Blog on Panji Gautama

AI, Hype, and Real-World Value: My Takeaways from Indonesia Product Conference 2025

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:50:47 +0000

It was great to be back in the buzz of a proper tech conference last week. I headed over to the Indonesia Product Conference 2025, an event Apiary has been running for a while now, and it’s clear they keep leveling up. It feels like forever since we’ve had these big, in-person gatherings post-COVID, so the energy was palpable.

Unsurprisingly, the theme this year was AI. But what I found fascinating was the undercurrent beneath the massive GenAI wave. While the conference was certainly riding the hype, most of the speakers on the Growth/Main Stage were actually focused on the practical, real-world applications of “traditional” AI—like machine learning for recommendation systems—rather than just the latest generative models.

Software Estimation

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 15:07:25 +0000

You may be surprised that we are not able to give an estimation as well as we think, and you may be more surprised that not all of the software engineers are able to estimate (properly), most just guesstimate with rough intuition. Though it’s not completely wrong, we can actually learn how to estimate properly. If you are graduated from Computer Science major like me, you will remember that software estimation technique is one of the courses by itself.

On Growing in Software Industry: Domain Knowledge

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 11:38:49 +0000

Shipping a working product is one thing, but do things really stop at production? Absolutely not, and I’m not talking about maintenance, but when we talk about “working,” it’s stretched beyond the definition of meeting acceptance criteria. It’s about whether the product has an impact on the customer and achieves the business outcome. Hence, think beyond the code, extend the knowledge of the domain , and understand the business.

On Growing in Software Industry: System Design

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 17:05:24 +0000

We agree that the tech industry is getting more and more competitive (especially with layoffs everywhere; the tech bubble is bursting already), and software development has always been evolving at a rapid pace.

However, I believe the key to staying relevant and competitive in this market always goes back to problem-solving. How exactly do you solve problems in tech? IMO, it is by providing the appropriate system design for the given problem.

On Knowledge Management Method: BASB a.k.a. Building a Second Brain

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 11:28:33 +0000

I shared briefly about BASB in the last post. I started my note-taking with the straightforward method, Zettelkasten, and used a simple note-taking, Obsidian. As my life went on, my job role expanded, various sources of information were unlocked, the long-term effect was real, I got information-overloaded, and I had difficulties managing my notes with a bunch of links and tags. I stumbled upon this book on Amazon and tried the PARA method, and it has been life-changing.

On Capturing Notes

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 13:52:00 +0000

Unlike the other typical managers who are very tidy and organized on their stuff, I tend to be chaotic. However, COVID has changed me quite a lot, especially after one month in an isolated room with dyspnea + silent hypoxia. I read a bunch of books and newsletters and went through many YouTube & Facebook videos (yes, the Indian street food videos. 🇮🇳) and I found a perfect formula for me to capture knowledge .. in notes. I stumbled upon this article https://fortelabs.com/blog/basboverview/ and decided to put my nuance into the takeaway.

Redis use-cases aside from Cache

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 13:46:50 +0000

Redis can be more impactful aside from caching. Here are a few other use cases :
1️⃣ As a persistent storage for use cases like shopping carts, user profiles, and social-media-related posts/newsfeeds. Easily sorted set simply by ZRANGE
2️⃣ Tracking state with Bitmaps, easily track and get states with boolean logic with SETBIT and GETBIT
3️⃣ Location Based with Redis geospatial, easily search and add geospatial data with GEOADD & GEOSEARCH. AFAIK it’s quite tricky to do this with Postgre
4️⃣ Distributed Lock, i.e., updating inventory stock to handle flash sale traffic
5️⃣ Analytics Funnel with Probabilistic easily store event and or merge with the HyperLogLog
6️⃣ Simple event-driven architecture with Redis Stream or as a Pub/Sub with SUBSCRIBE/PUBLISH commands, which can be seen as a message queue even with LIST

On Evolutionary Architecture Book

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 13:40:13 +0000

Evolutionary ~~Pokemon~~ Architecture is good architecture that adheres to the fitness functions of the company; fitness function terms emphasized by the authors help to define what characteristics define good architecture.

The author’s discussion revolves around evolvable change, a change that has little to no breaking changes to the existing feature or integration, and implementation coupling leaks.

The fitness function acts as governance or guidance of any changes because changes can happen anytime. Principles of principles are an alternative, but they tend to be impractical. Example of fitness function on Code Quality: Code has test coverage above 90%. On Resiliency: API is able to complete a transaction in under 10 seconds, even if there is network latency.

