Shayne Holmes

https://lnkd.in/gQTGcv7H Nothing in this was directly written by a human. I also did not make an easily repeatable prompt. This was just an experiment in human to ai to coding.

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Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. 🌟 Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

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Very well said. Understanding and stating the value of proposed work in customer / business terms is critical to determining what to do, and when. This is the essence of prioritization, and thus decisionmaking. See also Cost of Delay, WSJF, etc.

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Time to be fair.... In past posts, I have been less than complimentary of the DLC regulations that now make it more difficult to implement SMS into an application. I understand that all sorts of organizations use (and misuse) SMS millions (billions?) of times daily. I get that the new regulations make an attempt to reduce, as much as possible, SMS Spam. All in all, it just seemed like another example of hand-cuffing the good guys while trying to put some limits on the bad actors. My experience at the time was with #Twilio... and I tried to make it very clear that my frustration wasn't necessarily with them - they were doing the best they could to handle an avalanche of organizations trying to comply with new rules that everyone was stumbling their way through. I've been using Twilio for years and can't complain AT ALL about the platform performance for my particular small-scale needs. It was the nearly impossible approval process that really soured me. After nearly a year of living without application-based SMS (email only), I decided to revisit. The application was already all wired up for the feature - it was just dormant. This time around I was able to get up and running in 3 days... 99% of which was the DLC approval - which happened today. Kudos #Twilio for suffering through the tough days and making SMS once again something that can be done with very little pain. #twilio #sms #dlcapproval

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Isn’t it funny that 60% of engineering managers see a shortage of qualified candidates while 56% plan to increase headcount? The math is not mathin’. 🧮 Maybe it’s time to rethink what makes a “good engineer”. Skills are evolving with AI and machine learning, and our criteria needs to evolve too. The “passion engineer” coding all night is rare now, and that’s okay — maybe even better — because we can introduce more diverse skill sets, experiences, and problem-solving. Let’s evaluate our talent definitions, invest in training, and embrace diverse paths of excellence. ✨ For more insights like these, check out Jellyfish's 2024 State of Engineering Management report: https://lnkd.in/eKAJ5jZy

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🌟 Attention Engineering Managers and Technical Leaders! 🌟 In just two weeks, on June 28th at 10 AM PDT, I’m excited to host an interactive roundtable on Feature Flags and Delivery in conjunction with ELC! 🚀 Why Attend? This is a collaborative discussion where your expertise and curiosity are key! Whether you're experienced or eager to learn, your contributions are invaluable. 🔍 Discussion Points: - Decoupling Processes - Boosting Team Efficiency - Optimizing Feature Delivery - Tracking Platform Usage Expect rich conversations on best practices, unique implementations, methodologies, and the latest tools enhancing feature flagging and delivery. Who Should Join? - Engineering Managers - Technical Leads - DevOps Engineers - Software Developers This roundtable is your chance to: - Share your experiences - Gain new insights - Network with peers - Discover practical recommendations RSVP Now and mark your calendars for June 28th at 10 AM PDT! Let’s collaborate and elevate our skills together! #EngineeringManagement #TechLeaders #FeatureFlags #DevOps #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamEfficiency #TechRoundtable

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From IC engineer to C-Level exec, the most effective people I've worked with have one thing in common: they break down and decouple decisions. Optionality, trade-offs, last responsible moment, one-way and two-way door decisions, slicing, MVPs, proof of concepts etc. are all techniques they use for breaking decisions down and getting them made. The best engineers did this when working on code. Rather than trying to decide on all the functionality at once they'd be able to say "I can break this story down into smaller pieces of value that we can get released to users fast" or "we don't need to deliver this piece of functionality now, we can wait until we see how user's respond". The best architects, product managers and business leaders do the same thing. It's a real skill to decouple decisions. It's a real skill to be able to defer parts of a decision to next or later (or even never) to enable faster movement and lower risk. I have always been impressed when I witness it. Often it's obvious with hindsight and sometimes its completely out-of-the-box and you would have never have realised.

