DEV Community: Meet Chopra

Business advice for software developers

Meet Chopra — Mon, 20 May 2019 10:50:31 +0000

I started into coding and then jumped into business and this is the most common path most of the makers/founders happens to start with. As a developer, running a business was totally a new world for me. I realized that running a business and writing code are totally different things. They are like a parallel universe and we have to take care of both. I have tried to write some of the points that can be helpful for you as a software developer.

Functional code is better than elegant code

As a developer, writing elegant code with all the best practices might be your fantasy. But when you are running a business, users don't care about how well the code is written and which tech stack you are working with. What will matter to them is - if you are able to solve their problem.

Spending time on writing elegant code will make you slow and hinder your growth. When you are in the early stages of your business, you need to ship things quickly, validate your ideas and features.

After once you find your product-market fit you can always refactor your code and make things scalable. But in the early days, it's important to make and break things. One of the best things, when things go broke, is you have the chance to communicate with customers and turn them into loyal ones.

Make one thing and do that extremely well

Rather than making more and more features in the start, it's better to focus on one core thing and make it better than anybody else. If you notice, most of the successful founders started with just one simple thing rather than having a complex product.

"Make one thing and do that extremely well".

Even star athletes in Olympic don't participate in every event. They specialize in one thing. If you do all the things at once, you will be mediocre at all of them. Being mediocre can be the worst enemy for your business.

Don't look at competitors

One of the things I have started to practice is not to look at the competitors at all. When starting out with an Idea, looking at competitor will restrict you from trying out with your own approach. Once you see what other's are doing, it becomes hard for you to think out of the box. You only look at what others have done and try to replicate it. The thing you should focus on is - are you able to solve the problem effectively.

Often times the market is big enough to have more than one companies co-exists. It will not matter to you until a competitor is taking away your customers. After coming in the growth stage, looking at the competitors can be worthy.

Build a brand, not only features

The first question that you might have is - what the hell branding actually means. Well, Branding is what your customers think about you. Also, what you want the customers to think about you.

Branding is what your customers think about you. Also what you want the customers to think about you.

Focusing on branding from the start has its own benefits that show results over time. In the long run, you can't win on features, you can only win on by brand. It's important to build a brand and associate your company with it. Today, competing on features won't help you win. Everyone is lean, has access to remote servers, remote workers making it hard to differentiate on features.

💡 Sleep, Exercise and healthy food

Health is the most precious thing and still takes the back seat for most of the developers and founders.

Developing a feature or working on article whole night won't make your business a success. Running a startup is a long term process and takes time to show results. When things go down and don't work as they should, proper sleep, exercise, and healthy habits help you stay calm and tackle the problem as a founder.

One of the best things to follow is Big Five by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. Sleeping, eating, exercising, learning and creating. It's the best things one can have in his life, irrespective of what his profession is.

James Clear

@jamesclear

@dlabo10 @itsericbrown @naval The Big Five: sleeping, eating, exercising, learning, and creating.

Sleep - 8-9 hours/night
Eat - whole, unprocessed foods
Exercise - lifting weights or playing a sport
Learn - read or practice a skill
Create - I write, but it could be anything: painting, coding, etc

22:58 PM - 21 Feb 2018

6 33

Being patient is a compound effect

In this fast pacing world, where everything now just works at a tap, we have become more impatient than ever. Often times while running a SaaS business, things will take time to show results.

If it's a perfect case, it will take a year or two to find the product market fit and reach $1M annual revenue.

But often things don't go in a way they are meant to be. For example - Popular email marketing company, MailChimp was a side project for 6 years. Todoist was a side-project for 4 years. Basecamp took 2 years to even pay themselves salaries. It takes time to grow a company. You need to constantly ship, ask for feedback, iterate on ideas to grow and start earning revenue.

Justin Jackson

@mijustin

MailChimp was a side-project for 6 years.

Todoist was a side-project for 4 years.

Basecamp took 2 years before it was paying their salaries.

Maybe the rest of us shouldn't be in such a hurry.

07:48 AM - 01 Dec 2018

2916 9902

It's better to be patient and focus on solving the customer's problem and making them happy. Being patient and working focused will do wonders.

Originally published at tryprosper.com on 13th May, 2019

Do you know what these 63 HTTP status codes mean?

Meet Chopra — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 10:48:35 +0000

I came to know about HTTP status, while working at a new product Freshping, a free website monitoring tool and was pretty intrigued with the number of HTTP status codes out there. I saw some tools on HN explaining about status codes and thought of sharing this here. Just a fun fact there are around 63 status codes that I discovered. I don't know if there are more than this. Do share if you find any.

The 1xx Codes

1xx codes usually refer to as informational response, where the server accepts the request and wishes to receive further payload/body.

100 Continue
101 Switching Protocols
102 Processing

2×× Success

This usually means the server has received, understood and accepted the request by the client.

200 OK
201 Created
202 Accepted
203 Non-authoritative Information
204 No Content
205 Reset Content
206 Partial Content
207 Multi-Status
208 Already Reported
226 IM Used

3×× Redirection

300 codes are commonly used for URL redirection. The server sends a response containing a list of metadata and URI reference(s) from which the user or user agent can choose the one most preferred.

300 Multiple Choices
301 Moved Permanently
302 Found
303 See Other
304 Not Modified
305 Use Proxy
307 Temporary Redirect
308 Permanent Redirect

4×× Client Error

This status code is intended when there seems to be an error caused by the client

400 Bad Request
401 Unauthorized
402 Payment Required
403 Forbidden
404 Not Found
405 Method Not Allowed
406 Not Acceptable
407 Proxy Authentication Required
408 Request Timeout
409 Conflict
410 Gone
411 Length Required
412 Precondition Failed
413 Payload Too Large
414 Request-URI Too Long
415 Unsupported Media Type
416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable
417 Expectation Failed
418 I'm a teapot
421 Misdirected Request
422 Unprocessable Entity
423 Locked
424 Failed Dependency
426 Upgrade Required
428 Precondition Required
429 Too Many Requests
431 Request Header Fields Too Large
444 Connection Closed Without Response
451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons
499 Client Closed Request

I know these are too many 4xx :D

5×× Server Error

500 status codes are used when the server fails to serve/fulfill the request.

500 Internal Server Error
501 Not Implemented
502 Bad Gateway
503 Service Unavailable
504 Gateway Timeout
505 HTTP Version Not Supported
506 Variant Also Negotiates
507 Insufficient Storage
508 Loop Detected
510 Not Extended
511 Network Authentication Required
599 Network Connect Timeout Error

After reading so many status codes, you are now more informed about the HTTP codes out there. I tried to give the gist of all the codes in general as describing each of them would be too big. For those interested to know more, here's the link

Also, we are giving new business 50 free public status pages at Freshping, do check us out and let me know what you think.

Hope to see you again. Bye! 👋