Thoughts on Developer Productivity

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 07:29:59 +0000

I used to have a dream to work at a consulting giant until a few years ago. I worked with a bunch of them, as my parent company decided to hire one of the consulting companies, and they gave me nothing but a mess (Duh! 🙄). A while back, I stumbled upon this “Yes, you can measure software developer productivity” article from the consulting giant, and it sparked debate in a lot of tech blogs/newsletters.

Convergence as Tech Debt Safeguard

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 11:57:15 +0000

Managing technical debt is never an easy game. Even if we have ideas, we need to compare the impact with the product initiatives/feature that we need to build to ensure we stay strong on the product side and boost the business. So what to do? lo and behold : Diverge-Convergence, comes as one of the strategies.

Each Sprint diverged into two streams: shaping & building, execute convergence sprint every triples.

On maintaining a reading pace

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 07:49:59 +0000

never tried a proper test but I believe I’m able to read around 200 WPM for 70-80% comprehension, not a great number, and it slowly decreases over time. I believe it does have something to do with a combination of WFH, poor diet, lack of exercise, and MULTITASKING which leads to a short attention span.

the obvious answer would be to fix the diet & exercise regularly, however, maintaining the reading speed to good numbers isn’t that straightforward.

Talking about Runbook

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 21:18:29 +0000

Why do we need a runbook?

the alert is only a signal, the very first step; reducing MTTR and solving the customer problem is the ultimate goal;

an actionable alert is one of the repetitive tasks; Adding a runbook for the repetitive task will help to increase debugging, accuracy, and efficiency in the triaging process.

But.. what exactly is runbook?

A runbook is a series of steps and detailed instructions to solve common issues or tasks effectively.

Turning Elephant into Colony of Ants - XYZ

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 10:49:18 +0000

XYZ is fictional product inspired by personal experience, that happen went into the journey of monolith to microservices.

#1 Context

Problem Statement

XYZ Codebase has tech debt where the monolith majestically hosts mobile API and Web Backend at the same time. This Big system is highly susceptible to a changing environment. They’re big and slow and unwieldy, tricky to scale horizontally (x-axis scale), costly to scale vertically (y-axis scale), and challenging to scale on the z-axis (e.g. serve multitenancy)

Video & Audio Codec Primer

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 07:01:37 +0000

This post is not intended to explain the video in a comprehensive manner but rather to distill important pieces of knowledge that are relevant to TipTip needs.

Compression

Compression is a lossy process to shrink the size of the media, video in this case, to ensure the video can be streamed appropriately according to the user device’s requirements. This process removes information; in a simple example, If two frames are basically identical, we can get rid of the data for one frame and replace it with a reference to the previous frame. Video compression has a lot of techniques; encoding is one of them.

Engineering Metrics

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 09:16:02 +0000

https://www.slideshare.net/panjigautama/metrics-that-matters-in-software-engineering

bunch of metrics are available to track and give us insights, but are they really that important?

How to work with Panji

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 10:49:23 +0000

A while ago, I wrote this https://github.com/rhapsodixx/manager-readme, inspired by the other manager readme. Though it’s debatable whether the doc is useful, to me, writing this kind of doc is intended for ourselves - as managers - to force us to think about what kind of managers we want to be and what is our expectation to work with our directs, explicitly.

3 years afterward, I’m rethinking and came up with this…

CTO CheckList

Thu, 16 Jun 2022 12:02:49 +0000

Talking about tech management, it’s actually not really about writing code or building a service, it goes beyond. A lot of resources to help you ensure you have decent tech management, but what helps me the most for the past couple of years is: a checklist.

It started with a very simple checklist to expand the checklist that I got from Rutul Davé’s GitHub.

Tech Debt Management

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 20:25:54 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9BUA96ymC0

🔗 https://www.slideshare.net/panjigautama/taming-technical-debt

Defect/Bug Management

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 08:30:33 +0000

who doesn’t love bugs? they are small yet beautiful…ly ruining our life 🙂. Bug is inevitable, choosing 0 Bug as your OKR/KPI is an insane choice, it’s not impossible but it will astronomically hit your productivity & cost, your best bet is to manage it properly. So how are you organizing and managing these bugs? Assigning the right priority(by assessing its severity) is the key, inspired by a couple of references, here is how I typically categorize them.

