Gemma Silvers

What’s ahead for 2024? Elections in some of the most influential countries in the world including the US, India, Venezuela, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, China and the UK. And yet we have zero handle on the use of generative AI, by legitimate or illegitimate players, in manipulating the electorates in how they will vote. That’s terrifying. In a small effort to equip myself with some strategies and frameworks for how to think through the use of AI in digital product design I took this course. It’s only a start but it’s an important one. Center for Humane Technology (CHT) remind us that it is possible, and economically viable, to develop products that help humanity rather just driving engagement. To anyone who is applying AI to products that will be out in our world, I recommend looking into the work of Tristan Harris, Randima Fernando and colleagues at CHT. So, that’s my hot take for the new calendar year. What’s shaping your thinking around AI?

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Wow! It’s been a week 🫠. I might have missed the live posting, but as I start to recover from the exhaustion, I wanted to share the amazing things we’ve just shipped at #NetlifyCompose2024 But for those who want a TL;DR version, my product engineering organisation kicked ass and we shipped some awesome stuff. I’m so so proud of everyone involved in getting us here ❤️ Now for the detail… First up, we have AI Assisted Publishing, which helps to turn written content into fully fledged webpages in a couple clicks. No longer do Marketing need to pester Engineering to get things pushed live! Next we have Async Workloads. We built these internally to support the AI Assisted Publishing and wanted to share more widely. Because that’s just how we roll 🚀 You can now use event driven architectures inside your functions! Which in turn was enabled by the GA of Netlify Extensions. This is an evolution of our integrations, build plugins, and SDK and has so much more power. SDK 2.0 was the driver for all of this. I am very excited by what this unlocks as an API/SDK nerd. We already have partners who have built extensions and those at the conference excited about getting started. We’ve also been improving all the things we had already and making them better for you! Our functions are now longer running on all tiers/plans. You too can now write code that runs for 30 seconds. Which makes LLM API calls a lot more realistic. Combine that with our Async Workloads and 💥 For our enterprise customers, we have our WAF fully available, and early access to Dev Server which enables you to work on your site live while it is in development in Netlify managed container. It will go on to power all visual editing on Netlify. The future is bright. The future is Netlify! Thank you for reading this far if you did! There are so many folks to thank and I know if I try. I will miss some. In summary there were some incredible efforts from my managers, my teams, and my peers ❤️ (Also, if San Francisco could just be a little bit cooler! I missed the fog. Words I never thought I’d say 🤣)

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Do you believe in a growth mindset? I do - and it's led me through countless mistakes (and a few spectacular faux pas!). But I've learned something valuable from each one. Next week at LeadDev London, I'll share the hard-won wisdom and practical tips that helped me transition from first-line manager to a strategic senior leader. Beyond excited! #LeadDevLondon #GrowthMindset #LeadershipLessons

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Day 1 at LeadDev First impression: Oh my word this is big! It's a different scale to any other conference that I've been to. It's been a busy day too. 13 presentations, table talks, loads of company booths, food, drink and lots of chatting. The speakers were amazing and the stage was huge! 13 talks is too many to summarise and do any justice to, so here are my high level take aways: 1. Be proactive. Own the situation, don't let it own you. There is a lot of chaos in the tech industry at the moment. Covid, recovery from covid, layoffs, AI and about a million other things. But out of that chaos comes opportunity. The industry and indeed the world is changing at a rate never known before. Techies are suddenly being made into execs because it turns out we have some of the skills to navigate this new world. Let's use that power for good. On a smaller scale we should choose the work we do and we should choose the things we enjoy. If you find a some work mundane, does it need to be done or can it be automated? Failing that pass it off to someone more junior who will be stretched by it. Different people can get a buzz out of different things. 2. Data doesn't have to be hard and quantitative to be useful. When you want to know how your team is doing and what the blockers are, it might be best to ask them rather than set up a whole bunch of complex metrics. Even better ask them specific pointed questions immediately after completing a bit of work, rather than in a generic survey 3 months later. 3. 53% of techies are neurodivergent, but only 3% are open about it. Small accommodations go a long way and can end up with big benefits for the whole team. Having restrictions can force you to be creative, as can diversity.

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Leading Cross-Org Tech Reviews Josie has written a great post about driving a cross-org multi-team tech review practice. It's very focussed, as only senior principal-level engineers are usually tasked with those projects. I do think that org leaders as well as senior engineers will benefit from reading the article and adopting the best practices described there. It's also an excellent example of how to scale one person's efforts across multiple team, and thus applies to more than just tech surveys. Project planning, roadmaps, and tech explorations all have the common characteristic of standardized templates, parallel execution, and open questions. Read on here: https://lnkd.in/gX6bnXzq

