Donald Piret

Started a little experiment, a site I'm developing in the open while hosting (locally) https://lnkd.in/g9vXgFFX It'll be rough for a bit while I build it out on GitHub https://lnkd.in/gUK8dpTi but trying to do it all in the open while making it *somewhat* functional as I do it.

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At a certain level of seniority you and your peers will share less and less in common, you don’t have the same jobs, you don’t work on the same products or are solving the same problems. The two questions I’m thinking about are (1) does it represent a failure of company strategy that somehow we aren’t aligned as peers to something larger and compelling (2) are there practices to still make a regular staff meeting compelling under these conditions (or I supposed (3) is the staff meeting a success and sufficient if it works for the person whose staff meeting it is)

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Super excited to be back at the SingaporeJS meet-up next Tuesday, 13 August! I asked Erik Nguyen if I should present a new talk, and he said why not. So, here it is—I’ll be sharing some tips and tricks for frontend debugging using DevTools. With this being a fresh talk, I'll be spending the National Day 🇸🇬 long weekend preparing the slides. Majulah Singapura! Happy 59th birthday, Singapore 🇸🇬! As a web developer, you've likely relied on console.log countless times—but what if there’s a more efficient way to debug? Many of us tend to overlook the full range of powerful features that browser DevTools offer beyond basic logging. In this session, we'll uncover some of the hidden gems within DevTools, introducing techniques and features that can completely change how you debug. We’ll go through everything from debugging hidden elements to using tools like Visual Coverage, Animation Timeline, Performance panels, and more. Expect around 20 tips to take your debugging skills to the next level and make your workflow smoother. A lot of these DevTools features get missed because we assume they’re just common knowledge. Think of this session as an information buffet—I'll present a variety of tools for you to explore. Let's dive in with curiosity and see how we can rethink our debugging approach! Looking forward to seeing you all next week. This is an in-person event at the Rakuten Asia Pte Ltd office in CapitaGreen. RSVP here: https://lnkd.in/gjY5KpgW

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https://lnkd.in/gdGKdeAW - New project I built using a combination of Replit Agent, Perplexity search API using llama-3.1-sonar & OpenAI API Assistant. You're not sure how to vote on that? Take a quiz about your core values then this app will research it/them and help you decide.

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🌟 From IC to Leader - Learning to Empower, Not Pressure 🌟 Moving from an individual contributor (IC) role to managing a team has been a bigger transition than I anticipated. As an IC, I thrived on solving problems quickly and setting high standards. But as a manager, I realized this approach was creating pressure on my team to work to the same expectations, sometimes without the same resources or experiences. Here’s how I’m shifting my approach to lead more effectively: 1. Involving the Team in Goal-Setting: Rather than setting targets based on my personal past performance, I find ways for my team to establish goals. This allows each person to feel ownership and stay motivated without unnecessary pressure. 2. Celebrating Progress, Not Perfection: I’ve started to recognize progress and small wins along the way, not just the final outcomes. Acknowledging milestones in long-term projects shows my team that growth is a journey, not a race to an end point. 3. Supporting, Not Solving: When a team member encounters a challenge, instead of offering a solution immediately, I ask questions like, “What steps would you take here?” or “How would you solve this?” It empowers them to think critically and builds their confidence. Other areas where small changes can bring big impact. 1. Modeling Work-Life Balance: I’m activaley working on demonstrating healthy boundaries—like stepping away from emails after hours or taking necessary breaks. Setting this example reassures the team that they’re not expected to be “always on” to be successful. 2. Delegating Ownership, Not Just Tasks: I’ve started assigning entire projects based on individual strengths, rather than just single tasks. Full ownership makes each member feel trusted and responsible for the outcome, while I focus on guiding and supporting the overall strategy. Each of these changes has been valuable in helping me transition from being a problem-solver to an enabler. Leadership is about empowering others, and I’m grateful for the lessons learned along the way. How do you manage such challenges on your team? #Leadership #EmpoweringTeams #MiddleManagement #GrowthMindset #Teamwork #LinkedInCommunity

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"It's 2024, The Frontend Deserves Observability Too," indeed! Check out our webinar with the talented Winston Hearn to learn more, coming up October 22: https://lnkd.in/gQmauZc6