On Observability

Sun, 12 Sep 2021 19:46:30 +0000

Running an application without having a proper monitoring is akin to driving without a dashboard. You don’t really know if you still have enough gas, or if you are within the speed limit, or how far are you till your next oil change. There are many uncertainties involved in running an application. Monitoring is instrumental in getting first hand awareness on possible incident or help predict that an incident is about to happen so we can prevent it.

Scrum != Agile

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 09:54:22 +0000

On demystifying agile and scrum in software engineering ..

https://www.slideshare.net/panjigautama/agile-software-development-compfest-13

Software Fragmentation - The Golden Path

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 09:29:07 +0000

There is a direct correlation between teams that give their engineers autonomy to own their technical decisions and the team’s ability to hire and retain A-class or Senior talent. There is a tradeoff, but an acceptable level of chaos in exchange for a stronger sense of individual/team ownership is usually the right one and leads to higher performing teams in the long run - at least this is what I’ve been seeing if a couple of companies in Indonesia.

Engineering Growth Framework

Wed, 12 May 2021 13:56:50 +0000

Growth Framework, Career Guideline, Career Ladder, whatever you call it, is essentially general expectations of each of the grade, sometimes people call it as career ladder, but we at Mekari wanted to take it further down into its philosophy: Framework. In general, a framework is a real or conceptual structure intended to serve as a support or guide for the building of something that expands the structure into something useful.

Manager Manifesto

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 11:41:27 +0000

Manifesto

Giving critical feedback or having difficult conversations
Assessing whether a product is ready for launch
Designing and executing a realistic roadmap
Setting good goals with accountability
Building viable new products
Managing a team during “war time” versus “peace time”
Defining quality
Determining who to hire
Understanding people’s skills, strengths, and growth trajectories

Helping people reach a common goal

Listening and learning about people’s aspirations and frustrations.
Mentoring and advising, generally in the form of providing frameworks rather than here’s-what-you-should-be-doing’s (which is a whole topic for another time).
Designing better and more efficient ways for people to communicate, work, or learn.
Context-switching often in your day-to-day.
Playing a key role in the flow of communication (writing, sharing, meeting, presenting).
Owning the outcome of the team’s successes and failures, even if you won’t make all the decisions yourself.

note : not mine and nor I wanted to take credit on this points. I took this note awhile ago and unfortunately didn’t put the source link.

Engineering Initiative, where to start?

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 11:31:04 +0000

Performance improvement we must do, but where to identify it? Sometimes this kind of things might not obvious as they are, as experience and frame of reference from each of the individual engineer within your team might vary.

This post intended to share questions and framework that I’ve been using (and pushing) to my team to give cue and where to start on finding room for engineering improvements.

We start with very basic Minto Pyramid framework to help us have clear written thoughts of problems & solutions.

Excerpt on Regulated Data : Amount, Duration Data Holding, and Archiving

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 10:33:06 +0000

Data subjects are entitled to request the ESO delete their PII, and the ESO must do so accordingly. If the data subject does not request such deletion, under MoCI Regulation 20, an ESO shall comply with a five-year minimum statutory retention period or as otherwise required by the relevant supervisory authority. This retention period is calculated from the moment the data subject terminates the use of services of the ESO.

On Establishing Technical Documentation at Mekari

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 10:21:42 +0000

**
**

We all hate time wasters. Documentation often is seen as one of these time wasters, mostly because it is boring to do. Planning is often seen as kind documentation, so there is a natural tendency to just skip this step for efficiency. However, people forget the hidden cost of skipping this documentation step: no agreement on shared understanding may cause the project will take a lot longer than people think, and this is only the beginning of other disadvantages of not having proper documentation.

Incident & Post Mortem Process

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 12:50:06 +0000

This article is part of On Managing Stability series.

Recurring incidents are the enemy of scalability. Recurring incidents steal time away from our teams - time that could be used to create new functionality and greater value. Our past performance is the best indicator we have of our future performance and our past performance is best described by the incidents we have experienced and the underlying problems that caused those incidents.

Engineering North Star Metrics

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 12:11:10 +0000

In the world where all of the metrics are available to be fetch and tracked, we end up on too many things being measured or worst, too little things that are being measured. It is impractical to make smart decisions based upon all available data and impossible to make any decision without data, and virtually impossible to make every metric as a priority worthy of improvement. The first challenge is deciding on what to measure, this article is intended to propose following metrics as the de jure metrics that being tracked and constantly improved going forward within tech team that I led so far.