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This week marks the end of my 4.5+ years of employment at Immersive Labs. I’ve worked with amazing people on some really interesting stuff in that time, but I've decided that the time has come to try something new. I have received so many kind words of support from those I’m saying goodbye to, support which I’ll be printing out and sticking to my home office walls, for the moments of extreme self doubt that lay ahead 😅. As for what's next... my aspiration is to co-found something of my own. For the past 10 years working in startups and scaleups, I have worn a great many hats; backend, frontend, devops, data engineer, SRE, tech. PM, eng. leadership. I would love to apply all of that knowledge taking something from zero to one. The obvious question everyone has quite reasonably asked is, what’s my idea? The problem is, I don’t have one! Well, I have many, but they are probably bad. The problem area I am most keen to work on is accelerating the net zero emissions transition, or at least where software plays a significantly role in it, such as energy management or home retrofit. I have not worked in these industries though, just a growing obsession with them. With that in mind I have a favour to ask. If you have experience in an industry in this space, and a desire to found, please get in touch! And if you know someone who fits that bill, please do repost. While my aspiration is to co-found, I’m also interested in senior roles in early stage startups too. Many thanks, Matt In the meantime, I’ll be taking some long overdue offline time… see you in a couple weeks!

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How do you make sure your website is up and running 24/7 and that your customers can convert at any time? There are many complicated solutions to this problem, but in this post I will show you how I developed and implemented a very simple solution to help us achieve this at Zalando and address the blind spots we discovered. Want to know more? Reach out and get the expertise of deploying frontend software at scale with high reliability

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I'm seeing a lot of hate directed at #storypoints at the moment. Personally, I've always found them useful as they make it easy to bake unknowns and complexity into estimates, rather than just thinking about everything in terms of elapsed time. I've definitely seen story points done badly (1 story point = 1 day is a classic anti-pattern), but you could say the same about any tool, technology or technique. On the assumption that businesses need to be able to plan, and some sort of malleable estimation technique is required of the team, how do people prefer to measure their team's velocity? #agile

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I gave a talk at the most recent London Ruby User Group (#LRUG) on how experienced programmers solve problems, and what that means about how we think and communicate as human beings: https://lnkd.in/eBzTM53t I am really proud of this talk and care deeply about this subject; I'd love if you could give it a watch! (slides available here: https://lnkd.in/eXX89qXe)

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After a long day at work, everyone needs a little break. Can you think of any better way to relax than a little sparring with Rust's borrow checker? I can not :) With that in mind, I'm happy to present the progress on my open-grid Tower Defence game(made in Bevy Engine) - check out my small demo video! https://lnkd.in/dNxni8cr #Rust #Bevy #GameDev #DarkWispsDefence

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To say that I’ve had a bad week would be an under statement. I try to lose myself in reading and whilst it’s not the best coping strategy it does yield some interesting results … like this piece which really resonates with me: "Bad leaders execute, good leaders improve, and great leaders compound. Compounding is not about improvisation but a coherent set of actions in response to strategic challenges ahead. [...] A strategy is a designed response to the challenges ahead." We often fall into the trap of viewing strategy as a cure-all, neglecting to validate if the problems we identify are truly the most impactful for the business. We can create meticulously crafted documents brimming with well-intentioned policies and actions, but these efforts often yield minimal organisational recognition or lasting impact due to a lack of prioritisation. https://lnkd.in/ek8Xjfkx

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Google/Nest needs to seriously throw the DIY community a bone, specifically Home Assistant users. It’s important to remember that like many products, features are often derivative works of the ingenuity and ideas of power users. So it was disappointing to learn today that despite us being all-in on Google household hardware (ie, if there’s a G product in the space we opt for that - 20+ devices across cameras, thermostats, and speakers), that because of that amount of adoption the ability to integrate with Home Assistant is rendered useless. How does the Device Access Sandbox API have a 5/10 QPM rate limit PER PROJECT Anish Kattukaran? The docs explicitly say the Sandbox is intended for personal use.

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David Edmonston is too kind ❤️ Since he mentioned it to me, I’ve gone down the Zettelkasten wormhole and like what it offers. After years of note-taking, I’ve got my system dialled in, but I like seeing how others approach it to keep improving. Linking notes and references was my biggest game-changer, “Contextual Computing”. Moving from Evernote to Obsidian turbo-charged it. Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is something I geek out over, along with Omnifocus and GTD for task management. It’s all about having a system that not only stores knowledge but makes it accessible when you need it. Looking forward to comparing notes (pun intended) with David Edmonston!😀 Edit: In a twist of fate, I came across https://lnkd.in/e43Ys-U8 I love this perspective: "My satisfaction no longer lies in the doing of my CTO responsibilities, but rather in the cultivation of my own knowledge." How do you take notes? What do you use for note-taking?