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When it comes to machines, my MacBook is my best friend—always there for me, except when it decides to update right before a deadline! 😅💻 If you can relate to it, share your fun tech stories in the comment section. 😄 #MacBook #Loyalty #TechLife #FunnyButTrue #Technology #Machines

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"Design is a team sport. Everyone who touches the product is a designer, whether they realize it or not." (Jared Spool 2018) Today I wanted to shout out my software engineering colleague at Inversity Adrian Montagu MEng, who has been doing a stellar job delivering features across the site, including a much-needed facelift of our landing page at https://inversity.co The best engineers lean into the product space and this is even more true in an early stage startup like Inversity where it's crucial that the eventual end-user experience is kept front-and-centre of any features that we build. It's been really rewarding for me to see Adrian working with colleagues in the Product space to bring about some great designs that not only look great, but are sympathetic to technical realities such as SEO and different screen sizes etc. But what about if you're not a natural designer? Not everyone is, but it is a learnt skill and there's loads of great stuff out there already to draw from - Adrian recommended https://dribbble.com/ as a source of inspiration for design ideas, which I've certainly found useful. #inversity #design #softwareEngineering #startup

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Triplebyte a recruiting company for devs that launched in 2018 once valued at $135m got acquired in 2023🦄... Their former head of product wrote a postmortem on what she feels went wrong: 🌎 - https://lnkd.in/eWWBEevN ℹ️ Initial growth was fueled by when engineers were in high demand and interest rates were low for VC backed companies to grow headcounts. But struggled to be better at their core value prop than competitors within their market. ℹ️ They engaged in a lot of AD spending but eventually had diminishing returns and it did not help improve their growth rate. ℹ️ Ultimately this proved that they could not create a scalable business that is viable in a VC backed environment or set of criteria. They were only able to prove that they could be a small and not high growth business with large returns in a short time frame. ℹ️ They never really figured out how to make their users more successful at what they currently do but tried to change their users’ behaviour without fully understanding it. ℹ️ Their attempt to pivot was not carefully setup with the correct success metrics. Usage of a product needs to turn into tangible value that fuels business growth. This was a great read! 🐸 the team should be equally celebrated that they managed to build a business that could be in a state that it could be acquired and still return some form of value to everyone with equity. 💡🌟

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For a long time, I've been using the SBIR framework for giving feedback, especially strong constructive feedback. Recently, ▫️ Daniel Bendavid introduced me to a TED video that overlaps and complements with SBIR and is a great addition to a feedback toolkit. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/ewZPRR46. #Feedback #SBIRFramework #ConstructiveCriticism #TEDVideo #ProfessionalDevelopment

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People ask me to help them find resources to get hands on experience with AI/ML pretty often. Usually I send some YouTube links I like, or Medium articles. I'm not one to farm engagement, so instead of doing a Medium post myself and trying to get clicks, I just made a colab of a toy example of LoRA fine-tuning Meta's Llama 3.2 1B Instruct to make up pretty nonsense recipes. I think there's something interesting about small-large language models that is just beginning to dawn at the edges of the LLM explosion, so I wanted (myself) to kick the tires on this smallest of Lllamas. Feel free to copy this and try it out (its not anything super serious or complex, I promise). You won't become an expert by running all the cells, but if you follow along and let yourself get curious, you'll probably learn how to learn about this stuff - or at least not be as intimidated about trying stuff out. Oh! and LMK if you want more of this kind of junk from me.

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With many companies embarking on #GenAI projects, data engineers suddenly have to figure out how to process increasingly large amounts of data, likely in real-time. And many of the technologies in this space are not easy to get started with! The open source Quix Streams library allows you to easily process data in real time in pure #Python. We have also introduced streaming DataFrames that allow you to treat data stream simply as continuously updating tables 👌 Thanks Anton for this awesome guide to help others get started!