On forming Technical Program Manager team at Mekari

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 17:12:39 +0000

credit

As the company growing and more product verticals are coming in, and more competitors coming in not only from Indonesia but also big players from outside the country, there are needs from stakeholders and management (C/VP levels) to ensure we are delivering our initiatives more than ever. Hence, ensuring a team to be self-organized, transparent, and great visibility of ongoing and upcoming project progress are very critical. Spotting potential delays early and doing continuous improvement on how we structure the team and do communication within the team is also essential for us to achieve effective & efficient productivity.

Guidance on Creating New Service

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 17:07:11 +0000

something that we definitely don’t want to happen to us 🙂

At any tech company, we work with a lot of legacy systems and monoliths. As engineers, our first instinct would be to decouple these monolithic applications into microservices architectures so we can have cleaner code and an easier system to maintain. While this is definitely a good goal to have, sometimes we focus too much on the technical side of things (architecture, scalability, implementations) and lose sight of the bigger picture. Hopefully, this document can be guidance on other aspects we should think about.

Answering Yes/No Question

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 16:41:04 +0000

Your boss answering a simple yes or no question: pic.twitter.com/8uTFWpNyTV

– shelby wolstein (@ShelbyWolstein) May 8, 2020

Different types of 1:1 conversations visualised

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 13:50:43 +0000

Original Thread

#1. Ping Pong

Both parties are equally engaged and curious about the other. Answers are thoughtful, and each participant always turns their answer back into a question for the other.

#2. Interview

One person takes the role of questioner, the other person takes the role of answerer. Conversations like these can have two implications:
i) imbalance in interest in the other
ii) perceived hierarchy or power dynamics

On Regulated-Tech in Indonesia

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 10:26:54 +0000

Note that this document created in mid-2020 where on 24 January 2020, President Joko Widodo signed the Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill which is currently being finalized by the Indonesian House of Representatives (DPR). Upon finalization of this PDP Bill, Indonesia will become the fifth country in ASEAN to implement regulations regarding Personal Data Protection.

For the existing Personal Data Controller, there will be a two-year period before the PDP Bill is fully effective and achieves full compliance.

Tech Resume

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 10:07:21 +0000

Tech Resume is an internal personal profile managed and updated by us as an employee with information including current and past projects, accomplishments in our current company, expertise, impact, motivation, career aspirations.

The idea itself comes from https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/, since ourselves don’t remember everything we did in the last 6 months, higher chance that doesn’t remember everything we did. it’s important for our works to be recognized and it also useful for us to see our progression so far as part of our retrospective.

Talking about OKR

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 09:58:17 +0000

Why do we care about OKR ?

Managing a company’s performance relative to goals is important. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have been found by the tech industry to be a good way to do that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR for a history of OKRs. See Measure What Matters, by John Doerr for a great read on how they started to be used at Google.

By using OKRs correctly, we can align both within groups and across the company on our strategic direction and our tactical implementation of that direction. We can also chart how that direction changes during a period, and we can measure ourselves on how we did. Just like a feedback-and-performance culture is imperative to have at the individual employee level, it’s also essential to have at the team/group/org/company level.

Standardizing FrontEnd development at Mekari

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 09:54:59 +0000

TL;DR

VUE as a first-class frontend framework at Mekari.

React is a perfectly reasonable tool for building front ends, and we are not claiming it’s bad. In Mekari’s case, Vue has a couple of strong points based on decision principles. which may or may not change in the long future.

*note that there is no silver bullet in software engineering, this decision needs to be a review on a periodic and case-by-case basis to ensure the decision is to solve the problem, not being biased by personal preference. To minimize subjectivity and bias into framework decision, we use the following criteria:

API Key Best Practices

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 09:49:20 +0000

API keys are required for apps and projects that being used across Mekari platforms, either GCP/AWS/Logging Tools or other third-party services. This document identifies the intended use of API keys, how to protect them as you would other credentials, and which restrictions are appropriate for your projects.

Always try to adhere Principle of least privilege.*

*The principle of least privilege states that only the minimum access necessary to perform an operation should be granted, and that access should be granted only for the minimum amount of time necessary.

My Ex-Boss Cultural Hints

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 09:46:38 +0000

⚠️ This isn’t my note nor intent to take any credit.

TL;DR: We take our job of building quality services for our customers seriously in every way. Rigor at every level is the only way to do that reliably and efficiently.

