Craig Labenz

Awesome to see how our Pinterest Engineering friends take advantage of an almost *700x performance difference* between Honeycomb and their Develocity (fka Gradle) dashboards to find outlier users, old machine types, or use of specific JDKs. 🔥 We love seeing our customers use Honeycomb in all parts of their development process, leveraging our support for custom metadata (monotonically increasing, unbounded build identifiers are a perfect stealth example of high-cardinality data) and 💥speed💥 to deliver better experiences for their users. https://lnkd.in/eGcKeUvY

59

2 Comments

This is a cool project, and another example of the emerging "replace stateful storage with S3" trend. I do wonder at what point someone will package this sort of thing up into a FUSE filesystem to make it generally usable across existing services. Or maybe every service has unique enough needs that it's better to handle it custom each time. https://lnkd.in/etcVBfVf

9

Agents, combined with the incredible power of LLMs can offer you limitless power. What happens if most of the code being deployed is generated? Very soon, almost all the software around you will be powered by agents with self-reflexion, reasoning, and the ability to automate a complete process without your input. Now with agents delivering production level code to the public, it's more important than ever to understand what is happening. If you don't have any observability or control on what is being deployed, you might be in for a world of hurt. If you want to learn about the power of AI agents, start by listening to this Stack Overflow Podcast episode featuring our CEO Saumil Patel.

2

Some context from the #Founder perspective. As liberal as Seattle is as a city with policy and politics, it's incredibly conservative from an investment standpoint. One of the reasons you may not hear big "home-run" type pitches or pitches with sizzle, is simply because investors in Seattle don't like those types of pitches and Founders have been ingrained to not present in that manner. They may say they do, but ask any Founder and they'll tell you how they have been told to size down their pitch or talk about MVPs, first customer, first revenue, etc. or how what matters more is what you can do first couple years rather than the home run. Those early metrics are important by the way, but different from the big home run. Do you know who is receptive to homerun pitches? Investors in the Bay, NYC, Miami, Hong Kong. Seattle is not great for early-stage Founders with many prioritizing raising outside the city. We will be raising capital in the fall and as of now, have no plans of reaching out to Seattle-based VCs. I should also add that our company has a blockchain component and sadly Seattle VCs have not embraced crypto or blockchain. Welcome to #Seattle, Kyle Lui! Hopefully, you can help change the narrative! GeekWire

22

7 Comments

An intriguing startup called Fragment is shaking up the ledgering game. 💡 If you’ve ever dealt with tracking customer balances, you know how tedious it can be—Fragment's API aims to simplify that by offering real-time, double-entry accounting without the accounting jargon overload.📊 Founders Thomas Neckel and Omi Chowdhury are onto something big here, especially with their track record of successful startups. With early adopters like TruckSmarter and Nala already onboard, it's exciting to see where this tech goes. 🚀 #Fintech #Startup #Innovation #AccountingTech #TechTrends https://lnkd.in/eUrC-tJE

6

I’m fired up! Three takeaways from a meetup last week with the R&D org showcasing AI projects: 🔹 Prompting magic - Where’s the long-term home? It’s clear that there’s a new skillset requirement in the product development cycle related specifically to prompting. Today, prompting seems to consistently fall in the engineering team, but as prompting gets disentangled from coding, I’d be very surprised if that’s the long term home for that skillset. AI Agents rely on carefully conceived prompts, and while engineers are owners of these prompts today, I highly doubt that will be the long-term home. I’m betting on English majors 🙂 🔹 Differentiated experiences rely on differentiated data It’s clear that many AI companies are building very slick, human-centric experiences on top of LLMs. As the tooling continues to improve natively with LLMs, those slick experiences won’t stand the test of time as they become commoditized and easy to replicate. Lasting differentiation will rely on sophisticated experiences built on top of differentiated data. This has always been true, and will ultimately be the reason the AI funding bubble comes to an end at some point. 🔹 The hype is real! The product experiences that are possible to build in such a short time are astonishing! Two-dimensional platform experiences are a thing of the past, and interaction with data is experiencing a massive overhaul. I’m on the edge of my seat and siked for the innovation we’re seeing every day.

