet-lagged, and at 10 PM I opened X. When I put the phone down it was 1:15 AM.

The next morning I drove to work on too little sleep. Somewhere on that drive I asked myself a question I couldn't shake: why did I do that? I knew the scrolling was bad for my head. I knew a tired drive is a dangerous one. I did it anyway, for three hours.

The honest answer is that the product worked as designed. A feed that never ends, ranked to keep you there, paid for by advertisers who want your time. Knowing that doesn't protect you from it, and especially not at midnight with a jet-lagged body clock.

So I tried to fix it from first principles, at two levels. At the platform level: what would a place for reading look like if it were built to respect attention instead of harvesting it? At the content level: what would people write if the reward were being useful instead of being loud? Galascribe came out of that drive.

What I wanted to build

I wanted something slow and organic. A platform that is happy to serve readers less, on purpose, because a limit on quantity forces you to work on quality. Galascribe is bootstrapped from my own pocket, which means there are no investors to please and no ad commitments to honour. That is the only reason the slow version is possible at all.

Here is what that means in the product today, without dressing it up:

There is no feed. No timeline, no trending list, no recommendations. Readers follow an author and hear from that author. Nothing ranks one writer's work against another's to keep you scrolling.
Posts can arrive on a schedule. Staggered release lets an author write several posts at once and have them go out on dates they choose, instead of all at once.
We practise the pace ourselves. This blog publishes two posts a week, Sunday and Friday. Not because we can't write more, but because nobody needs more from us than that.

What it does not do yet is judge quality. I have ideas about how to measure it and what to lift up or push down, but I won't claim any of them until they're tested on real writers and proven to work. A platform that says it rewards quality and can't show how is just another marketing line.

How I drifted

Building a product pulls you towards whatever is easiest to explain. For a while our pitch was "Articles from your videos, on a website you own." It described one feature well. It was also narrow, and it didn't give anyone much reason to try us. Worse, it had quietly moved me away from why I started. That line is about producing more content faster, with AI doing the work and the person tidying up after it. I set out to do the opposite: to help people's own work, and let AI serve it.

The video that brought me back

Then I watched Sandeep Swadia's Everyone Can Spot AI Writing, Here's How To Fix It. Galascribe already existed; the video didn't start it. What it did was give the project its direction back, and help me put into words what I believe about writers in 2026.

His point is simple: AI can write everything for you, and that is exactly why everyone sounds the same. In his words, AI gives you an accent. He sets out a five-step check that spells VOICE: is it verified, is it owned (built from your own experience), is it insightful, is it clear, is it engaging. He opens by promising writing that is "clearer, more insightful, and unmistakably yours".

That phrase stayed with me, and it's where our new line comes from. We changed what Galascribe says about itself to:

Sound like no one else. Write clearly. Share insights that are unmistakably yours.

The debt is plain, and I'd rather say so than pretend we got there alone.

His VOICE steps changed how we work too. This post was written that way: I was interviewed one question at a time about what actually happened, my answers were checked against our own code and records, and every claim about the product that couldn't be verified was cut. Further out, I'd like Galascribe to offer authors a VOICE-style review of their own drafts. That is a plan, not a feature, and it will stay a plan until it's built and tested.

What I believe

Most people believe a writing platform should chase engagement: help you go viral overnight, change the world, please everybody.

I believe it should build healthy habits instead. It should not turn readers into test subjects for attention-hungry feeds, or writers into editors of whatever a model produced. It should be gentle, and it should carry knowledge that is actually worth someone's evening.

The difference comes down to a few things:

Not everything is about money. That doesn't mean free. Galascribe has to keep the lights on and feed my family. But I hold to a simple rule: hunger has a limit; ego doesn't. Charge enough to keep going, and be ambitious only where it helps the people using it.
Ordinary is fine. A moderate, simple post that teaches one person one useful thing is a good post. Not every piece has to perform.
Try things anyway. I'd rather encourage people to be a little shameless, publish the idea, and see what happens, than wait until it's perfect.

None of this asks writers to give up reach. Post your links wherever your readers are. We are just not going to build another place that rewards stunts over substance. We are not trying to please every audience either. A handful of readers and writers at first is enough, if a few of them spend one fewer evening the way I spent that one in July.

Where this leaves us

Sandeep closes his video with a line I keep coming back to: you don't write just to find words, you write to find out what you think. Writing this post, I found out what I think. Galascribe exists so that night in July happens to fewer people, and so the writing they find instead sounds like a person.

To start a site of your own, the start flow is at https://app.galascribe.com/