Haikal T.

after years in Etiqa, i faced the classic crossroads: stay in technical team or move to product team? this post explores the challenges, trade-offs, and unexpected lessons.

i started knowing nothing about AI. just wanted to swap product logos on images. ended up learning about multimodal models, prompt engineering, and how tricky image editing with LLMs actually is.

Fresh out of uni, I thought being a good dev meant knowing syntax and shipping fast. A year in the real world changed that. Here’s how my thinking evolved — from rushing to reflecting.

My experience at Etiqa building UI components in React using Storybook. Why we went with CSS-in-TS instead of Tailwind, what we learned from shadcn, Radix, Mantine — and the hidden overhead nobody talks about.