Gabe Martin-Dempesy

If you are working with Docker... I highly recommend looking at the Slim toolkit. https://lnkd.in/gX_Gb9Kf Why? Slim allows developers to inspect, optimize, and debug their containers using its xray, lint, build, debug, run, images, merge, registry, vulnerability (and other) commands. It simplifies and improves your developer experience building, customizing and using containers. It makes your containers better, smaller and more secure while providing advanced visibility and improved usability working with the original and minified containers. Don't change anything in your container image; minify it by up to 30x to make it secure, too! Optimizing images isn't the only thing it can do, though. It can also help you understand and author better container images. Keep doing what you are doing. No need to change anything. Use the base image you want. Use the package manager you want. Don't worry about hand-optimizing your Dockerfile. You shouldn't have to throw away your tools and your workflow to have small container images. Node.js application images: from ubuntu:14.04 - 432MB => 14MB (minified by 30.85X) from debian:jessie - 406MB => 25.1MB (minified by 16.21X) from node:alpine - 66.7MB => 34.7MB (minified by 1.92X) from node:distroless - 72.7MB => 39.7MB (minified by 1.83X) Go application images: from golang:latest - 700MB => 1.56MB (minified by 448.76X) from ubuntu:14.04 - 531MB => 1.87MB (minified by 284.10X) from golang:alpine - 258MB => 1.56MB (minified by 165.61X) from centos:7 - 615MB => 1.87MB (minified by 329.14X) Rust application images: from rust:1.31 - 2GB => 14MB (minified by 147.16X) Java application images: from ubuntu:14.04 - 743.6 MB => 100.3 MB

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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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'We do not plan to buy any software because we do not have enough SPP projects at the moment.' This is a common objection we generally hear from companies. Here's the problem with that: Currently, approximately 2,000MW SPP is being realized at different stages in a medium-sized country. The vast majority of them are +10MW. - Almost all of the EPC companies that make these investments use a lot of software at different stages, including pvX. - These EPC companies lose maybe 3 times the projects they receive, but thanks to the software they use, they can make much more investments and increase their chances. - The common feeling of investors: Trust. With pvX, we are solving these problems exactly. How 💸 We expand your potential SPP portfolio by reducing your sales costs. 🌱 We seed many more projects, and the seeds will sprout over time. 🚀 We get your ready to act, before you even need to. If you'd like to have a quick chat about strategies to increase your SPP projects and save cost, Here's my availablity: https://lnkd.in/dnXz4_K2. I will be at #REplus Anaheim next week. #trypvX #replus

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More leads 👏 More meetings 👏 More opps 👏 More revenue 👏 Say no more Scott Cecil. We love seeing how you and the Anyscale team connect the dots between developers, decision-makers, and everyone in between using signals, context, and automations from Common Room. We 🖤 sharing our customers' wins: https://hubs.ly/Q02Lw4F00

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Great take from Orel Zilberman - Slack is killing your productivity. Derrick Schommer and I heard this message while doing ICP interviews. DevHuddle has features available (and some on the roadmap) to fix the interruption-tax of async communication tools that are treated as sync communication tools. It helps to have a culture of truly async collaboration to increase everyone's velocity. https://lnkd.in/eypeaVXV

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I advice 1-2 CEOs each week on how to select their CTO or founding engineer The average tenure of a startup CTO is < 2 years But the impact on the company - positive or negative lasts a long time after they are gone -> Early-stage companies lose momentum by choosing the wrong CTO So it is mission-critical to look for the right attributes in your first/next CTO: 1/ Hands-on capabilities Should rollup their sleeves and get into the dirty details from day#1 2/ Experience working with offshore teams Such CTO can handle cultural & language barriers much better 3/ Obsessed about creating value every week Huge red-flag if they focus on fancy tech And complex architectures or expensive tools 4/ Clearly connects with your mission Startups are a slog A clear connection with your mission goes a long way 5/ BONUS: Has some entrepreneurial experience Can empathize with the tradeoffs a CEO has to make every day If you need more help selecting your CTO DM me with the message “world-class CTO”

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Check out our latest Tech Talk, sharing how we build systems for growth at Faire, touching on our move to a monorepo, how we use Next.js & our automation bot Fairey! Watch the full video in this blog post https://lnkd.in/gbkGsVNU

