Julian LaNeve

7. That's the median employee headcount for SaaS companies under $1m in ARR. Nearly half of those positions are in engineering. I'm often asked about headcount planning and it's so helpful to provide data to drive decisions. The High Alpha SaaS Benchmark Survey is live and it's full of data like this. Download the report now. (Link in the comments)

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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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I recently shared that one of my favorite parts about working at Amplitude is the fact that despite being a public company, it still feels like a startup. And I think one of the key reasons for that is the high sense of ownership that everyone here has. Ownership is one of our core company values, and I love being able to see it in action every day. I share more below:

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Could Replit Agent potentially 30x Replit's market size? It's idea-to-deployment in minutes (i screencapped my experience below). While still buggy at the moment — my app was caught in a pesky OAuth error— it points to a world where Replit’s customers grow beyond developers (20M today) into truly, anyone with an idea. This positions Replit closer to a Canva (general public) with 185M users versus a Figma (professional/ semi-professional) with 4M users. Canva generates more revenue than Figma, Miro, and Webflow combined. There has been a number of new players in the battle for AI code generation — like Copilot, Codeium, Claude, Cursor AI. But Replit has a unique insight that gives them an edge: a great user experience. Design might just be the differentiator that gives them the winning edge.

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🕒 Boost Your Productivity in Just an Hour! 🚀 ⏰ Ever feel like there aren't enough hours in the day to get everything done? Redis Solution has got your back! ⏰ 🌟 Here's a simple breakdown to maximize your productivity in just 60 minutes! 🌟 🙌 5 Minutes: Start with a Gratitude Pause - Reflect and say thank you for what you have. It sets a positive tone for the day! 🙏 🏋️‍♂️ 10 Minutes: Take a Quick Exercise Break - Stretch those muscles and get your blood pumping! Your body will thank you for it. 💪 💌 15 Minutes: Check Your Unread Messages - Stay on top of your communication game. Respond to important emails and messages. 📧 🗄️ 20 Minutes: Organize Your Workspace - A clutter-free environment leads to a clutter-free mind. Tidy up and boost your focus! 🗂️ 🥤 10 Minutes: Hydrate and Recharge - Take a moment to sip on your favorite drink and rejuvenate yourself. Hydration is key! 🥤 Ready to supercharge your productivity? Start implementing these simple steps today! ⚡️ #ProductivityHacks #MaximizeYourHour #RedisSolution #EfficiencyTips

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Airtable is great for small teams, but... I love Airtable. I think the price is reasonable for solo users or small teams. It’s also incredibly developer-friendly, making it easy to integrate into custom workflows. (Definitely a step up from Google Sheets.) But here’s the catch: Their pricing model for teams is steep, especially when hundreds (or thousands) of users need access to tables. I haven’t tried it yet, but I came across Undb.io as an open-source alternative. It seems to offer affordable enterprise pricing and is designed to be API-first. Has anyone else had similar thoughts about Airtable’s team pricing? Or maybe you've found other cost-effective solutions?

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I created a GPT to help the team @ Class turn feature requests into problem statements 👇 The wild thing is that this isn't trained on ANY proprietary data. No product documentation or requirements (at least, not yet). Just some very specific guidance of the process that it should follow, the types of inputs it should expect, and the outputs that it should provide. Can't wait to see where this will go in the future! Here's the link to give it a try: https://lnkd.in/enNrnzNj. If you've made something like this for yourself, let me know in the comments! I'd love to see what you're building.

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"Probably the worst decision that I made as CEO of Loudcloud was to take ona. 10-year lease with a $30M letter of credit. We leased the space right before the dot-com crash. Rents dropped 10-fold in Menlo Park... worse yet, due to the recession, we couldn't hire so the space we already had was sufficient and we never ended up moving into the new building. So I basically lost $30M for nothing." This is from Ben Horowitz's recent interview with Big Think. Even a quarter century ago the typical office lease construct is misaligned with how a company needs to operate. Our industry could get away with this when office spaces had a monopoly on how and where work got done, but those days are dead. As global markets are crashing, we'll be looking at another disruptive cycle for businesses which will create more cost cutting pressure and the first thing to go when they roll will be inflexible leases. CRE needs to develop new offerings and fast. https://lnkd.in/ePuZgzkU

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"You can't manage you can't measure." However, the age old question of "How to measure software development productivity" has always been fickle. In the latest episode of Level Up, I had the chance to sit down with Eli Daniel, Head of Engineering at Jellyfish. We talked about why metrics are important for engineering leaders and how to select the right metrics for your organization. Spoiler: DORA isn't a one size fits all. Link to the podcast in the comments, or check it out below 👇

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Hi folks! I need some help. We’re building a roadmap for Scoutflo for the next one year, and we want to ask some questions to our users and get to know them better. A quick intro to Scoutflo: A platform that enables developers to manage infrastructure and deployments across clouds. We want to talk to: - DevOps Engineers  - Developers handling Infrastructure With Scoutflo, our goal is to: - Simplify and automate infrastructure provision and microservice deployments for developers. - ⁠Reduce DevOps burnout (juggling between supporting developers and production environments). - Adopt Kubernetes at scale. Please drop a comment / tag someone you know in your network or DM me! Thank you 💙

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Hey folks, We need your help to get more feedback on our Product Roadmap at Scoutflo! If you are a DevOps engineer or know someone in your network - do tag them on this post! Appreciate your help 🤝 #kubernetes #devops #cloud