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So, I'm actively looking for a new job (two weeks left before my layoff), and I just found an interesting method for generating cover letters. I've been using ChatGPT for a little while, by simply prompting it with: "Please generate a cover letter for me for the following job posting:" and then pasting the post. That worked pretty well, but I still had to do a decent amount of rewriting. I've tweaked this method a little bit, and am now getting much better results. I started a new chat, and began it with: > For the remaining conversation, I'm going to ask for cover letters for various job postings. Here, I'll give you my resume, and would like you to base the cover letters off the experience listed in this resume. Here is my resume: I pasted a plain text version of my resume after that. It responded with: > Based on your extensive experience, here's a tailored cover letter And then gave me a generic cover letter. But, after that, in the same conversation, I do something like: > Please create a cover letter for me for the following job posting, based on my experience: And I paste in the job posting after that. Now, the cover letters I get include mentions of my previous work. It's not perfect, by any means. I still have to check it for inaccuracies, and weird word usage (it really likes the word "enthusiasms"), but now I can get job-specific cover letters, with my experience included, with very little effort. #JobSearch #OpenToWork #AI

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I am excited to share my second article on technical leadership - exploring what it really means to be technical beyond the code! https://lnkd.in/gQhSw542 The biggest question I get asked: "Should engineering managers know how to code?" - ABSOLUTELY! ✅ "Should they code every day?" - NOPE! 🚫 "Should they have technical depth and acumen?"- WITHOUT A DOUBT! 💯 "Should they keep learning and growing technically?" ALWAYS! 🚀 Five years of leading engineering teams of varying sizes at Amazon has taught me so much, and I'm still learning every day. Sharing my journey here! #TechnicalLeadership #EngineeringManagement #SoftwareEngineering

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Hey Asana, I contacted your support team two weeks ago. One week ago, I asked for an update. I still haven't got any response apart from an automated email with a case number. I understand that it sometimes might take a bit longer to answer support tickets. But two weeks without any feedback? This is not okay. Especially because I contacted your support team, because you show messages about upcoming changes to our Asana account to our employees that we absolutely want to avoid happening. Therefore: Please tell me what I need to do to get an answer from your support team.

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This is me just thinking out loud and looking for any insights from the community. I've been using feature flags for many years now. And, I only just learned about the OpenFeature standard in the last few days (though, to be fair, it was only created somewhat recently I believe). I'm reading though the site for the project this morning (https://openfeature.dev/) and it's interesting. I'm a little conflicted in how I feel about it. I completely understand that, in general, standardization is a "Good Thing". But, on the other hand, it also feels a bit like it's adding complexity to something that (ideally) isn't all that complicated. I remember when LaunchDarkly had a breaking change in its SDK (Software Development Kit) wherein it changed the way in which "context" was being provided to the LDClient. I _assume_ that this was their team updating the SDK to adhere to the OpenFeature standard. It took me all of 30-minutes to update our code to accommodate their breaking changes. And, not because we had any notion of an open standard; but, because we were wrapping the LDClient interactions in our own application-specific class. As such, all breaking changes were contained within one class implementation that we owned. None of the LaunchDarkly implementation details leak out into the application (within reason). I believe this strategy of wrapping the thing that you "don't own" is fairly common? To be clear, I am not poo-poo'ing the open standard, I'm just thinking out loud and trying to figure out where it fits into my life as a product engineer. When I read through the list of reasons as to why this particular open standard is helpful, it makes me a little anxious. In particular, there seems to be a lot of focus on helping you understand feature flags within your application. But, to me—and granted my experience with feature flags is just in one company—it's a bit of a "red flag" if features need to be understood in any kind of generic way. Feature flags should, in the vast majority of the cases, be short lived, well contained, owned by a single team, live within a single bounded context, and get removed from the code as soon as they are no longer needed. The less that this is the case, the more likely it is that you have a "people problem" and not a "technology problem." Though to be clear, we use technology _all the time_ to solve people problems (*cough* Microservices, *cough* linters). I've seen parallels being drawn to the OpenTelemetry standard. And, how helpful that standard has been to engineering teams. I have no real hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry. So, I don't really know if this is a valid parallel to draw. I guess I'm just throwing this out there to ask if anyone here can share some insights about their consumption of the OpenFeature standard. Is it really meant for product engineers? Or, is it more a set of best practices that have emerged for SDK providers, and this is just a codification of said ideas?

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In Search and Rescue we have a saying "slow is smooth and smooth is fast". The same mindset can be applied to #SoftwareEngineering. Have urgency and bias towards action, but don't rush. Find the root cause. Fix it once. Fix it right. An extra few cycles now will make you faster in the long run.

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