Tobias Macey

32-bit floats instead of SemVer! Obviously a horrible idea... or is it? https://lnkd.in/ghybmg4v (My searches turned up nothing like this but if it's already been invented, please let me know and I'll add a "prior art" section.)

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At the core of effective engineering leadership is the ability to stay connected with your team. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect because retaining the respect of your people is difficult unless you remain technically involved yourself. In my journey as an engineering leader, staying true to the individual contributor role that originally earned their respect has kept me close. This approach extends beyond technical expertise; it's about maintaining a deep connection with the core activities that propel product development forward at Gearflow. One of my biggest professional fears is becoming irrelevant or disconnected from my team and our work. This fear motivates me to continually reinvent and retool in response to market demands. Next month, I'll be sharing about my adventures generating synthetic data recently. And while I'm no expert when I start preparing for these talks, the process is incredibly valuable. It's less about delivering a perfect talk and more about how the preparation expands my thinking and exposes me to new capabilities. This helps me connect the dots to opportunities at Gearflow that bring real innovation to our customers. Speaking regularly holds me accountable and pushes me to learn ahead of the curve, ensuring I remain relevant and impactful day-to-day. Every talk is a journey of discovery, helping me to lead with humility, communicate clearly, and inspire a culture of innovation through a deep, technical understanding of our work.

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> "Note that different people tend to be drawn to different ends of these trade-offs. For example, TPMs typically are drawn to the “control” side and prototyping engineers are typically drawn to the “autonomy” end. This means that people will have their ego attached to one end of the trade-off, making the debate — especially if it frames the question as a binary and not a trade-off — somewhat emotionally charged." Leading a team can be especially tricky when team members hold strong, opposing viewpoints. The key, at least in my opinion, lies in prioritising a collaborative approach that emphasizes small, iterative steps, regular evaluation, and a shared goal of creating value for users/customers, not winning internal debates.

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"No More Blue Fridays" and eBPF, it's just a one-minute reading: https://lnkd.in/gAAmNU4D if you haven't seen it. That's precisely what I speculatively said to my colleagues, without even reading anything about it, answering their question about how that could happen: "BlueFriday was most likely triggered by the ring0 kernel driver accessing the invalid memory. It's hard to say without knowing details, but Ring0 could be the only way on Windows to access a particular functionality, like Network Stack." Undoubtedly, eBPF is a great tech, but is it a silver bullet? Can it replace Ring0 or kernel drivers? I do not think so. It's excellent for its niche, but is it safe? No. Is it safer than kernel drivers? Yes, it is way safer (as well as any other indirection layer that provides an infiltrated interface).

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Thanks for attending, especially Gregory Burd and Kresten Krab Thorup, the original authors of HanoiDB! We'll be back next week for more. Follow me on YouTube to get notified or catch up on past streams: https://lnkd.in/ea4rXxEx #RustLang #Databases #Erlang

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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've just wrote a blog post on how I can see the AI moving forward next year, and how the Agent landscape will look like in the near future. The future with AI is wild. 🚀 https://lnkd.in/daHUYiBf

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Best session about S3. Do not miss it!

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One potentially really good use for AI (for the rich person who wants to contribute back to US society): a model which asks for someone's opinions on general topics, and then correlates that with all available data for election choices, and fills out a sample ballot for the person based on the data. Each item could have a "drill down" link, to explain the available trade-offs, and why the option was selected. Rationale: A lot of voting is inefficient (in terms of "selecting the best option per people's desired outcomes"), because voters are bad at correlating large amounts of data, and propaganda people are good at confusing people and misrepresenting causal actions. But ML models are good at the former, and if trained properly, effectively immune to the latter. My assumption is that most voters/people are generally well-meaning, and trying to do the "right thing" for the country, but that's increasingly difficult in today's world of disinformation and propaganda. An unbiased model which aligned suggested choices with desired outcomes and trade-offs, based on actual data, would be potentially tremendously beneficial for getting better outcomes from elections in general. Note: This would not be an easy problem to solve by any stretch... but it could be a really positive change, imho.