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Recommendations for Fellow Software Engineers: In today’s era of software engineering, much of our work revolves around using pre-built “Lego blocks” and stitching them together to create innovative products. While this approach has led to incredible efficiency and progress, it comes with a trade-off: if assembling components is all we do as engineers, our skills risk becoming stagnant over time. Few of us get the opportunity to redesign a platform from scratch — transforming it from an on-premises monolith to a modern cloud platform. I was fortunate to be part of such a journey. Years ago, I worked on building a traditional n-tier architecture, which was cutting-edge for its time. Later, I had the opportunity to transform that same platform using cloud methodologies. In doing so, we wore many hats: application engineers, DevOps practitioners, database specialists, SREs, and security experts. As platforms mature and regulations grow more complex, it often makes sense to bring in specialized roles. However, this specialization can lead to a gradual erosion of certain foundational skills. If you were to revisit the journey of building or transforming a platform, particularly in a smaller company, these skills might be essential once again. That’s why I make a point of taking a “purist” approach during my staycations, working on coding projects that move beyond assembling pre-built services. Instead, I focus on building systems from scratch to refresh and maintain my core technical skills. For instance, during one staycation, I built an API server entirely from the ground up. I set up security configurations, registered a domain name, added SSL certificates, and implemented a basic API with proper CORS settings. This month, I am building on top of that foundation. While there are plenty of services that can handle authentication and login for you, I decided to code these features from scratch to revisit the fundamentals. Over a week of part-time effort, I designed a custom registration, authentication, and login system with two-factor authentication. I also considered the security of my implementation and explored telemetry options to protect the APIs. My goal is to have a fully functional sample website by the end of the holiday season, allowing users to register and authenticate, powered by APIs I’ve built myself. So, what’s my takeaway for you? Choose a pet project that challenges you to revisit and refresh the skills you might have taken for granted — those building blocks that are often pre-built in your company’s ecosystem. Keeping these skills sharp ensures you remain adaptable, versatile, and prepared for whatever engineering challenges lie ahead. #softwareengineering #code #programming

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Call me crazy, but I think LinkedIn could easily improve its reputation and gain a lot of goodwill and trust if they treated the site more like the office instead of Tinder by doing a few simple things it could do today: 1. Only allowed people to post jobs if they first validated their profile using CLEAR / etc to prove they are human. This would stop all the fake jobs posted by people with data science backgrounds who are clearly just running illegal studies by posting ghost jobs, and allow LinkedIn to get better metrics on the real market so it can provide useful recommendations. Sunlight would disinfect a lot. 2. Gave people realistic spam filters on LinkedIn messages. Let me block people who have not proved they are human instead of generative AI, let me block people who don't fit user specific regulatory requirements such as Residency in a specific country or ability to be held accountable to a specific legal jurisdiction, and usage of LinkedIn as a virtual global office will skyrocket. LinkedIn likes to pretend that it's the business version of social media but I've never worked at a company that did not force people to prove that they are who and what they claimed to be. LinkedIn allows fake accounts, and that makes it a worse experience. I deal with a lot of ai generated accounts. Some even blatantly add AI generated profile images of fake people that don't exist. 3. Because of number 2 above, the prevalence of scams and state actors working in intelligence capacities on the website is out of control. Yes I said it, LinkedIn is full of spies and scammers, and AI's run by them, all pretending to be real humans with real jobs to fill. The reason the job market has gotten so bad isn't that people don't want to hire or that companies don't want to continue existing, It's that there is a coordinated supply chain attack going on that is intentionally trying to make it harder for them to hire. The worst part about this is that you can only report people as not real humans so many times per 24 hour period before it stops working. And many of these fake profiles are blatant scams, Literally asking you for your Social Security number to be submitted to a ghost job at a company that I know doesn't really ask for that. We've all seen the posts about scammers following profiles for new jobs and pretending to be the CEO and making requests of the employee, or trying to take advantage of job seekers. That would stop overnight if they simply changed a few simple things to make things more secure. 4. And yeah, I mentioned Tinder earlier so I think it's fair to say that some of the messages that I see sent to women on this website are not professional. I imagine it's probably far worse. If Linkedin is really dedicated to having a professional and safe environment. then I think the ability to do filters and validate identities only serves to help with that and make people feel safe. Just a thought or 2.

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I relate to this quite a lot. I'm currently migrating some core logging functions, for example, to fix some systemic issues, and while I'm not doing all of the labor myself, I was certainly the only person driving the change, implemented the new methodology, and am handling all of the issues which arise in the process. Most of my projects these days (often self-directed) are of this type (ie: see something which needs systemic improvement, even if it touches a lot of code, and figure out how to do it).

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I'm sure there are a few of you out there wondering what I have been up to since I left Cadence. I was lucky enough to join a terrific startup called Metrics Design Automation. I’d like to tell you how wonderful our products are, but it would be better if you saw for yourself. If you have any interest in simulation, please go to www.metrics.ca and check it out! While you're there, watch a couple of the videos we put together that show you how easy it is to get started with DSim.

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If you’re building platforms for developers you have to watch what engineers are doing with output from your UX. Almost always there’s a cut and paste operation that you can make easier for them.

