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I’ve been developing great software products for over 25 years, for companies big and…
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Tom Bolton
This is a bittersweet post (more on that later) and long. When I joined The ASSISTments Foundation over 4 years ago, our platform was a hodgepodge of code and frameworks accumulated over decades. Ruby on Rails, GWT, JSP, Java, an API with no standard, and a database and data structures that had long since lost their ability to scale with the kinds of things we needed it to support. All running on a few physical servers at WPI. There was SO much work to do if we were ever going to have a foundation on which to truly innovate. Over the last few years, we’ve moved our entire infrastructure to the cloud, rebuilt the teacher experience and student experience in Vue.js from the ground up, and launched a brand new product for school admins and instructional leaders. But the last step was the biggest: we had to refactor all five of our products to use our new RESTful API (SDK 3.0), migrate terabytes of content to our new database structures and build an entirely new content management and authoring system to support everything. Plus, we wanted to include some of the first new features not possible on the old system: new item types and an alpha version of teacher authoring for our longtime ASSISTments 1.0 users. On Tuesday, after well over a year of the most complex refactoring you can imagine, the team delivered flawlessly. Even though this is not the Oscars (and I certainly am not “the winner” of this), I’m now going to go over my time limit and praise the amazing team responsible for this: First, Director of Engineering Ryan Emberling and Senior Product Manager Cindy Starks organized and managed the entire project through the many, many curve balls we were thrown and pivots we had to make, building the management systems on the fly as we figured out this herculean task, with help from Michael Weingarth owner of our district admin product. Lead Designer Kyle Scheuing, working with our Director of Content and now Product Owner Dawn Peterson designed an intuitive but amazingly powerful authoring environment that is legitimately worthy of a design award if such things were given for authoring environments. Our engineering leads, Christopher Donnelly, Joan Wong, and David Magid—along with Ryan—self-organized in true agile fashion to lead the rest of the engineering team through countless hours of analysis, architecture decisions, code review, and God-knows-what-else. And finally, our amazing engineering team: Danita Forbes-Sample, Manuel Gonsalves, Rownok Nowrose, Brian Rojas, Jaime Torres, Jose Velazquez did months and months of work rewriting vast swaths of our codebase. I am so proud of this team, and honored to be able to work with them. Their achievement has set the stage for innovation at ASSISTments for years to come. The bittersweet part of this is that I will not be with them for that journey. I will miss this team incredibly, and I hope our paths will cross again.
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Ziaul Kamal
Developer Relations Foundation Aims to Clarify Role https://lnkd.in/gfTxqiYr Developer relations (DevRel) has a “My Gal Friday” problem: It’s not that they don’t have a role to play, it’s that they have too many roles. Are they responsible for developer advocacy? Yes. Developer training? Also yes. Documentation? Probably. Developer marketing? Most likely. Coding? Sometimes, yes. Increasingly, it can be any and all of those roles, which leads to scope creep and all its problems. That makes it very hard to determine metrics and thus establish business value of developer relations. To change that, developer relations professionals have asked the Linux Foundation to form the Developer Relations Foundation (DRF). In September, the Linux Foundation agreed, announcing its intentions to do so as a new project under the nonprofit. The DRF already boasts 125 members, according to the count on its website. DevRel Demographics Who are developer relations professionals? First, they’re well-paid compared to most developers. To compare apples to apples, the average full stack developer’s median 2024 salary was $63,000, but the median salary for “developer advocate” was $124,203, according to the Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey. However, that doesn’t tell the complete story, since only .2% — or less than 200 of respondents — identified as developer advocates. The 2023 State of Development Relations, which was produced by DevRelAgency, queried 310 respondents in the DevRel field, of whom 242 completed the survey completely. It identifies $175,000 as the median base salary, with $167,088 as the average base salary. It’s worth noting, however, that the pay range is incredibly wide, with base salaries ranging from $10,000 to $400,000. They are also largely older than many developers, who tend to be in their early 20s to early 30s. The largest cluster of age groups for developer relations professionals is is 35 to 44 (36.4%), with the average age trending up. That said, more than 65% reported being above 35 years of age, as compared with 50% in 2018. Not surprisingly, given the demographics for programming in general, most are men. It’s worth noting, however, that DevRel has a much higher representation of female respondents at 32.1%, compared to the general developer population, where women account for just 5.1%, per the Stack Overflow 2022 Developer Survey. A hefty percentage — 43.2 % — also belong to underrepresented communities, a broad category that includes people who are neurodivergent at 23%, the LGBTQ+ community at 9.5%, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) at 7.9%, and those with a physical disability at 2.6%. The 2023 State of DelRel noted that the percentage of neurodivergent individuals is similar to the figures reported in the general developer population, per Stack Overflow’s 2023 Developer Survey. It did not report a comparison among other communities. While some DevRel professionals do freelance or work for...
