David Anderson

Hey folks! Garrett Milster and I have only posted about Sacramento Labs once, so we figured it's time for an update 😊 **What is Sacramento Labs?** We’re a small team focused on launching software products that solve real-world problems. Think of us as a startup lab—constantly testing ideas, learning from feedback, and building tools that matter, and having an impact while doing it. **How do we decide what to build?** We like to build products that: -         Solve real-world problems in mostly ignored industries -         Are small, highly maintainable, and scalable codebases -         Make the world a better place directly, or by donating a percentage of profits to a relevant charity in that space You can learn more about our philosophy at sacramentolabs.com **What you can expect from us** We’ll be posting product ideas that are in various stages of our pipeline: Early Concept, Customer Development, In Progress, Launched, Scaling. We’d love to hear your feedback! **Our latest concept: Self-Hosted Security** Here’s the problem: - Businesses often use third-party URL shorteners to share internal tools, resources, or campaigns, but these services introduce serious risks. Enterprise companies like Google, Microsoft, and Stripe have built their own internal URL shorteners for this reason – but most businesses don’t have the resources to do that. - Phishing attacks are rampant, and links from external services can be spoofed or abused. - Branding and security controls are limited, leaving sensitive information exposed. - You can’t track link activity—who’s clicking what, when, or why. - When employees leave, their shared links still work, leaving potential vulnerabilities. Our proposed solution: Self-Hosted Security. It’s a plug-and-play solution for businesses to host their own branded URL shorteners with: - SSO for secure access tied to your company’s directory. - Link expirations to ensure old links don’t stay active indefinitely. - Audit logs to track activity and improve visibility into link usage. 📢 We need your input! Would this solve a problem for you? What features would make this indispensable? Check out the landing page and share your thoughts: selfhostedsecurity.com Want to chat? Email me at [email protected] 😊 💡 And here’s something we’re passionate about: a percentage of profits from Self-Hosted Security will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Your feedback not only helps us create better solutions, but also contributes to making a positive impact. Thanks for being part of the journey!

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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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This product was practically built for me. I’ve been waiting for something like it for years, long after I gave up writing on paper almost entirely. Heck, if it wasn’t for having kids, I probably could have gone the last the past decade with the challenge of not writing anything down on paper. Which makes it all the more frustrating at the price point it’s released. This isn’t targeted for grade school students, college students, or young professionals. It’s targeted at prosumers which share the same space as an iPad Air, and the market is already dominated by prosumers who want that product. For those who can’t afford the iPad, Amazon releases tablet computers in the $100 range. I know Remarkable is a much smaller company, and can’t compete on price with Amazon, or volume like Apple. But waiting so long for something I can’t justify the purchase price just hurts. At half the price it would have been a no brainer. It checks practically every box.

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I was reading one of the 2 newsletters I follow - The Grappler's Diary on Substack - and the author (Chris Wojcik) pointed out one of those "well, yeah, of course" kind of ideas that made me stop and think for a bit. Wojcik pointed out that it takes more and more effort to reach higher levels of skill in jiu jitsu. This is of course true of any skill. I've certainly seen that with programming. The easiest and biggest leaps are at the beginning. Going from zero to your first working program is pretty easy. Becoming a true professional developer takes years. Continuous improvement takes introspection, feedback, seeking out training and education, and lots and lots of work. And the noticeable improvements these days are small: cleaner code, improved readability, and better organization. Little things that matter. And the more time I spend as a "programmer" the less I write code and the more time I spend on related things: technical design, code review, stakeholder relations, project management, and more. Just as you get more skilled in martial arts, the more time you spend teaching, coaching, and advising, and the less time you spend getting beat up by kids.

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I am genuinely curious about something and frankly, this seems like the only place to get a good answer: Are people in business classes still being taught models based off of factories? (e.g. You run a Widget Factory that produces some number of items per day.) If so, that might explain a lot of the more curious approaches and fixations I've noted over the years working for decidedly non-factory based industries.

Time to be fair.... In past posts, I have been less than complimentary of the DLC regulations that now make it more difficult to implement SMS into an application. I understand that all sorts of organizations use (and misuse) SMS millions (billions?) of times daily. I get that the new regulations make an attempt to reduce, as much as possible, SMS Spam. All in all, it just seemed like another example of hand-cuffing the good guys while trying to put some limits on the bad actors. My experience at the time was with #Twilio... and I tried to make it very clear that my frustration wasn't necessarily with them - they were doing the best they could to handle an avalanche of organizations trying to comply with new rules that everyone was stumbling their way through. I've been using Twilio for years and can't complain AT ALL about the platform performance for my particular small-scale needs. It was the nearly impossible approval process that really soured me. After nearly a year of living without application-based SMS (email only), I decided to revisit. The application was already all wired up for the feature - it was just dormant. This time around I was able to get up and running in 3 days... 99% of which was the DLC approval - which happened today. Kudos #Twilio for suffering through the tough days and making SMS once again something that can be done with very little pain. #twilio #sms #dlcapproval

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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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Last time I wrote about self-reflection routines and their power in professional and personal life. Today I have a small blurb from one of the articles I read written by Itzchak Sabo https://lnkd.in/gKj6qHRi. One of the things that instantly connected with me was prioritising writing to enhance communication and understanding in professional contexts. It argues that well-formed documents, supported by visual aids, allow for clearer thoughts, better goal alignment, and thoughtful questioning, making writing a crucial leadership skill. I referenced this with some of my thoughts in my leadership series here https://lnkd.in/gT7PqNvc #leadership #skills #management

