Aurobindo Patra

Gmail is one of the most resilient, scalable, and user-centric products ever built. From a technical standpoint, managing billions of active users with near-perfect uptime, fast search, spam filtering, and seamless integrations is an incredible achievement. What impresses me most is how Gmail continuously evolves — introducing features like Smart Compose and better organization (Priority Inbox, labels, tabs) without losing the simplicity that made it popular. It's a great example of scaling infrastructure and UX together over time without overwhelming users. From a product mindset, Gmail shows the power of building a core utility so good that it becomes a habit — something I always aim for when working on my own products.

Notion is an incredibly well-crafted product — it blends flexibility, collaboration, and clean design in a way few tools do. From a technical perspective, I admire how they've abstracted a block-based editor to support everything from wikis to databases to project management, all with real-time collaboration. What stands out to me most is how extensible it feels without overwhelming the user — that balance is hard to get right. It’s a great example of how powerful a well-executed full-stack architecture can be, and it’s inspired a lot of the UX and component thinking in my own projects like DeployIt.