Brett Hale

Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay is a valid reaction to the zero interest rate phenomenon of average management and company bloat. The goat founders can operate well in this way and scale it pretty far. Unfortunately it’ll also probably inspire a bunch of mid founders not really get it — and to lean into their current erratic micromanagement ways. They’ll think they’re in Founder Mode, when they’re really in Flounder Mode 🐟 https://lnkd.in/gpjSV9Ea

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Good article from John Cutler on dependencies and tech debt: “The further you are from the work, the most it seems like an excuse. The closer you are to the work, the more it looks like a reality you’re tired of describing and explaining.”

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Launching today! Even more debug info auto-included w/ Jam + Fullstory We're building the 1 tab engineers need to debug an issue Now any Fullstory session gets auto-added, so devs get more data right there in Jam, a full view of a bug in a link!

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Big day for the Rails Foundation: 1Password is the first new Core member to join the board since we launched. Looking forward to working with Jason Meller on the board. You might be thinking: 1Password? Rails? YES. 1Password recently acquired Kolide, a Rails app, and integrated it into the core of its XAM. With today’s world of remote work (and the apps we rely on at work) combined with the ever-increasing threat of data breaches and bad actors, this Rails app now handles “thousands of web requests per second, authorizes millions of authentication attempts, processes billions of asynchronous jobs each month, and consistently delivers four nines of annual uptime for customers”. Not bad for a Rails app, ey?

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Polls can be a cheat code for earned media, and a great way to build authority. But there are levels to this. Here's how one of the best I've seen - Capital One - does it. (And what I'd do differently to increase earned coverage). Led by Shena Ashley, PhD, Capital One's Insights Center is a masterclass in leveraging polls to create unique insights that would do incredibly well via earned syndication. Here’s what they do great: ✅ Content that sticks: Crucial issues > fleeting trends. Focusing on topics like financial stability, mobility, and entrepreneurship, it's easier to rationalize investment on topics with a longer shelf life. Their insights + stories can drive coverage for months to come. ✅ Visual storytelling: Data doesn’t have to be dry, and Capital One presents original insights through clear and eye-pleasing visuals that are easy to understand. Publishers like charts, they love colorful charts, and they LOVE colorful charts that are easy to understand. Check, check, check. ✅ Strong methodologies and extensive polling numbers: Capital One frequently involves 7k+ participants in their studies - they are not half a**ing it. Well explained methodologies are table stakes to get your polls covered, and Capital One does a great job outlining their data collection process, sample size, and research methodologies.   ✅ Easy to steal: Each report has multiple easy to take stories/soundbites, and are also written as full pieces of content, which can be taken as whole. Finally --- if I could change one thing... Add a byline. Brand publishing NEEDS a byline - no news outlet wants to cover a story that can't be credited back to a human. All in all, polls can be incredibly valuable for driving earned syndication - check out Capital One's Insights Center in comments for killer examples.

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so what is your move gaes

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Interesting commentary about two firms, in very different sectors, under fire, and the strategic reset their new leadership is communicating. The recorded music industry could benefit from a similar approach. What is the purpose of music managers, record labels, distributors, retail and digital music services? To identify, develop and grow great musical artists and to connect great music to music fans. There is no quick fix to the challenges breaking new artists we experience in the UK; fulfilling this mission takes time and requires investment in artists, in music and in the teams who can help them to success. Jennifer George’s piece talks about the “frontline moves” these leaders took - action to immediately address issues. What actions would you take? 

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I can say – without hyperbole – this is the best song about web performance I've ever heard. Well done, Scott Moore ⚛. 👏👏 https://lnkd.in/gj5GjMCD #webperf #webperformance #loadtest

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Hey Friends! 'Tis the season: Over the next couple months, I'll be looking for my next role and adventure. If you know any companies looking for a seasoned DevRel or DevRel lead, hit me up. A bit about me: I've been in web dev/design for 18 years now. I've worked on large-scale news websites, small marketing sites, and multiple startups. I've been: * An IC dev and designer * An IC DevRel * Managed a design team * Managed a hybrid design/dev team * Managed a small DevRel team As a DevRel, I've done the full breadth of tasks: * Content creation (social media, blog posts, video content, courses, and even a book published by Packt) * Managed continual docs improvement * Organically grown product communities AND organic communities of practice Before getting into DevRel officially, I helped build local communities: * Ran a monthly tech meetup for 7+ years * Founded and helped run an annual hackathon for 5 years * Helped work to combine all a city's tech events under 1 umbrella to work better together From a product side, I've helped iterate all the products I've worked on through: * Industry knowledge and UX experience * Being "User 0" and finding all the bugs and edge cases * Working with communities to test and provide feedback * Creating friction logs, organic feedback lanes, feature request prioritizaiton and more * Creating PoCs And honestly, there's a lot more, but chances are good you’ve already stopped reading, because this is super long at this point… So, maybe instead, have folks reach out 😆