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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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"Culture eats Strategy for lunch" - Peter Drucker This quote has never rung truer than in today's workplace. As someone who's had the privilege of working at both Google and Facebook (Meta), I've experienced firsthand the transformative power of a strong corporate culture. Sharing Tips for Becoming a Cultural Steward: 🚫 Top 5 toxic culture traits: Disrespectful, Non-inclusive, Unethical, Cutthroat, Abusive. 💼 People don't just leave jobs for pay or role - culture is 10.4 times more powerful in driving turnover. 🌟 Healthy cultures prioritize: Care, Coaching, Diversity, Transparency, Learning, Recognition, Purpose. 🎯 As a leader, you can create a positive sub-culture within your team, even if you can't change the entire organization. 🤝 Involve your team in defining and building the culture they want to work in. My time at Google and Facebook taught me that a strong culture isn't just about perks or benefits. It's about creating an environment where people feel valued, challenged, and connected to a greater purpose. 🚀 Action Item: What three words would you use to describe your ideal team culture? Share in the comments! #TechLEadership #CorporateCulture #LeadershipDevelopment #EmployeeEngagement #WorkplaceCulture #TeamBuilding

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"Do you think there is something *different* or *unique* about Amazon that might explain the 5-day RTO decision?" - a friend asked me. Amazon's 5-day RTO has been in the news a lot recently, and it has become yet another polarizing issue (way too many of those nowadays). Personally I think there are 3 things that make Amazon unique in that aspect. This post is NOT a statement on "to RTO or to not RTO." I do not have access to any secret information from leadership. These are not facts - they're just my own opinions. I am simply sharing the answer I gave my friend. 1️⃣ Keeping the Culture Out of all the tech companies where I’ve worked or interviewed, Amazon has the strongest, most crisply defined culture. It has survived with surprisingly little change for 30 years (I’ve known Amazon for 15). You can’t just learn culture in a book. It’s transmitted from generation to generation via interactions. I learned how to be amazonian by carefully watching the way others around me behaved and identifying role models I wanted to emulate. Why RTO? Culture is not *impossible* to learn and keep remotely, but it’s extremely difficult to do so. A lot of the culture you observe is in the little details, it’s in what folks say or do after they get off Chime. 2️⃣ Disagree and Commit Amazon has a healthy disregard for “social cohesion” and encourages healthy debate among all levels. This is a critical part of our culture – more so than in any other company. We are VERY direct in our communication - which if you’re new to Amazon can feel a little weird and unnerving, but I personally have come to really appreciate. Why RTO? There’s research that shows that people meeting in person disagree with each other 1.5x more often than people meeting over video (https://lnkd.in/gYmcTkzz). Anecdotally, I see this. 3️⃣ Sit’n’Read Culture At Amazon, you are expected to articulate your point clearly in proper writing - mostly 6-pagers (https://lnkd.in/gV6rwXAH). If you schedule a meeting to go over a doc, what inevitably happens is n% of the people that show up have NOT actually read it but nobody will admit it, so everybody wings it and you end up with low quality discussions. At Amazon we remove the assumption that people will pre-read a doc and we bake time in the meeting itself to read it. That way we can ensure 100% of the audience can conduct a thoughtful debate on a topic. Why RTO? People can just turn off their video, skip reading, multi-task on other things, and rejoin the meeting when it’s time to talk – leading to the low quality discussions that sit’n’read avoids. Having said all that, those mechanisms of the culture worked much better when most of us were concentrated in the Seattle area. We’re a global force today and we do need to figure out how to work asynchronously. We haven’t quite figured out how to evolve yet. But we’ll get there. I’m betting on us.

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In the early days of the internet, the W3C and few other organizations helped build the first Internet Standards so that the Web could foster it's own innovation & growth. Fast forward 30 years, I cannot believe we needed a law to get browsers and websites to agree on protecting your privacy by default... The internet should really be decentralized, and customer centrist by design. How did we ended up here?

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"Your main job is to make your product win." I think this should apply to any product that your company makes. I also like what he says following this statement about what is NOT your main job. I will summarize here: "Your main job is not to make your manager happy, it is not to make execs happy." Also, note, this main job doesn't only apply to PMs, but also to senior Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, and Designers. #makeyourproductwin #leadership

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Totally agree with Dan DiGangi here. If you don't understand the overall strategy of a business, it's hard for you to align and be fully effective. This goes from leadership down to engineering. What are you doing to try and understand that vision? Link in comments to the full interview with Dan!

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Question for engineering leaders (managers, directors, VP's, etc): I'm curious about the current landscape of developer productivity analysis + management tools - things like LinearB and Jellyfish. Which tool, if any, are you using? Any opinions/pros/cons on the tool you're using (or the entire domain overall)?

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This is a cool project, and another example of the emerging "replace stateful storage with S3" trend. I do wonder at what point someone will package this sort of thing up into a FUSE filesystem to make it generally usable across existing services. Or maybe every service has unique enough needs that it's better to handle it custom each time. https://lnkd.in/etcVBfVf

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Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional etc. So treat this with caution. Occasionally, I wonder if some techniques in software engineering work because a lot of devs have ADHD, diagnosed or not. (Not sure if anyone has actual numbers here: https://lnkd.in/eamW_Nqz) So it’s interesting to stumble across “body doubling” - the fact that having someone present helps with executive function in ADHD and wonder if that is why mobbing and pairing works so well for some developers. https://lnkd.in/eBrMQS84

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