56

2 Comments

Nick Hobbs on why we need AI designers: “Until you throw an LLM in the mix. Then, all of the sudden, there’s an alien in the middle of your software stack that defies all attempts to be specified. What makes the models so compelling — the ability to turn infinite input possibilities into infinite creative outputs — is exactly what makes them so hard to pin down into a shippable product.” Full post here: https://lnkd.in/gx4gcEqf

1

It's just amazing what a thoughtful leader like Rahul can accomplish when engineering operations is given time and attention. Software Engineers are notoriously hard to wrangle, but it's (usually) because they care — these are smart, driven folks who are hired to do work that requires both raw brainpower and creativity. To think that you can scale a team of those individuals effectively without putting in the same raw brainpower and creativity into the operations is just foolish. This is the way.

2

A Simple Two-step Process for Career Advancement Want to get ahead in your company? Do these two things: 1. Give away your Legos 2. Generate more impact I didn't say it would be easy! Only simple. Giving away your Legos means sharing responsibility effectively. By finding (and training) others who can take over for you, you free yourself to take on new things. And, of course, you create opportunities and growth for your team. But remember the word, "effectively." You can't set it and forget it. You are still ultimately responsible for the results, and you have to ensure the quality and results are there. Finding new, more impactful projects is even harder. The farther (or higher) you advance, the harder it gets. Playbooks run out. Mentorship is scarce. Stay focused on business impact and prioritize your time ruthlessly. Scores of books have been written on both topics. But ultimately the formula is simple -- free yourself by investing (and believing) in others, and use that freedom to pursue impact and generate results.

16

The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

11

1 Comment

Hey Friends, Today we're revealing the biggest launch in the history of Superhuman: reimagined for teams!! I would greatly appreciate your support if you could upvote us on Product Hunt https://lnkd.in/gX_b3PVi (if you haven't already, update your Superhuman version to get access the game-changing features)

44

5 Comments

Text-to-video generative AI is about change content creation forever. Some would say Kling (from Kuaishou Technology) is leading the pack, even more so than Sora. Sora can produce 1 minute long videos, and is accessible only to select testers. Kling can produce 2 minute long videos at 1080p 30fps, and is already more accessible to the public (in China). Prompt for this video: A Chinese boy wearing glasses enjoys a delicious cheeseburger in a fast food restaurant, with his eyes closed. How long will it be until AI can take a video script to produce a high quality 10 minute YouTube video? Or take a screenplay to produce a high quality 2 hour movie?

39

10 Comments

Announcing… ✨ UnVale's new VP of Engineering, Calvin Fisher, with 15 years of experience and two successful exits as an Engineering lead!!! Beyond being a fantastic person, proud father, and self-described nerd, Calvin had an immediate understanding of our unique community and infrastructure needs as we scale to millions of active users. Our hiring process was intense! Quickly after closing the round, we began the month-long hunt for our perfect engineering lead. During our process, we attracted: 🧑‍💻 - Over 900 qualified applicants 🤓 - 46 applicants from FAANG with over 10+ years of experience. 🦸 - 194 ex-founders, including 9 YC alumni. What it came down to was unimpeachable technical chops and a deep understanding of team management, process, and our infrastructure–as well as what it takes to scale a company to an exit. Bri and I are so happy to welcome Calvin to our team, which now includes 6x founders who have been a part of 4 company exits. I asked Calvin for a quote so you could hear firsthand why he joined UnVale— “I'm thrilled to be heading up the engineering team at UnVale! I've been leading software teams for over a decade and making software professionally for over 15 years. I'm coming to the team after leading my most recent startup to a successful acquisition directly out of its incubator phase. As a lifelong nerd, I've been involved in creative communities like this one since the days of dialup. People are one of the most crucial factors in a company's success, and I believe wholeheartedly in the team and their ability to bring this product into the world; the culture and community around UnVale are second to none.” He might even be a better writer than me… Keep following our journey at our UnVale company page. There is plenty more to do in 2024–and we are going to squeeze every drop out of this year–but this is all in prep for a truly transformative 2025! Talk soon.

