Alex Quick

Got an email "GCP's Apache Kafka service is now live" at noon. After dinner, spent half an hour confirming it works well with Timeplus. I don't think you can make the bootstrap server publicly accessible. Has to setup a bastion host or run your app within the same project/VPC. Setting up the SASL username/pwd was not easy. Follow the guide carefully https://lnkd.in/gcKEVh3g and you may need to disable the iam.disableServiceAccountKeyCreation Anyway, if your workload are in GCP already, having such Kafka service in GCP is nice way to burn your cloud credits. Yet another Kafka vendor, great.

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Large codebases are scary! 😱 When you're starting out contributing to a mammoth codebase like SigNoz with over 300000 lines of code, you have no idea where to even start looking. We took an open issue from Signoz's repository and asked Potpie AI's low level design agent to help us get started. The results were mindblowing 🤯. For a repository with THOUSANDS of files, Potpie was able to : * Pinpoint which exact file needed to be updated * Tell which part of the code needed updating * Suggest next steps like testing 🥧 agents >> Try us out at https://potpie.ai We are open source! Pranay Prateek Ankit Nayan Shivanshu Raj Shrivastava

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We're shipping a lot here at Schematic, take a look at what went live this month. https://lnkd.in/ejmxiyi2 Highlights:  💲 Stripe integration: Sync billing data from Stripe and map it to company profiles in Schematic 🔌 SDK update: Caching, event buffering, and offline support for Go, Python, and Node.js ✨ UX improvements: Feature usage sidebar and bulk entitlements adding 🪵 Audit log: View, search, and filter updates to a company's features access, troubleshoot issues, and track changes for compliance 👥 Team permissions: Invite teammates and specify what permissions they have within Schematic

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Earlier this week, I mentioned that we shipped over 30 new endpoints for the Vanta API at the end of June. Another exciting set of improvements centered on controls: adding and removing custom controls, updating control metadata, assigning control owners, adding and removing test or document (evidence) mappings to controls, etc. These building blocks allow you to bring your program into Vanta – keep the work you've already done, gain a high-level view of your security and compliance program, and benefit from continuous control monitoring. Thanks to Bo Y. and Eric Yuan for building these new endpoints!

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Having a ton of fun writing an ORM for V2 of Case Kit. Typescript has such an incredible type system. I have autocompletion for column names, the ability to include relations, relations of relations, etc etc etc... all returning properly typed data (no classes in sight). It's been really satisfying seeing it coming together, and it's been great getting my hands dirty with some (relatively) complex generics. And to head off the obvious question… why aren’t I just using Prisma? Well there’s a couple of things I’m doing differently that I think are marginally better: there’s no code generation involved here, it’s just types (inspired by Drizzle); there’s no Rust binary you need to deploy, and it hews much closer to Postgres behaviour and syntax (the aim here is not to abstract away which database you’re using). But the real blocker to me using Prisma was that its extensions don’t support modifying queries of nested relations - a hard requirement for me due to the way I have multitenancy and soft deletes set up. It’s not shown in the video but the Case Kit ORM lets you write simple middleware that will be applied to every level of a nested query. Perfect for setting timestamps or adding clauses on tenant id or things like that.

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"Curiosity over tenure" -- use quality telemetry in your traces to make debugging accessible. Empower curious folks to debug, not just the most tenured person on the team/company. Metrics are great... they're cheap, enable high data retention, but they're coarse... too coarse to understand what's happening in your system. If you're solely reliant on metrics, you'll need lots of intuition and tenure to understand what's going on in the system. "Oh... it's the cache" says the hero on the team peering over a graph, and doing some inaccessible pattern matching. It looks cool, but it's not scalable. Adding lots of telemetry to your traces ensures anyone with a curious mind can understand what's going on in your system.

