Dear Users,
We are shutting down Cyclic.
Effective immediately we are turning off signups by new users.
In two weeks, May 10th, we will begin turning off free tier usage.
We will begin turning off all usage May 31.
In our journey as Node.js developers, we often deal with various external services such as Google Cloud or Firebase. These services require us to provide credentials that authenticate our application and grant it the necessary permissions to interact with the respective service. This post is about to handle large secrets or files that contain private keys. Google provides files like this. You will see them named a few different things: serviceAccount.json or sometimes serviceAccountCredentials.json. This file contains secret data and is used to authenticate against Google Cloud and/or Firebase.
There are three types of software systems that any company runs. First, high value software systems that drive customer value. Second, the systems necessary to deliver the product or service, but not sufficient as stand alone products on their own. Third, systems that support the business but are not related to the competitive advantage of the company. The fourth type of software system is one that doesn’t exist. Every company has software they chose not to build. This is "Unbuilt Software". To understand how much value organizations are missing out on, we must first better understand each type of software system and how software investment decisions are made.
As an engineer I like to talk about the features of a product. I talk about the product’s implementation and how it was built. I get excited about the internal workings. I have spent days of my life working on features that were never used. I operated under a mental framework that users came from outside and were external to the product. I was concerned with building the product. The users would be there when I was done. So I spent most of my time heads down writing code.
Chasing the wrong KPI is like chasing a mirage of water in the desert.
Check out our trailing twelve month site analytics above.
Our marketing and user acquisition was awesome in Feb, right? More of that?
When I was a younger I went on several rock climbing and mountaineering expeditions. I was exposed to some instructors and practitioners that took staying safe in the mountains very seriously. One of them carried a book from The American Alpine Club on climbing accidents. The accidents were never the cause of a single bad choice. They were caused by a series of decisions, taken over time, that combined to create the conditions for the accident.
We all hit bugs that feel impossible to diagnose. The hardest ones to debug are intermittent or inconsistent. How do I fix what works sometimes? If a line of code always breaks then the fix is direct. The system is linear. The action leads to a failure.
How do I debug a bug that is intermittent? How do I debug something that works sometimes?
Here are some reminders to myself next time I encounter a baffling debugging session.
(photo credit Charles Cushing)
This article is intended for startup founders, particularly for those who are first timers. There is nothing extraordinary about my VC experiences. I have done the following: raised an angel round and two institutional rounds (and failed at two rounds?) at a company I co-founded in the GovTech/Community space (SeeClickFix). I have participated in pitches as CTO of a pre-PMF (product market fit) mortgage tech company (HeavyWater). I have raised a friends-and-family round at my current Cloud Infrastructure company (https://www.cyclic.sh)
I was 16 and about to head off as the youngest member of a month-long wilderness sailing trip. The night before my departure my dad came into my room to check on my packing and inspect my gear. He got serious and gave me the following advice for how to stay alive, keep safe and make the most of my time.
It has stuck with me. It is the best, most concise advice I know for how to build a startup, be a parent or venture into the unknown.