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Andrew Henderson
Learn how our CPO, Amanda Grant, shifted our focus to put customers first this past year. As CTO, we are partnering with Amanda to evolve our engineering practices to ensure our customers' jobs to be done are leading the way in product and platform design & engineering. Check out her story on Mind The Product. #ProductTransformation #OneAdvanced #PoweringTheWorldOfWork
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Bryant Cutler
If you're the kind of person who's excited about all the recent S3 feature announcements (bucket policy unlocks via temporary root sessions, up to millions of buckets per account, pagination and region filtering for ListBuckets, conditional writes, ListCallerAccessGrants API) and you're attending re:Invent, then you should come to our storage track session, STG306 Advanced security patterns on Amazon S3. Learn how to use all the exciting new stuff securely in the most interactive format available at re:Invent!
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David Putnam
Milwaukee Software Process Improvement Network presents "From Mechanical to Mastery: Silent Killers of Scrum Revealed" with Chad Beier and Jeff Bubolz See the details here: https://lnkd.in/g6iExuVy Presentation Description: Many organizations adopt Scrum with high hopes of enhancing agility, productivity, and team collaboration. However, the reality often falls short as teams find themselves trapped in a cycle of going through the motions without realizing the true benefits of Scrum—a state often referred to as "Zombie Scrum" or "Mechanical Scrum." In this talk, "From Mechanical to Mastery: Silent Killers of Scrum Revealed," we will delve into the critical root causes that lead to these ineffective practices. Targeted at organizational leaders, this session will uncover the often-overlooked variables that silently undermine Scrum's effectiveness. We’ll explore how common organizational behaviors, cultural misalignments, and leadership decisions contribute to these pitfalls and provide actionable strategies for moving from a mechanical implementation of Scrum to an effective state that drives business outcomes.
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David Evans
Leaders, ask not what your reports can do for you but what you can do for your reports. Maximize your impact by fostering environments where people can do their best work. Great post from John Cutler about shifting a reactive perspective and getting clarity on how to respond when things seem too complex. #Leadership #ProductDevelopment #PeopleFirst #Empathy
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Jack Masterson
If you want a lesson on inspiring loyalty in those who work for you, and garnering deep respect from the people who work with you, spend thirty minutes with Alexis Chitwood, MBA, PSM1, for whom phrases like "put people over process" go way beyond the words! "We follow the principle of people over process, putting people first the same way that we put our creators first. There’s a large sense of community and support at Raptive enforcing that idea that we can achieve more when we work together, and those lessons will stay with me forever." https://lnkd.in/eCYG_mw6
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Matt Gallardi
We call this self integration - Coming soon. Tyne integrations can utilize any API documentation, read all functions, create and execute code within minutes instead of weeks which reduces manual labor significantly. For example, we created 80 functions from the Spotify API on single thread in just 10 minutes, a process that typically takes weeks. With multi-threading, this could be even faster. #innovation #digitalmarketing #technology #creativity #Future #futurism #Entrepreneurship #Markets #Startups #Marketing #SocialMedia #VentureCapital #SocialNetworking #LeanStartups #Economy #Economics #sustainability #healthcare #education #design #sales #supplychain #retail #data #top #recent #best #LinkedIn #AI #Automation #Intelligence #Analytics #Artificial #Machine #startup
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Eric Hanson
We just shipped SingleStore 8.9 in mid-November and as you've come to expect from us, we continuously strive to improve database performance. Check out our new blog that talks about how we've made analytical query processing, JSON analytics, JSON loading, and full-text search faster! One of my favorites: a 20X speedup for common kinds of analytical queries over nested JSON array data! Mongo too slow? Read the blog :-)
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Kin Lane
I really wish there was good lucking inline OpenAPI generated API docs. Like SwaggerUI was, but modern. I love what RedDoc did to the conversation, but I really want something I can embed on a single page -- I don't need whole site, navigation, or even 3-panel. I just want really good looking API docs in my own site.
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Noah Cooper
Nonprofit organizations are using technology in creative ways to reach more people. AI is quickly emerging as a crucial tool to help these organizations save time, scale their services, and meet the growing demand for support. We’re excited to see how this momentum continues. Learn more in this new Forbes article.
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