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Programming is Unnecessarily Hard! I’ve taught programming to business and product folks at Acko and Coverfox Insurance. The goal was to help them run queries and get data without depending on the tech teams. Here’s the reality check: Before they even get to writing code, they’re buried under syntax, editors, file organization, server deployments, version control, and so on. As a developer, I get it—it’s part of the job. But for non-tech folks, this has been a total roadblock. It’s not about their aptitude; it’s the crazy learning curve. That’s why I founded FifthTry. We believe programming should be as easy as changing a cell color with conditional formatting in MS Excel. Doesn’t that instant win make you want to keep going with Excel? Coding should be just as rewarding from the start. I am excited to share that over 1,000 non-tech folks have already started their projects with us 🚀 A big shoutout to our early supporters: Dr. Sneha Upadhyay, Swapnendu Banerjee, Rutuja Kapate, Jahanvi Raycha, Govindaraman S & others. Let’s make tech easier for everyone. #CodingForAll #FifthTry #TechMadeEasy #Fastn

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Two weeks ago I posted a question "AI vs API vs UI?": https://lnkd.in/e3Z2cXd8 It asked whether the value of UIs will diminish in a world of AI Agents, a counter to Zdenek's question of whether we should still be building APIs at all? No doubt that there are a lot more UIs out there in the world than public APIs today. This reminds me of the discussion in the world of self-driving cars: many folks thought that we'd only achieve self-driving if we updated all the road infrastructure to be "machine-optimized". Many also think that we can only have self-driving when ALL cars are self-driving. Both seem ridiculous to me; the world is messy and the only scalable system is one that can deal with that. Now people are starting to see that we are on the path to self-driving which is mostly vision-based - like its human counterparts - and drive (more) safely alongside human drivers on existing infrastructure. The recent Claude announcement of AI computer use is a great demonstration of the capability of modern AI to deal with that messiness: https://lnkd.in/ePhEbz7w Arguably this strengthens the case for UI > API in the future. I think this might be true for legacy interfaces - why go to the effort of creating a nice API if you've already got a UI that AI can deal with? However, what about net new development? I still think the cost and difficulty of building decent UI vs good API means that focus will shift to API >> UI for agents. We're talking long-term here though, maybe 10 years. One interesting thing though, is how will businesses handle a shift to agents interacting on behalf of users? Such a strong disintermediation is going to create an even stronger deployment of 'aggregation theory' (https://lnkd.in/epMKwjdM) with winning agents having enormous power, more even than Google has today. What do you think?

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We've been making some cool examples of things that can be built with substrate.run lately. Here's a simple chatbot that can help you cook: https://lnkd.in/eEZm-nRJ If you're working on building a chatbot, take a look and see what it might look like to use Substrate 🧑‍🍳

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Hiring great software engineers isn't a numbers game. It's a soul-crushing, lonely fight. Finding the right talent feels impossible. The market is flooded. We desperately need a better way. We must stop the madness. My team and I were drowning. We were months behind schedule. Our last product launch failed. It was devastating. We lost key team members. Morale plummeted. We were close to giving up. The pressure was immense. Then, we changed our approach. We focused on cultural fit. We prioritized soft skills. Communication became key. We started interviewing differently. We made it personal. We asked about their passions. We listened to their stories. We looked for grit. We sought resilience. We found people who cared. They loved what they did. The results were incredible. Our team thrived. Our product launch soared. Success followed. * **Focus on values:** Align hiring with company culture. * **Prioritize soft skills:** Look beyond technical skills. * **Humanize the process:** Build personal connections. * **Invest in training:** Develop existing talent. * **Offer competitive compensation:** Attract top talent. The transformation was profound. It was life-changing. We finally built a high-performing team. Our products are amazing. Our customers are happy. We're proud of our work. Empathy is the key. It changes everything. The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary. - Vidal Sassoon What will you do to change your hiring process? #HealthTech #SoftwareEngineering #Hiring #CultureFit #TechTalent