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🚀 𝐇𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐬: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐈𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧! 💡 A few weeks back, I had the privilege of sharing my thoughts on 𝑯𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒏 𝒄𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 with none other than Per Lange, the visionary behind one of the world’s largest Hackathon organisers, #Cillers 🌍 We dove deep into how #Hackathon are not just fun competitions—they're powerful platforms to 𝘂𝗻𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗵 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱-𝗯𝗼𝗴𝗴𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮𝘀 that can reshape industries. Some of the 𝒈𝒂𝒎𝒆-𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒅𝒖𝒄𝒕𝒔 born from Hackathons include: 𝐒𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐤 – Started as a game idea but transformed into one of the world’s leading collaboration tools. 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩𝐌𝐞 – A messaging app that went from Hackathon to being acquired by Skype. 𝐙𝐚𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐫 – Simplifying automation across apps, bringing seamless productivity to everyone. Hackathons are 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒂𝒔 𝒎𝒆𝒆𝒕 𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏, pushing boundaries and creating products that would otherwise remain untapped. 🎙️ 𝐄𝐱𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐧𝐞𝐰𝐬! Our podcast episode discussing the 𝒑𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒓 𝒐𝒇 𝑯𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒏𝒔 and how they drive innovation is 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐰! Don’t miss it! #HackathonCulture #Innovation #TechLeadership #NextBigThing #UnleashCreativity #BusinessIdeas #HackathonSuccess #Chillers #PodcastLive

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Day 2 at #LeadDevLondon LeadDev What a great conference! I'm exhausted. More fantastic talks today and I got to meet loads more exciting people (hi to you all!). Again too many talks to comment on individually, so again I'm going to pick out themes. 1. How do you make decisions? This seems to have been a running theme across all three days, but there were great talks about it on day 2. The first thing is you are going to need to notice that you are making a decision at all and take a moment to step back. Things to weight up: - Do you have existing biases? - Have you stepped back far enough to consider all the options? Throwing in some wild options is a good way to open it up. - What are the upsides? - What are the risks? - Who needs to buy into the decision? (Not just your line, but also other teams who's support you are going to need, or customers/teams that you want to use the output). - Do you have the skills? Or are they skills that your team would like to gain? - What are the maintenance costs? If this is a migration are you really going to be able to get rid of the legacy system? How quickly? - What are the repercussions for other teams/areas? - How are you going to get feedback as the project progresses? Metrics? People? - Above all, is this going to be fun? As you go through all those questions and indeed the project be curious, humble and empathetic. 2. Humans > machines, metrics, process.......... If you are putting people first you probably aren't going to go too far wrong. That isn't to say there isn't a place for all those other things, but they are there to assist people, not the other way around. If people are giving you a clear signal, you better listen to it. 3. Finally some practical advice from the bug all stars talk: - Be explicit in your APIs, make it super clear exactly what parameters/outputs are. - Get help whatever help you can to validate your code, whether that is from people, or from tools. - Don't try to solve difficult problems that have already been solved, use existing hardened libraries. Thanks to all the speakers/organisers, you were amazing. Thanks as well to my LeadDev buddies: Jen Kitson, Yanqing Cheng, Alice Twist, Daniel Phillips and Macauley Davy, sorry I didn't catch you all for the photo before you left. Finger's crossed I'll be back next year!

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The policies being driven forward by Thierry Breton around the EU AI Act have been utmost damaging for the European tech industry, and they need to be revised as soon as possible. We need to better balance driving European innovation through data collection and modeling with conflicting needs such as data protection and safety. We need to ensure we can turn these developments into businesses that can be the pillar of the next generation of companies that provide productivity growth in Europe. We have no other choice - either we do this here, or we will have to take over products developed in the US and in China, as it already happened with search engines, cell phones, and social networks. We wouldn't want to let this happen with AI applications in robotics or digital assistants. #euacc #euaiact #aiact

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In the run-up to Develop:Brighton, I've an idea for a comedic article buzzing around that I'm hoping to publish in time for the fun next week. However, I wanted to provide a quicker bit of advice before then, based on data I've found on the event's MeetToMatch. If you're attending Develop as a student, freelancer, or someone looking for work...PLEASE fill out your MeetToMatch profile with something descriptive. Some attendees do browse the profiles to find people that seem interesting to have chats with at the event, and I'm seeing a small proportion mentioning anything as basic as what their field and/or specialty actually is (around 50% of those looking for work, and 20% of students). In most students' cases, I can see more about what university they're attending than what they're studying. Like in previous years, I *want* to dedicate some time at the conference to helping out others, be it with industry advice, CV/portfolios reviews etc as I've benefited from similar support myself in previous Develop years. But I can offer more targetted advice to coders than I can to artists, producers etc - And reaching out to random profiles simply marked "Student" or "Looking for Work" is risky in a meeting system with limited/top-up meeting credits. Please: Make it easy for people to find you for things you may find relevant. BTW a special shout out to the voice actors out there, this don't apply to them at all. From what I've seen, almost every VA coming to Develop is P-R-E-P-A-R-E-D! #developbrighton #meettomatch

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Have you ever said **NO** to a project? We have—countless times. We believe in aligning our work with our values, which means we choose not to engage with projects involving pornography or other content we consider immoral. Saying no isn't always easy, but it's essential for maintaining integrity and staying true to our principles. How do you handle situations where a potential project doesn't align with your values? Have you ever turned down work to uphold your ethical standards? Let's discuss the importance of staying true to ourselves in our professional lives. #ProfessionalIntegrity #EthicalBusiness #ValuesDrivenWork

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