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What are you doing this Friday at noon, Boston time? WRONG! You're joining me for a roundtable chat with Jellyfish's own CFO, Joanne Cheng on what many engineering leaders get wrong during budget planning. Treat yourself to some good tips and tricks for leveraging data effectively and driving financial impact at the company level. Come hang out, share your own tips and experiences, and meet other leaders. Click it --> https://lnkd.in/eDxaJ4tZ

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Some context from the #Founder perspective. As liberal as Seattle is as a city with policy and politics, it's incredibly conservative from an investment standpoint. One of the reasons you may not hear big "home-run" type pitches or pitches with sizzle, is simply because investors in Seattle don't like those types of pitches and Founders have been ingrained to not present in that manner. They may say they do, but ask any Founder and they'll tell you how they have been told to size down their pitch or talk about MVPs, first customer, first revenue, etc. or how what matters more is what you can do first couple years rather than the home run. Those early metrics are important by the way, but different from the big home run. Do you know who is receptive to homerun pitches? Investors in the Bay, NYC, Miami, Hong Kong. Seattle is not great for early-stage Founders with many prioritizing raising outside the city. We will be raising capital in the fall and as of now, have no plans of reaching out to Seattle-based VCs. I should also add that our company has a blockchain component and sadly Seattle VCs have not embraced crypto or blockchain. Welcome to #Seattle, Kyle Lui! Hopefully, you can help change the narrative! GeekWire

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At SSOReady (YC W24) we're giving your customers the best possible SAML user experience. To that end, we just shipped a native SAML "test mode"! SAML is inherently complicated to set up. SSOReady's self-serve configuration takes that complexity out of your app and into a specialized flow that gives your customers the best possible setup experience. With the new test mode, that UX just got even better. Your customer's IT admin can test their SAML configuration end-to-end directly within the self-serve configuration flow. They can see exactly the user details your application receives. If anything is wrong, they can immediately fix it. Test mode is available to all customers. Like everything else we build, it's all open-source. Give it a whirl!

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It was hard, but we now have a primitive at Gadget that lets us do absolutely 0 downtime atomic changes to an application's structure or data under the hood, with 0 requests dropped. I call it "request catching" but it was inspired by this Braintree eng post I read long ago For stateless workloads like serverless functions, 0-downtime deploys are pretty easy. You stand up the new one next to the old one, use a load balancer to start sending requests to the new one, and slowly stop sending requests to the old one. But for stateful workloads, it's much harder. You can't just start a new Postgres and send some queries to the new one and some to the old one without lying to somebody about state. If you want to be consistent, there has to be one source of truth. Fancy DBs have quorums for this, but PG doesn't. If you want to be consistent, you're effectively forced to have some tiny-but-real window of downtime in between draining the old one and starting the new one. That said, there's nothing forcing you to return errors to clients while that is happening. If your infrastructure supports it, you can pause requests while this changeover is happening under the hood, and then resume them once it is over. Clients will notice a longer request that normal, but it will be served like normal and they'll be none the wiser! What's required to do this though is a deep deep integration between the load balancing infrastructure and the thing doing the database deploy under the hood. We've built this up using a distributed locking tool, where all requests start by taking out a shared lock. When we're ready to do the maintenance under the hood, the maintenance workflow takes out an exclusive lock, blocking all requests from proceeding. The workflow does the atomic change it needs to make knowing it has exclusive access which means nothing will change under its feet, and then releases the exclusive lock as fast as it can so those requests can proceed. As an optimization, we only check the lock on the request path if an app is marked as near a maintenance window. This is only possible because of Gadget's architecture where we bundle together the load balancer, the request processing layer, and the database access tier such that we can reliably intercept all requests and all database transactions and do this lock checking. Its these nasty, in-the-weeds details that make me so proud of Gadget -- we can do world-class engineering stuff under the hood on behalf of all our apps without them ever noticing. If you're interested in doing this on your stack some OSS tools have the primitives you need! We use nginx for our load balancer, Temporal for the reliable workflow execution and we're currently using postgres advisory locks for hte locking. I think the Braintree post has been lost to time after they got acquired, but @simonw has a great post on the subject here: https://lnkd.in/eZmiktGT

