Hi, I’m Matt, the founder of Lucid Modules.
I like black swans.
There are moments in life when we come across our own Personal Black Swans. An unpredictable event or a person with contrasting perspectives that significantly influence our worldview. We stumble upon them in the least expected situation. Whatever the setting may be, these encounters leave an indelible mark on our psyche, altering the way we view life itself.
Many black swans dwell in Taiwan. Living on the Formosa, a beautiful island, is the first reason I’ve started Lucid Modules.
Initially, I worked as Magento 2 developer and later as a Tech Lead. I spent my early professional career dedicated to e-commerce solutions for international enterprises. Among them are TME, MODIVO (formerly Eobuwie) in Poland and Romanian Cora. If you want to learn more about my professional journey, please check out my LinkedIn profile.
The second reason: While working in a corporate hierarchy, I realized it lacks the freedom necessary to create the best work. It is not an environment suitable for the Renaissance man or woman.
Majority of the corporations avoid novelty and experimentation.
However, the future belongs to agile companies.
Similar to the prehistoric era, where the smaller mammals replaced the magnificent dinosaurs. Following the Agile does not equal with true agility.
The ongoing democratization of AI will only speed up this change.
The third reason: following the Czech entrepreneur, Tomáš Baťa: people should think and machines do the labor.
It is common for companies to have a postindustrial attitude and force employees to sit for long hours in front of computer screens. However, this approach is counterproductive in the long run.
I believe that empowering individuals to think critically and harnessing the potential of technology to handle repetitive tasks leads to more efficient and innovative workplaces.
An environment that fosters employee autonomy and responsibility has a significant impact on motivation and creativity levels. This leads to the development of high-quality products and solutions.
Trust is the most valuable currency.
LUCID Manifesto
Here is the explanation of LUCID approach:
Lightweight
Tradeoffs are an inevitable part of engineering. Both physical and virtual solutions adhere to 3 constraints: time, speed, and cost. The whole construction is as strong as its weakest link.
How to maintain lightweight solutions:- Keep in mind the hierarchy of latencies:
- Network
- Local Services
- Disk
- Ram
- CPU Cache
- Never create god-objects, functions, modules which know too much beyond their context and are too expensive to replace.
User-centric
Even when a piece of software merely connects machines (API), we should remember about the user that sits at the end of the chain. Thus, launching a new piece of software must be straightforward - Plug&Play. Without tons of instruction pages.
What is user centric:- Always show some empathy to the user and remember that target audience might not understand technical details.
- Provide automations and interfaces with functions of aggregated modifications, mass update.
Customizable
Contrary to a hardware, the software has this property that should be easy to change and adapt to the dynamic environment.
We implement customizations by:- Exposing public interfaces inside extensions and modules. Sticking with SemVer versioning.
- Favoring adapters over 3rd-party API functions.
- Applying battle-tested architectural patterns.
Innovative
It is easy to do the same things over and over. Sometimes it is necessary when the solution works. However, we owe our ancestors, who lived in harsh times, to embrace the exploratory spirit.
Our innovation is expressed as:- We strive to dedicate 30% of our time to research and experimentation.
- 3D web product configurator
- AR product viewer for Magento 2
- JAM stack for sustainable blog and websites
- PWA as alternative to costly native app development
Data-driven
Bill Gates once wrote: Content is king. Data must be the Queen then. Data is a North Star, guiding us on the ocean of possibilities.
We stick with data-driven solutions by:- Analyzing application performance with APM tools like NewRelic reporting.
- Logstash monitoring, performance dashboards.