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Had a great catch-up earlier this week with my dear friend Keji. We talked about a variety of things, as we always do, but something she said really resonated with me. This article perfectly reinforces her point: stop inventing product problems and focus on solving real customer problems. Look, it is exceptionally challenging to excel at building products that deeply resonate with customers' needs and experiences. This does not mean engineers must take on the role of Product Managers, but rather, they should cultivate curiosity to thoroughly understand customer pain points and explore creative solutions. Engineers bring unique strengths to this process: an understanding of effort, awareness of risks and constraints, and the ability to generate innovative options. By engaging in this way, engineers become proactive partners, contributing insights and fostering an ownership mindset. This collaboration transforms PMs from sole decision-makers into co-creators working alongside informed, engaged engineers. The result is not just functional products but solutions that surprise and delight customers while addressing their core needs effectively. > "The prioritization process turns into haggling: we will solve this many product problems to this many design problems to this many developer problems. While everyone is haggling for themselves, there is no time left to exercise all that empathy for the customer.[…] In reality, no products are desirable to customers. Customers have desirable outcomes, which products can help them reach."

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I've been programming professionally for over 20 years now. Work experience with tcl/tk, perl, php, ruby, python, javascript, elixir, erlang, typescript, and go. And I've hobby programmed in much more including rust and clojure. Elixir makes it easy to program things that are quite difficult to express in other languages. Systems that can tolerate faults to an almost mythical degree. Systems that can selectively shed state to get back to a stable point. Systems that spread compute work across all available resources. Systems that ensure slow operations cannot bog everything else down. These things are possible in any language, sure. But the work is already done in Elixir. Here are some great video resources if you are at all curious https://lnkd.in/e9MuQsed https://lnkd.in/eafr8Mmm

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I am genuinely curious about something and frankly, this seems like the only place to get a good answer: Are people in business classes still being taught models based off of factories? (e.g. You run a Widget Factory that produces some number of items per day.) If so, that might explain a lot of the more curious approaches and fixations I've noted over the years working for decidedly non-factory based industries.

I liked this migration story a lot (in addition to it just being a Rewrite-it-in-Rust thing). Lots of good tradeoff discussions in addition to gory technical and non-technical details. A few key takeaways for me: * Motivation really does matter! Even if rust is chosen just because "it's more fun", if that gets you more contributors that's a good thing * the last 10% is always the last 90% * incremental migrations are necessary, big-bang rewrites don't work "The port wasn’t without challenges, and it did not all go entirely as planned. But overall, it went pretty dang well. We’re now left with a codebase that we like a lot more, that has already gained some features that would have been much more annoying to add with C++, with more on the way, and we did it while creating a separate 3.7 release that also included some cool stuff." https://lnkd.in/gVtYb8DC

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> "Wartime stretches and strains Engineering Managers especially hard because they receive pressure from above and below. By ruthlessly focusing on well-aligned delivery, building a resilient team, investing in individuals, and maintaining your own health, you can lead your team to not just survive but thrive under pressure. Keep calm, "lean into the suck", and trust that you've got what it takes. Your people count on you." In this article Péter Szász outlines practical advice for engineering managers in crisis situations, drawing from his own experiences. Péter identifies a key concept: during "wartime," focus on what's essential, moving quickly, and making decisions without being bogged down by perfectionism. When everything is urgent, prioritisation is critical—managers need to be ruthless about what gets attention, ensuring alignment with the most important business objectives. Team resilience becomes paramount in crises. I completely agree when Péter emphasizes the importance of maintaining a healthy, functional team despite mounting pressures. Leaders must foster an environment that supports well-being and personal growth, even when times are tough. This involves transparency, providing context for decisions, and showing empathy, as teams tend to trust leaders more when they feel included in the process. At the same time, they should continue to encourage a sense of ownership, so each team member feels empowered to contribute, even under stress. Péter also touches on the personal toll leadership can take in high-pressure situations. Leaders need to take care of their own mental and physical health to avoid burnout and remain effective. He suggests that managers assess their limits, manage expectations, and delegate where possible to maintain a sustainable work environment. This particular point hammered home for me since we've been dealing with a crisis at work recently and an area I overlooked was my own well being. Ultimately, Péter's approach is to balance urgent decision-making with long-term team care, ensuring that immediate problems are solved while protecting the team's future potential. The article also provides tactical advice for maintaining momentum, such as reducing the dependency on meetings, breaking down tasks into manageable chunks, and keeping the team focused on solving the right problems. https://lnkd.in/euapKeKQ

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Project update! My application tracking extension is now doing fuzzier matching and injecting new information into LinkedIn (and other sites) to keep me from doubling up on applications. Next up: local storage and bulk import/export operations...

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Accessible, Inclusive, Safe, Secure, Sustainable, Reliable, Resilient, Transparent, Independent, Human-centred. "We need a web by and for humans". humanewebmanifesto.com What an important and necessary project by Michelle Barker. Read & share!

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