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I read the new Analytics Development Life Cycle from Tristan at dbt Labs, and it's still not enough. We started Tobiko to bring still missing software engineering best practices to the data world with SQLMesh. Our founding team had decades of experience building data infrastructure and software for some of the largest and most complicated datasets and organizations in the world (like Airbnb, Apple, and Netflix). We wanted analysts and engineers at any company to have access to the similarly powerful tools that we enjoyed. Although companies are moving in the right direction in terms of embracing software engineering best practices (eg. using version control instead of stored procedures), we know there's still a long way to go. Although software engineers get quick compile time errors, when writing SQL with transformation tools, you won't know you missed a parenthesis until you've already waited 10 minutes and processed gigabytes of data. This is because current tools don't actually understand SQL and just delegate all checks and execution to the warehouse. SQLMesh can catch syntax errors and invalid column references at compile time. Unit testing data is a pretty rare practice in data but quite common in software. It's challenging and expensive with current tooling because you can't run warehouses like BigQuery locally and it's a pain to generate test data / maintain it (we don't like hand-writing YAML just as much as you). When we first launched SQLMesh, we believed that unit tests needed to be a first class feature of the product, not a nice to have later. Unit tests needed to be fast to write, easy to maintain, cheap to run, and not a tedious chore. With SQLMesh, you can automatically create tests with a simple SQL query. This significantly reduces the friction required to create and maintain unit tests since you don't have to manually input data into a YAML file. You can also optionally run unit tests in DuckDB, making it fast and easy to run in any environment (even without an internet connection). Another practice that is widespread in the data world is "testing in prod" (called out in the ADLC). Due to limitations with current tooling, it is difficult to test changes to ETLs outside of prod. SQLMesh's virtual environments makes it not only possible to test on production data, but to directly deploy tables to production without recomputing them. This is similar to how software engineers do blue/green deployments in CI/CD, making sure that deployed changes are exactly as you'd expect with easy rollbacks. We believe that data analysts and engineers should enjoy the same productivity workflows that software engineers have had for years. We aren't tourists in data looking to build another generic data SaaS. We're people who have loved building data platforms for years. We know how hard it is, and we know it should be way better for all of you. We want to make data better with you. Come talk with us: https://lnkd.in/geevzB24

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Founders, waitlists don't work unless you talk about your product somewhere else or offer some type of lead magnet. Nobody cares about getting updates. That's not enough of a value exchange. Just published my latest teardown (search Roast My SaaS on YT) about a startup with a huge missed opportunity to capture leads & onboard them. Too bad the video is a little over 15 minutes and LinkedIn doesn't allow me to publish it here as well. #buildinpublic

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"Work-life balance: a myth in fastest-growing SaaS companies?" The snapshot below is from Avenir's report written by Jared Sleeper, Hannah Bao, and David Prilutsky on the State of SaaS. It highlights that the fastest-growing public companies in SaaS fare lower on work-life balance scores than their peers Data consistently shows that extraordinary outcomes demand exceptional efforts from every team member, not just the founders. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise! This rings especially true for early-stage startups in India. Joining forces with smart, passionate, and driven individuals often means giving up some personal time each week (and it is worth it)!

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Who would our solutions engineer role be great for at Mapistry? My likely uncommon take on the "normal" company job description ☑ You love figuring out problems....you like digging into spreadsheets and asking well articulated questions based in curiosity (e.g. why are you doing it that way?) ☑ You want to solve problems (technical and user/workflow) that have an environmental impact using software ☑ You like working with people, maybe you consider yourself an "extroverted engineer"....you like some time working with customers and internally with your team but also like the head's down time to do deep work and solve problems. The variety is key to your happiness! ☑ You want to work in-person some or most of the time in Berkeley, because you learn quickly and fuel yours and others creativity that way ☑ You like being organized....maybe your use project management software in your personal life or color code sticky notes or like organizing your work photos/files and developed your own naming conventions or ??? ☑ You value direct, frequent communication.....you communicate well within in a team, to clients, and to managers. You love giving and receiving continuous feedback. You follow up to emails quickly, you send meeting summaries, and you ask about next steps ☑ You are ambitious in learning/growing and having an impact in your role.....small company and working in-person with myself and Allie Janoch means you get direct access but also like the pressure :) If this sounds like not much fun, please don't apply :) there are lots of jobs out there that will be great for you If you are excited after reading this and say "yes" to each of these then please apply! https://lnkd.in/eZuvcjQN If you are not sure what I mean with any (or all of these), but are intrigued by the role...send me a message!

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Anyone in my network (or knows someone) that’s looking to start out their software career or already has some experience, gimme a shout. Have a client looking to hire. Please note, this is more of an entry level/less experienced position. Not looking for loads of experience. Only drawback is it’s mostly an on-prem gig here in Jax. Upsides include getting to work with modern tech, a plethora of legitimately interesting problems, and you get to work with us too. 😎 That last one might include some mentoring, pairing, and teaming. #payITforward

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Here's my commits/week vs. customers added. Not a perfect metric for total product effort, but a decent proxy. I get so excited about building products because, compared to consulting, there is unlimited upside. A fixed amount of product effort can make unbounded money while you sleep. (And yeah, I'm not factoring in time spent on customer support. Obviously that's rising with customer count and at some point requires hiring staff. But you get the point.)

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