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Today we're launching our newest candidate quality-of-life feature on Ropes - IDE themes. There's a universal dislike for the rigid IDEs that assessment co's force on candidates. These code editors are slow, clunky, and missing the styes/shortcuts that developers enjoy. Developers are unique, and we work in unique ways. Ropes offers two new options to let candidates keep their style: (1) First, many employers on Ropes allow candidates to work in their own IDEs entirely. We've developed a way to gather insights like you were in the room, while allowing developers to use their daily environments. (2) For cases that need a browser-based IDE - we're giving the ability for candidates to choose their style/editor setup before the assessment starts - so they're comfortable when it begins. --- My bet is that if we build a great experience for candidates, we'll be building a great platform for evaluators, too. I hope you'll follow along as we pursue that mission - and we need help! We're hiring founding engineers in NYC - if you're interested, I'd love to talk to you.

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Building a reliable RAG system isn’t just about performance—it’s about trust. Matt Turk's blog post breaks down the importance of this for both technical and non-technical folks—highlighting how Cleanlab's TLM, paired with Pinecone’s vector database, delivers high-quality data retrieval, accurate, context-aware responses, and scalable performance to meet growing demands. 👏

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In the U.S. on Thanksgiving a regular tradition is folks share what they're thankful for. This needs a little context - I used to build on an open source CMS that while it had a robust plugin ecosystem, plugins, themes etc didn't have to guarantee they'd work together, and always support the latest CMS version. Unfortunately it wasn't uncommon for an automatic update on a client's site interrupting a much needed vacation or camping trip. I have spent multiple trips sitting by a campfire on spotty 2g internet trying to use an IDE on my cellphone to fix goofy php issues, or using the mobile interface to try to enable/disable plugins to try to identify where the problem came from. What I'm thankful for: I have never both before I worked at HubSpot and while I've worked at HubSpot - needed to fix an issue that caused a client's website to go down while on vacation. Developers need to rest and recharge too. Happy Thanksgiving to those in the U.S. #HubSpot #HubSpotDevelopers

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Listening to this podcast right now about the "enshittification" of tech (their words, not mine!). It's a good listen to understand at a macro level what's happening. https://lnkd.in/eETbYdZQ

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🛠️ Okay y'all, looking for advice: I'm running a handful of small apps for Build Carolina's Development Studio initiative. These are low-utilization apps for relatively small audiences. I'm leaning heavily on Rails at the moment but expect to bring on some JS-stack projects in the near future (likely Next, but I'm always open to the flavor of the week in JavaScript 😅) Here's what I'm finding for hosting: - I still know Heroku best, but I just don't trust them to not enshittify further. 🫠 Every new app here is a liability when Marc decides he needs another island or whatever. 💰 - I'm using a lot of Render and like their devex philosophy, but their pricing is weird (per-service + premium tiers? Pick one!), the big feature gaps in their platform have gone long-unaddressed, and their support has been poor. 🤖 - I'm experimenting with Fly.io: great pricing, but a weird mix of UI-vs-CLI workflows and segmenting project resources is unintuitive. I feel like I'm going to wake up to a huge bill because I accidentally over-provisioned something here. 💸 I'm curious what other folks are doing for small-scale artisanal app hosting in 2024+. Are we all running our own EC2 clusters? Is everyone just writing Next apps for Vercel? Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy looking for a backend host in a static SPA world. 👴 ❓ Tips/tricks/tales welcome. Where are you hosting your lil' bytes right now?

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This is a really good post. I've often thought that async/await is a truly horrible paradigm to program in. Its hard to reason about the computation model, its hard to debug, its hard to trace, apparently they're all implemented differently and have differing lineages (TIL from this article), and it infects a codebase almost in toto. I also have a sneaking suspicion (although I've never been able to prove it) that programming this way doesn't lead to a speed up over doing more naive concurrency or parallelization techniques. Hopefully in the future this pattern will go away toward concurrency models that are much easier to reason about (like Channels in Go or Actors in Elixir). Even threads might be reasonable as the author suggests, but async/await is bad imo and I'm with him. https://lnkd.in/eu9PPFBV

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