TTT - Try Three Things

Don’t reach out to others unless you have tried a reasonable number of things first. Not only will this stop you from task-switching others, but it will slowly build up your expertise in our tools and procedures. Most of the time, you’ll find the answer to your question by the time you’ve tried that third thing - without bothering somebody else. This is our equivalent of “LMGTFY”. Of course, don’t go overboard and unproductively go into a black hole of learning everything yourself - that would be the fourth thing and be a waste of time too.

On being a great meeting attendee

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 09:43:09 +0000

Staying engaged during meetings

Attendees, please follow these instructions:

Bring your own notebook for the pre-reads
Turn on your webcam, even if you’re in a room with other people. It helps other participants better understand what you’re saying AND keeps you focused.
Participate during meetings by 1) reading the pre-reads, 2) leaving feedback, and 3) participating during discussions. We have found many things need to be repeated due to unfocused meeting participants.

DO’s and DON’Ts joining from Computers or Mobile Devices

✅ Do’s	⛔️ Don’ts
- IF you are not in a meeting room, DO use headsets or earphones to avoid echo.
- DO mute yourself when not speaking. Coughs and keyboard clicks are louder than you think.	- DON’T use the speakerphone on mobile devices. Not all devices have a built-in echo cancellation. It will be a poor audio experience.
- DON’T introduce multiple audio sources into your call. Don’t dial in by phone too, if you have a mic and speaker on your computer

Silent Meeting

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 09:41:05 +0000

Feels that your meeting is somehow ineffective? try silent meetings.

This isn’t really a new type of meeting, but since the dotcom and the rise of the startups, this kind of meeting helps people especially leaders to avoid joining busy-bandwagon and meeting hell. It’s scientifically proven effective in various scenarios, but we need to be well prepared.

✅ What are Silent Meetings?

“Silent Meetings” are meetings where most of the time is spent working and not talking. When done correctly most of the meeting is spent silently working together.

Facilitating a Great Meeting

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 09:37:56 +0000

As a lot of companies switched their mode into WFH and try to move toward remote-first, we need to know how to best interact prior to, during, and after meetings. For meetings to be effective, it is imperative to have a clear agenda, well thought through pre-reads, proper meeting setup, and a fully engaged audience. We will spend less time in meetings if we are more disciplined at meetings.

You should invite the right people to a meeting; those who actually need to be there. Start with identifying participants, but make sure their schedules are free during the meeting’s time. If inviting a set of people as a group (ex: devops@company.com) prefer to invite the google group rather than the people individually. That way, it will be clear to others who are invited. Use “Find A Time” in google calendar to easily find a good time to set your meeting.

Personal Development — Silent Killers of Productivity

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 09:32:31 +0000

Beberapa saat ini saya gemar membaca dan mengikuti beberapa buku dan kursus mengenai personal development. Salah satu kursus yang saya ikuti adalah : https://www.udemy.com/productivity-and-time-management

Semakin kita merasa sibuk, disaat itulah kita harus berhati-hati untuk tidak terjebak pada kesibukan yang bisa mengakibatkan produktivitas menurun.

Dari kursus tersebut, salah satu topik menarik adalah ada beberapa hal yang tanpa kita sadari mampu menurunkan produktivitas kita secara signifikan. Banyak ‘aha’ moment yang saya dapatkan di kursus ini.

Muhasabah

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 08:20:00 +0000

So lately I’ve been thinking about what should I do better this year and trying to learn from other experienced leaders on how they run their high-performance team. They definitely have some sort of framework/structure on whatever they do, and it’s becoming a routine, they do it every day and improve it at the same time - over and over again.

Then I remember Lara Hogan’s blog post on management expectation which brilliant. I realize that to improve ourselves, we need to understand ourselves. I decided to write a manager readme, to get myself know better about myself ( well..its some sort of Panji Gautama’s Manual ) - and give a clear and explicit expectation to my team, and here I go: https://github.com/rhapsodixx/manager-readme. I found this very useful, and now I’m confident about things I should pursue this year.

New Chapter of Kudo

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 09:33:00 +0000

Three years ago, I was working in my room to develop a prototype apps for these Indonesian guys who studied at Business School in US. It was a very fun project and I enjoyed the moment I spent to discuss the features with them.

When they came back to Indonesia, they built this company called ‘KUDO’ and asked me to join them. Back then, I was worried that this company is just ‘another startup company’, but i decided to take a leap of faith and chose to believe that ‘KUDO’ is working to help underserved people in Indonesia through technology, which is pretty much my mission too coming from my computer science background.