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Last week, we re-released the Vanta API for customers in REST. I'm excited about a lot of our ships, and I'm *really* into the move to REST. I say this as one of the folks who chose GraphQL initially 🙃 . Back in 2017-2018, GraphQL seemed like the future, and so we built on it. While it has some nice properties (e.g. lowering the stakes of changes), it never really took off, and most engineers are more comfortable with REST. Good intentions, wrong technology bet in retrospect. If you're shipping, you'll get some of your technology bets wrong, and all you can do is acknowledge reality ("our customers prefer to work in REST") and build. Huge kudos to Jan Castor and Mikaela Gilbert for leading the project at Vanta. By our count, at least 17 other engineers at Vanta contributed endpoints, architecture, and documentation to this release. (Never win alone!) Now, with our REST API, customers can: * Automate processes in Vanta to minimize clicks and human error. Examples include auto-uploading documents or policies, bulk assigning owners to resources, or bulk offloading employees. * Programmatically extract information from Vanta into external reports that aggregate data from multiple systems. For example, you can automatically export test status information from Vanta and Trust Center viewer data to a Business Intelligence tool to help power enterprise-wide compliance dashboards. * Build custom integrations so Vanta can run automated tests against systems the platform does not already integrate with, including on-premise or custom applications. * 🔜 Automatically initiate external workflows to improve your security posture through fast remediation of security gaps. For instance if a critical test in Vanta fails, an external workflow or script that monitors this test can automatically initiate remediation.

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So, about dinner last night... 😁 Julianna Lamb and I co-hosted an engineering leaders dinner on behalf of her team at Stytch and our team at Orb alongside guests from Bardeen, MongoDB, Pinecone, Log10.io, Sybill, DeepScribe, meez, Census, Pocus. Here's what was top of mind: 1️⃣ We broke the ice talking about production incident stories, as always. There were some good ones - near data loss, versioning protobufs, and staging coming to the rescue. It's encouraging to see how much a team can come together when these issues happen -- says a lot about the talent you've built! 2️⃣ There was a lot of discussion around product management in early companies - what's the right stage to hire your first PM, and how do you balance the founder vision with PM strategy? Despite lots of differing opinions on this, everyone agreed that a great PM is able to exercise pointed and often non-concensus intuition to advocate for specific product investments. 3️⃣ Quality assurance in software is a hot topic - it certainly seems that the days of pure MVPs are gone, especially in B2B enterprise software. Strategies here ranged from manual outsourced full-time QA to a battery of automated, property-based tests. My sense is that there's a lot more framework to develop here (and I admire folks like Meticulous who are pushing the boundaries!). 4️⃣ When the conversation turned to favorite vendors, Fullstory, Twingate, and Conveyor came up. It's always fun and a bit counter-intuitive to see how many times a 'favorite vendor' involves lots of excellent customer support. Durable trust is still built in these interactions! 5️⃣ I suspect that the areas of cloud economics and cost management are still a severely under-invested-in area for most companies. We discussed several stories on both sides: teams racking up $100K+ bills over a weekend from a cloud provider, to having to shape their internal architectures to support free tiers and cost management for customers over optimizing performance. This is an area where I'm particularly excited to see Orb's features around spend caps/alerting make a dent. Thank you again to Ram Sriharsha, Artem H., Niklas Quarfot Nielsen, Parth Shah, Nikrad Mahdi, Brad Buda, Aniruddha, and Ujwal Bachiraju for joining us!

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Interesting read from DC Palter. Thoughts? ===== "Every founder thinks they want as much cash as they can get, but if they haven’t found product-market fit (and by definition, a pre-revenue company hasn’t found PMF) they’re going to need to pivot at least three times before they get rolling. The more they spend now on what will turn out to be a dead end, the harder it will be to pivot. Attempting to fly before you can crawl is a recipe for crashing." An Open Letter to VCs: Please Get Out of Pre-Seed Investing https://lnkd.in/gzC7HtZ8

