Shubham Singh Chahar

Software Engineer | Building KonnecTo | Distributed Systems | Mentoring People

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Do you remember when you joined X? I do! #MyXAnniversary

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

A trick that changed how I read: when a book bores me, I quit it on page 40 with zero guilt. Life got shorter and better. You are not obligated to finish what wasn't worth starting. Same goes for jobs, projects, and conversations.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

I stopped tracking how many hours I worked and started tracking how many hard decisions I made per week. Turns out I was busy for years and deciding almost nothing. Motion is cheap. Choosing is the expensive part.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Still convinced you can tell a lot about a person by their browser.

Arc folks want to feel special.

Chrome folks gave up.

Firefox folks are principled and slightly tired.

Safari folks just never opened the box.

What are you running, and be honest about why.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Nobody tells you that most of adult competence is just calling the thing you're scared of and getting a boring answer. The dentist. The landlord. The tax form. The dread is 90% of the weight. The task is the other 10%.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

The best career advice I ever got was three words: ship embarrassing things. The version of you that waits until it's perfect ships nothing. The version that ships early gets feedback, gets better, and stops guessing what people actually want.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Unpopular opinion:

your SaaS doesn't need AI.

It needs onboarding that doesn't make people rage quit in the first 90 seconds.

Half the "AI features" I see are just a chatbot hiding a bad UX.

What's one feature you shipped that nobody used?

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

The Rust vs Go argument is never about Rust or Go.

It's about whether you'd rather fight the compiler now or fight prod later.

Go people ship and sleep.

Rust people sleep and then rewrite it in Rust.

Which camp are you actually in?

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Every dev has that one model they secretly trust more for real work.

Not the benchmark king. The one you paste your ugliest bug into at 2am.

Mine changed twice this year.

Which one is yours right now, and what made you switch?

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Hot take that gets me in trouble at dinner:

Most founders don't have a distribution problem.

They have a "nobody actually wants this" problem wearing a distribution costume.

What's the last thing you built that people asked for before you finished it?

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Nobody tells you that the hardest part of getting good at something is how boring it gets right before it clicks.

The plateau isn't a wall. It's a waiting room.

Most people quit because they think flat means finished. It means you're close.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Nobody tells you discipline is mostly just lowering the bar for what counts as starting.

Not "write the chapter." Open the doc. Type one bad sentence.

Not "go for a run." Put on the shoes. Stand outside.

Momentum isn't a mood you wait for. It's downstream of the tiny embarrassing first move you're too proud to make.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Every team I've seen die slowly died the same way. Not one big failure. A thousand small 'we'll fix it later' moments that quietly became the culture. Later is where standards go to disappear. Fix the small thing now or admit you never will.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

@erinfoox Yeah, I feel this. Babysitting agents all day isn't the same as building something.

The fix that's worked for me is carving out a little time to actually write code by hand again. Even a throwaway side project.

The high comes from making things, not from prompting things.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

@KevinNaughtonJr Kind of wild. I babysit two agents now and mostly just review diffs.

Still snaps back to 100% focus the second something breaks though.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

Most people fail on the job because they show up to look busy, not to fix the thing.

Spending decades being busy. Meetings, docs, Slack threads that went nowhere.

Do what actually matters, the rest is noise you can bill for but shouldn't be proud of.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

@i_mika_el No customer has requested or performed an independent restore yet.

The export format and documentation are intended to make that possible, but we haven't publicly validated that workflow.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

your community data on someone else's cloud is a lease, not ownership.

we built KonnecTo BYOC first. your cloud, your keys, your exports whenever you want.

nobody should have to email support to get their own members' data.

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

no offense taken, you're mostly right :)

features get cloned fast, agreed. but distribution isn't the only moat either, trust and switching costs are earned slowly and AI can't shortcut those

still, point taken. we're engineers first so marketing is the muscle we have to consciously train

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

@HeyAliux and the product keeps them 😅

but yeah, agree. seen so many beautiful landing pages that say nothing. good copy is just clear thinking written down

[Shubham Singh Chahar @shubhamschahar]

@T_Zahil I get him honestly. the joy was never typing the code though, it was making something work that didn't exist before

that part's still there, maybe more than ever. hope he finds his way back to it, forcing yourself to use it out of fear doesn't help either