Hank Yates

This morning I've got a guest post on Google's Open Source Programs Office blog: what to do when your open source contribution stalls out. There are posts and posts about how to improve contributor experiences from the maintainer side, but I couldn't find much about how to push through a rough contribution process from the contributor side. Turns out you, as a contributor, actually have quite a lot of power here! I wrote down some of the strategies that have worked for me and my team as we contribute to the Git project; they apply for open source work, but also for any kind of decision stalling out. https://lnkd.in/g3eD6W4N

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More features in Shorts Creation tool!!

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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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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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I think this is a really important topic that we don't see much in Engineering recruiting. A great way to lead to #burnout, especially when you're already giving your all in a full-time dev job, is to take on side projects that aren't work-related. For some, programming is their whole life, and if that is who you are looking for in an employee, then this might be a great metric to use. Otherwise, it most definitely is not. #TechCareers #BurnoutPrevention #WorkLifeBalance #Programming #SoftwareDevelopment #TechCommunity #CareerAdvice #TechTalk #GitHub #EngineeringLeadership

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Whew, fellow engineering managers, do we need to talk? We had more yeses to these three questions than either front-line engineers OR execs: 📈 I do not feel the potential for advancement in my current role 🚀 Leadership at my company is out of the loop when it comes to engineering challenges 💥 I do not feel secure in my current role. Pair that with the 69% of EMs who’ve experienced burnout in the past year and it’s enough to make even the best of us look at the engineer/manager pendulum with renewed interest. For me, the saving grace is the big improvements we as an engineering industry have made on informing and driving the business strategy over the decades I’ve been in tech, and wanting to stay in the room where it happens. Check out the 2024 State of Engineering Management to think about where you and your team falls on the trends we're all experiencing firsthand. (And for funsies, you won’t believe which group thinks AI is a gimmick. ✨)

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this meme led to an interesting convo: friend: Borg are perpetually in a build phase. never take a step back to fix the cables. me: That's a lot of technical debt. friend: can you imagine how they just "hack together" a species's technology into their own stack? me: To tech folks, that kind of software assimilation is more frightening than actual assimilation. Imagine if they kept you human just long enough to complete the integration into their Frankenstack. You'd be *begging* to be assimilated.

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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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Have you ever wondered how video game Auto-Tiling in games works? Excalibur.js contributor Justin Young is on🔥with this latest post about authoring tile maps with aesthetically pleasing tiles! The algorithm is surprisingly grokkable and low effort to implement 🤯 https://lnkd.in/gsVHwc5V #gamedev #typescript #javascript

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Annotations have landed in Capture.dev. Perfect for design feedback, and easier than that folder of screenshots you've got saved on your desktop.

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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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Observation: 9/10 SWE's quit at “reading the docs”. Cut through the BS with this easy trick: Take action and build. Writing code is 100x easier than the docs make it sound. “Reading the docs” gave me crazy imposter syndrome: -Git -WPF -Kafka -OAuth -Angular -GraphQL -RabbitMQ -Kubernetes In ALL cases, I conquered my fears by building. Except for WPF. I gave up on that. And Kafka, that's for another day. Forcing yourself to build/code/deploy melts analysis paralysis. Then you'll say "oh that was pretty easy". Trust me, we aren't building rockets. Practice AND Study build true mastery.

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Sometimes, you just need to slow down and make sure your work is sustainable. Short story follows... Once upon a time, I took over management of a team that had had such a steady drumbeat of feature requests that they felt that they couldn't prioritize quality at all. They saw what we were building as bits and pieces of strong engineering work floating amid a bunch of half-measures and temporary hacks. Meanwhile, the customers were gathering with torches and pitchforks because the product just-wouldn't-work. Among the many things that team needed was to feel as if they had permission to put their pencils down on new features and work on product quality instead. We collaborated with product and customers to make that happen. Outcomes were better for both the team and the customers. Ignore the quality of your work at your peril.

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Software engineering is not the same thing as just coding, why don't people understand that?? Most of software engineering is actually thinking about and understanding the ecosystem/requirements. Once you understand that, writing the actual code is actually usually quite easy.. easy enough that it can be outsourced to AI maybe.

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Working through logic from old code is a fun exercise. I enjoyed figuring out why we did what we did in the old game. Updating it to be more readable helps too! https://lnkd.in/gWkWHVkh https://lnkd.in/grNbNA7G

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Our team just release a new benchmark for Hand and Object Tracking called Hot3D: https://lnkd.in/gBT2bF5H. HOT3D is a new dataset to explore vision-based methods for hand-object interaction. And we believe it will unlock new opportunities within this research area, such as transferring manual skills from experts to less experienced users or robots, helping an AI assistant to understand user's actions, or enabling new input capabilities for AR/VR users, such as turning any physical surface to a virtual keyboard or any pencil to a multi-functional magic wand. To learn more about the dataset, read the HOT3D paper (https://lnkd.in/gqp34kZa) and visit https://lnkd.in/gUy4RUYX. HOT3D will be part of the BOP challenge (https://bop.felk.cvut.cz/) and the HANDS challenge (https://lnkd.in/gQnbSBih) at ECCV-2024. Check out the respective websites for more details on the challenges. #CVPR2024 #ComputerVision #AI

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I will add one more thing. The code review should be the last line of defense, not the first. The design should be correct and reviewed (if need be) and the code should be correct as much as the ability and knowledge of the author allows.

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Okay, the yew abstractions just weren't worth the complication for me, imo. It's not so bad to just write my own #javascript and call the wasm_bindgens directly after all: https://lnkd.in/gifgcT4c I've repeatedly seen the pattern that backend programmers make javascript more complicated than it needs to be, and I think that might only get more extreme with #WebAssembly being a thing Watching all the evolutions of Rails js over the decades (as someone who has been writing extensive js since gen 4 browsers) has been painful at times. Trunk (trunkrs.dev) is still super useful though, as well as the rest of the rust wasm stack I'm using. mast:https://lnkd.in/gj798twP

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