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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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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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I cancelled our team's subscriptions to Github Copilot & ChatGPT after 10 days with Cursor 🌟 What Sets Cursor Apart Seamless Onboarding: The transition was remarkably smooth, reminiscent of Chrome's early days. Cursor's team clearly understands that muscle memory can be a significant barrier to adoption, and they've crafted an onboarding experience that makes the switch a delight. LLM Flexibility: The ability to switch between different Large Language Models, bring your own, or use the default Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a game-changer. This flexibility proves to be a massive advantage, freeing users from being tied to a single AI model. Multi-file Editing with Composer: This highly anticipated feature delivers 80% of the time, and when it works, it's phenomenal. It explains code changes, shows inline diffs, and allows for selective application of changes. My favorite one - https://lnkd.in/g4aYJbJQ. Contextual Awareness: The ability to @mention files, folders, and invoke web searches has transformed how I approach parallel feature development. It's like having a hyper-aware coding companion. Intelligent Auto-complete The tab auto-complete function is surprisingly powerful, working seamlessly across lines and files. It often feels like it's reading my mind, significantly speeding up coding sessions. Smart Inline Editing Cursor's understanding of the existing codebase shines in its inline code editing capabilities. It's prevented me from creating redundant utility functions by suggesting existing, similar functions—a huge time-saver. 💡 Pro Tip: Embrace smaller, more frequent code iterations. Commit changes often; you never know when you might need to start over on a change set. 🔧 Areas for Improvement Composer occasionally has UI glitches, taking over the entire window or hiding its title bar. Familiarizing yourself with keyboard shortcuts can help navigate these issues. Sometimes there's a disconnect between Composer's suggestions and what it displays. 🤔 Is Cursor Worth the Hype? For me and my team, it's a resounding yes. We're transitioning to Cursor as our primary development environment. I've noticed a significant reduction in my use of standalone AI consoles like Claude or ChatGPT, as Cursor integrates these capabilities seamlessly into the coding workflow. 🔮 Looking Ahead This shift to Cursor is part of our broader strategy to embrace AI-native development practices. I'm excited to share more insights in future posts about how we're leveraging AI to enhance our development processes. I'm curious to hear from other developers: What are your favorite Cursor features or hacks? How has it impacted your workflow? #DeveloperProductivity

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TLDR: 🚀 In 6 months, I've transformed my challenging homebuying experience into Home inSights—an AI-driven app I built to help navigate Portland, ME's challenging market. Like, share and read on to see how you can help. 🏠 Like many of you, I've faced the challenges of today's housing market firsthand. In just one year, we made 10 offers, toured dozens of homes, and combed through hundreds of listings. After repeatedly coming up short, I had a realization — the current tools weren't serving the actual consumers: homebuyers and homeowners. 📈 In Portland, home prices have surged by 85% and mortgage costs have tripled in just five years. We're in the midst of a nationwide crisis marked by limited supply, skyrocketing prices, and escalating borrowing costs. With this increased pressure on consumers, homebuyers need all the help they can get. 🔍 Home inSights is built to empower buyers and homeowners with personalized insights, community discussion, and smart comparison tools. You may be a home owner wanting to better estimate the equity you can roll forward, waiting for the right home to popup within a school district, or a new buyer with constantly changing buying power. Existing apps prioritize lead generation, and maintain this information asymmetry. There is a better way. 🌅 This version of Home inSights is only the beginning, currently focused on the Portland market. I’m racing to keep building this, but I want to begin including you all. Here’s my backstory on why I’m embarking on this journey: 💼 My career began in the aftermath of the last housing crisis. I worked on mortgage-backed securities lawsuits worth billions, reviewing tens of thousands of mortgages. The countless stories of hardship have stayed with me, fueling a deep-seated desire to make a difference. 👔 As a CFA charter holder, I love markets and valuations and feel driven to help make the market better by empowering consumers through information and tooling. 🥒 Later, I grew my family's pickle company to $3M revenue, gained hands-on business management experience, learned to listen to customers, and how to grow and lead teams when the future is unknown. 📱 Most recently, at Appex, I managed dozens of mobile apps with hundreds of thousands of consumers, worked with many founders, and learned how to build a mobile business. 💡🤖 But I wasn't a coder. Determined to create a solution, I turned to AI. In a few months, I launched not one, but two apps. These unique keystone experiences laid the foundation for what has become Home inSights. If you have read this far, thank you thank you thank you. 🫵 Any help is appreciated: 👍 1. Like, share, comment and/or tag someone on this post 🫶 2. Follow my progress on Instagram: @Buildwithphil.ai 📲 3. Download Home Insights on iOS, subscribe to support ongoing development, and share feedback https://lnkd.in/eQQc8tm9

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