71

9 Comments

How do you share (or receive) product updates? What strategy strikes the right balance of frequency and granularity? When we first started Koala, we shipped changelog posts every ~week. BUT we've dramatically slowed down how often we share product updates, despite still shipping new features and improvements every single week. And I want to change that – there is simply too much value that customers (and lurkers) are missing out on! #product #startups #engineering

7

Where did all the product engineers go? Is there a new title in town? I'm talking about people who are skilled at traversing the entire stack (frontend/backend/api +) to build incredible product and ux. #engineering #recruiting #product

25

21 Comments

🚀 New week, new job post: Full Stack Developer 🚀 Sonaar is on the hunt for an experienced Full Stack Developer with a passion for pushing the boundaries of technology! If AI, ML, and NLP get you excited, this could be your dream role. We’re using a cutting-edge tech stack to unveil hidden gems of information from millions of documents and revolutionise how companies and public entities collaborate, with the ambition to make public tenders accessible for everyone. 🔍 By joining Romain’s team, you will learn from the best and have the opportunity to design, build, implement & optimise systems from scratch and making a tangible contribution to Sonaar’s product while taking part in a fast-growing venture 🚀 🔹Why Sonaar? ▶ Join a startup where the product is the keystone of our strategy 🏗 ▶ Be part of a team with its feet on the ground and its head in the stars ✨ ▶ Believe in the mission to make public tenders sexy 😂 If you’re a developer who’s ready to take on an exciting tech challenge with real-world impact, this is it! Join us, and let’s build something extraordinary together. Join us for our next team retreat with : Romain F., Amélie Meunier, Mathieu Leng, Grégoire Legris, Jean Rifflart 📌 Apply now and make your mark on something truly innovative. 👇 Link to the job description in comments #FullStackDeveloper #Hiring #AI #MachineLearning #NLP #Sonaar #TechJobs #Innovation #PublicTenders #StartupLife

44

5 Comments

Pie is LIVE in San Francisco. This is not a city that is dumb to new startups. There is e large and growing graveyard of companies and apps that have tried to solve the problem of making friends IRL. Having worked on this for five years, here is why we think Pie is right on time: 1. Our Pie Creator Fund is creating a gig economy of people building IRL communities. Loving people is one thing. Being able to afford the time and treasure to bring them together is another. Apply here: piecreatorfund.com 2. Most Pie plans are free. The internet is littered with paid opportunities to buy tickets. But what if you don't know what to expect? What if you don't know what is worth paying for? Believe in free: getpie.app (and click San Francisco). 3. We have secrets about the future. Not all of them are in our product yet. We hope that you give us a shot and maybe later we can tell you our secrets. Maybe you don't have to figure out who to hang out with, maybe we can do that for you.

113

11 Comments

We hosted our first ever Hangar DX dinner in SF this week! We kept the dinner intimate with 12 DX leaders from Slack, Notion, Figma, Reddit, Amplitude, LinkedIn, Yelp, Benchling, Babylist and AMD. This gave everyone opportunity to have open unfiltered conversation about the DevEx space today, and form real connections. These were some of my most surprising findings: 🌟 None of the DevEx teams have a Product Manager - it is extremely hard to find a PM for DevEx who truly understands and aligns with developers' complex workflow needs 🌟 Even though everyone feels the pain of ownership, no one is using any off-the-shelf IDP today 🌟 Roadmap is primarily driven bottoms up - everyone uses some form of surveys and internal interviews to inform the roadmap 🌟 Influencing C-suite and explaining impact seems to be on top of mind Thank you Poya Osgouei for helping host the dinner, and Aviator for sponsoring :) #developerproductivity #developerexperience #devex

19

9 Comments