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"The core art of Operations Management is observing the messy, human chaos of business and applying order to it." The Operator's handbook is a great guide to the various operations disciplines like #businessoperations or #bizops, #revenueoperations or #revops, #financialops or #finops,#legalops, #marketingops, #peopleops and #productoperations / #productops that have emerged as a result of shift from hardware to software-based value creation (see my previous post too --> https://lnkd.in/gwNWwkNh?). Great introduction, though I find it lacking as it did not include factory operations, supply chain, store operations that rely far more on offline-online interfaces. For any operator out there, process, analytics, metrics, cadence, solutioning and execution are the key concepts to apply.

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I think this is the last of my ToTTs that are publicly applicable that haven't been posted. Thank you so much, Andrew Trenk for helping get these out there. One of the toughest things about leaving Google was the amount of written material I lost access to. It isn't just the infrastructure at Google that was incredible, it was the (mostly volunteer) efforts to explain the knottiest problems of understanding in software engineering. In any case, I like this one a lot. We might talk about tests needing to be hermetic, or readable, or deterministic, etc. All of those properties are absolutely good and important, but from a certain point of view, those are refinements of "actionable." And that ties nicely with https://lnkd.in/exKth93Z and some of the recent work on observability for CI from CNCF - we don't write tests only to *have* a test, we write tests to trigger an alert when something would be a problem when shipped to users. If an alert doesn't cause action, or can't be deciphered, or isn't reliable, it's a bad alert - whether that's in prod or in CI.

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We're shipping a lot here at Schematic, take a look at what went live this month. https://lnkd.in/ejmxiyi2 Highlights:  💲 Stripe integration: Sync billing data from Stripe and map it to company profiles in Schematic 🔌 SDK update: Caching, event buffering, and offline support for Go, Python, and Node.js ✨ UX improvements: Feature usage sidebar and bulk entitlements adding 🪵 Audit log: View, search, and filter updates to a company's features access, troubleshoot issues, and track changes for compliance 👥 Team permissions: Invite teammates and specify what permissions they have within Schematic

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I'm getting used to how to utilize LLM as a useful software component.

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My Apache Hudi CDC first draft is sitting in my blog ready to publish. I'll reread it with fresh eyes on Monday and publish.

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Confession: I am lazy. A while ago I showed a Prescient Designer/Node-RED subflow with multiple "virtual" inputs. Not too hard, but not simple enough for me. So I made a couple of nodes to make this super fast and dead simple. Watch how in my latest video! https://lnkd.in/e7WxhxpH #designer #nodered #lazy

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If you have built and operated an application or service that relies on an operational database in production, you will immediately understand the insane amount of value that these features deliver.

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“For Graeber, bullshit jobs carry with them a moral imperative: ‘If you’re not busy all the time doing something, anything—doesn’t really matter what it is—you’re a bad person.’ But the flipside of that logic seems to be: if you actually like doing X activity, if it is valuable, meaningful, and carries intrinsic rewards for you, it is wrong for you to expect to be paid (well) for it; you should give it freely, even (especially) if by doing so you are allowing others to profit. In other words, we’ll make a living from you doing what you love (for free), but we’ll keep you in check by making sure you have to make a living doing what you hate.” — Geoff Shullenberger, a writing professor at New York University I couldn't help thinking that here, the professor is describing, how “open source software” thing works. And then, I found: “The free software industry, perversely enough, has become a paradigm in this respect... software engineering work was divided between the interesting and challenging work of developing core technologies, and the tedious labor of ‘applying duct tape’ to allow different core technologies to work together, because the designers had never bothered to think about their compatibility. ... increasingly, open source means that all the really engaging tasks are done for free.” — David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

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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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This is a fun blog post about first steps with Rust -- and what looks like a legitimately useful tool!

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