Being the CTO at Geedesk I have always wanted to launch a tech blog to talk about the interesting stuff that we build and the problems that we solve on a daily basis.

However the work pressure and a little bit of imposter syndrome prevented me from going ahead and launching the tech blog.

During a random Google search I recently came across the Zerodha tech blog. I have always been fascinated by Zerodha for the simple reason that they have been bootstrapped and yet managed to build a profitable business.

Geedesk is also bootstrapped and bootstrapped companies have a special place in my heart.

We are by no means a company that has arrived. We have a long way to go, but nevertheless we are on the right path. With that confidence I was able to hush my imposter syndrome and kickstart a blog.

What is this blog built on?

This blog is built on Laravel without any database. I am not a Wordpress developer and I am personally not a big fan of CMS applications. I love working with html rather than modifying the Php files of Wordpress.

This is all the code that was required to build the blog article section. So basically the blade file name and the blog post slug are the same.

		public function blog_post($blog_post_slug) 
		{
			$title = '';
			$view = 'blog.articles.'.$blog_post_slug;
			echo view('header.header', ['title' => $title]);
			echo view($view);
			echo view('footer.footer');
		}
	
	

This is a quick fix as I do not want our team members to waste time on building a tech blog on Laravel instead of migrating the APIs from Codeigniter 3 to Laravel.

I don’t see this blog having any database ever as the article count might not drastically increase. Our primary goal is to build Geedesk and not write articles for this product.

What is the tech team like?

The tech team in Geedesk is very small but pulls the load of the entire product and as a CTO I have nothing but immense appreciation for the team.

Almost all our developers are self taught and do not have a degree from pedigree college.

Our vision is to transform the hospitality industry with technology (damn we need to fix some important bugs this week).

What do we work with?

We use a lot of Php and Vuejs but they are by no means the only programming languages that we use. We also use a little bit of Nodejs, Python and Dart.

We are migrating our mobile apps from native languages (Java and Swift) to Flutter with Dart. Managing two source code repos was a nightmare for us minus finding the right talent. So we have decided to do away with two repos and are in the process of building our mobile apps from scratch with Flutter.

In addition to that we use a lot of Terraform for our infrastructure and Jenkins for our CI/CD pipeline.

We also love building home grown solutions for expensive alternates and have inhouse built applications for accounting, CRM and customer support and HR. This was definitely not a prudent decision but it was so much fun.

For documentation we use Dokuwiki. In my opinion it's an amazing application to setup a simple wiki for internal or client facing documentation needs.

Going forward

I am planning to maintain a content calendar in a spreadsheet for this blog and will consistently write articles here. Now the definition of the word consistent might change from time to time but I am sure we as a team will be writing loads of interesting stuff on this blog. Our methods might be unconventional but we are sure it will be a worthwhile experience.