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Ever been in a meeting where the CTO starts talking about "complex database work" and you just know—deep down—they're stalling because they really don’t want to do it? Yeah, we’ve all seen it. Instead of tackling a simple feature request, they spin it into some mystical tech problem, drop a line about "focusing on growth, not features," and suddenly your whole idea is on life support. Brilliant deflection. And if you’re using an outsourced tech platform? Welcome to the development queue of death—where good ideas go to die, or get resurrected with a price tag that makes you wonder if you’re paying for an actual resurrection. Even worse, that “innovative feature” you paid through the nose for ends up farmed out to your competitors. Feels good, right? You end up feeling stuck—constrained from growth, forced into clunky workarounds, battling limited resources, and hoping the CTO stops having bad days. But here’s the thing—DIY tools like OpenAI, Claude, Anthropic, and a growing list of others are rewriting the script. The old song and dance of "we can’t because it’s too complex" is getting real tired—if you know where to look. Still hesitating? Keep in mind, while you're sitting there debating, others have already grabbed the tools and moved on. Can you relate? How often have you seen a platform bottleneck your business? In Leadgen, it's practically a rite of passage. Let’s hear your stories—how did you handle it?

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Hey friends - have you used Kafka and can share pain points & feelings on usability? I have a friend working on a project to improve the dev-friendliness and would love to chat (just 15-30 mins) if you're open to it -- comment below :)

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So I hear goblin.tools is doing amazingly well with users and near the top of the Apple Store charts? A few thoughts 💭 after reading Maggie Appleton's Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers article. https://lnkd.in/eYPf3Bfh It would seem this disruptive #AI todo list product checks the local-first data box, less from a community aspect though. That said, I think this project could highlight her Barefoot Developer points. This image below really caught my attention because I’ve been thinking a lot about Business Process Automation after I did my deep dive into Apple & Microsoft’s #AI ecosystems and SLMs (local) impact. https://lnkd.in/eKeQyDxD Makes me wonder if the "financial planning wonks producing extensive spreadsheets" and much much much more are coming? Or will there be a new normal and the same % splits stick around? Either way, I still feel certain you need to build this... if you do not Barefoot Developers will!

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I think many people in the software industry make the mistake of viewing tech debt like a loan in deferral. They decide to add to their debt assuming there is no short term cost, but one day they will have to start paying it down (or declare bankruptcy with a huge rewrite). A more accurate analogy would compare your tech debt to credit card debt. You immediately start paying for this debt. The minimum payment would barely chip away at the interest accruing. You pay that cost in your project with every feature. The tech debt you add today makes the feature you add tomorrow more difficult. Every work item you take on without addressing the debt will be more difficult, and will likely add to the debt itself. With both analogies, a common end result is crippling debt that grinds your progress to a halt. However, the former analogy assumes that you are making quick progress, when that simply isn't the case. "The only way to go fast, is to go well." - Robert C. Martin

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Hey everyone! 👋 Just published my 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐠 on a quirky behavior in C/C++ GCC – why printf or cout with increment/decrement operators sometimes gives those unexpected outputs. If you've ever been stumped by that, this one’s for you! Check it out on Medium! 📑 [https://lnkd.in/gbfHRYAt] #CProgramming #CPP #CodingTips #Debugging #Programming

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I learned about the relationship between Swagger and OpenAPI/SpringDoc earlier from seeing the OpenRewrite recipe results running on a large swath of repositories inside a Moderne customer. At the time we ran it, this change affected about 10% of their total repositories and 1,600+ individual source files. Basically, OpenAPI is now the standard and Swagger is the specific implementation. Hot swap the implementation I suppose. Not entirely sure what other implementations exist and what the relative advantages of each are, but it seems to be a common enough need that its nice to see a community standard around this. Here is an example change description from a similar run on open source code:

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For folks who've used copilot or other genAI tools a lot, I'm curious how good the unit test generation ends up being long term. I'd be concerned that you'd end up with a lot of test suites that verify exactly what you implemented, which are not going to be as useful as TDD cases that are more focused on the intended behavior rather than the code you wrote (which might have latent bugs to begin with)

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It's my first post on the Gusto engineering blog, and it's all about #RailsConf! https://lnkd.in/e4zCVUQ4

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