Tripp Millican

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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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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Breaking Barriers, Building Futures: cPacket Commitment to Portland's Tech Landscape. Today, I'm excited to share some big news about cPacket continued investment in Portland. We're not just moving offices – we're recommitting to a city with incredible potential. Our new space in the Pearl District isn't just a location; it's a statement. We're creating a collaborative hub where innovation thrives, bringing our team closer together and staying connected to the vibrant heart of Portland. With plans to grow our engineering team, we're betting on local talent and the power of in-person collaboration. Some key highlights: - Hybrid work model that balances flexibility and team connection - Strategic location that supports our engineering and AI teams - A belief in Portland's tech ecosystem and its future The past few years have challenged downtown Portland, but we see beyond temporary setbacks. We're investing in spaces that foster creativity, problem-solving, and breakthrough innovations. To my friends Portland tech enthusiasts: the future is bright, and we're building it together. https://lnkd.in/gaAfKzyb #Portland #networkobservability #NetOps #WeBelieveinPortland #TechCommunity

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If you want a lesson on inspiring loyalty in those who work for you, and garnering deep respect from the people who work with you, spend thirty minutes with Alexis Chitwood, MBA, PSM1, for whom phrases like "put people over process" go way beyond the words! "We follow the principle of people over process, putting people first the same way that we put our creators first. There’s a large sense of community and support at Raptive enforcing that idea that we can achieve more when we work together, and those lessons will stay with me forever." https://lnkd.in/eCYG_mw6

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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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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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Leaders, ask not what your reports can do for you but what you can do for your reports. Maximize your impact by fostering environments where people can do their best work. Great post from John Cutler about shifting a reactive perspective and getting clarity on how to respond when things seem too complex. #Leadership #ProductDevelopment #PeopleFirst #Empathy

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Super interesting (and technical) breakdown on how the folks at ClickHouse are transforming the simple, flexible JSON format into something that can be leveraged at hyperscale. An excellent example of how sometimes scale can make you do crazy things.

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There's an oft-cited stat from Pendo that 80% of software features are rarely, if ever, used. While it's impossible to know the accuracy of that, it's not hard to believe. I've been part of multiple feature factories, where emphasis was put on new features to 'claim' rather than taking time to ensure we've actually solved the desired problem before moving onto the next. If you're a Product Manager/Leader in the Indy area, join us on August 14 for a conversation around best practices for measuring product success. We'll have food, drinks, and hopefully some great learnings! (Registration link in the comments)

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I was recently asked what I look for when determining if an engineering manager was ready to become a director. I gave what I thought was a pretty good answer. Then I gave it some more thought and ended up writing 1200 words on the topic 😬 So now I share it with you if you're interested. https://lnkd.in/geifmmU3 The TLDR: - Can this manager broaden their scope effectively? - Can they make good decisions with a whole lot more information to sift through? - Can they take the next step and manage managers?

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It's been less than two weeks since we released Replit Agent into the wild. The response has been more than we expected. So many people have great ideas for software, and their creativity has just been unleashed. As a result, we're hiring for multiple roles in engineering to help double down on our efforts and keep improving it every week (our weekly all hands is called Weekly Wins for a reason). Want to be part of the action? Message me or just check out: replit.com/careers Want to know more about Replit Agent? Check out Matt's deep dive: https://lnkd.in/gb8z8i6S

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Familiarity Levels at Work, and Meeting Scheduling Novice: You are surprised by their calendar blocks Journeyman: You already schedule around their blocks Expert: You know why those blocks exist and when they are negotiable Elite: Already synced over chat

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Don't miss out on our upcoming streamcast on Thursday, Oct 17th at 8 AM PDT. Discover the ins and outs of Redpanda's architecture, deployment choices, real-world applications, and top tips 💻 Read the details here: #Kafka #datastreaming #dataengineering

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Last Tuesday, Malsgufa, our legacy CMS backend, was shut down. This milestone for BI's Tech and Product team culminated years of planning, effort, and execution. Malsgufa's first commit was on July 25, 2014, leading to 5,186 commits across nearly 30 repositories. Built and maintained by scores of engineers, its deprecation represents significant cost savings (20 production replicas, 3 instances of Solr, and an insane number of Zookeeper instances!), reduced security risk, and the elimination of an often-blamed boogeyman. The journey began in January 2020. Our challenge: moving traffic off Malsgufa without rebuilding everything in Muse. Initially, we tried GraphQL as an intermediary between Viking and our services, but progress was limited by Viking's complex Angular/Vue architecture. In January 2023, we pivoted to the strangler fig pattern with a shim. This approach proved far more effective – all Malsgufa traffic went through the shim first, with verbose logging to track unhandled requests. Meanwhile, we built Story Versioning API (SVAPI), incorporating lessons learned from Malsgufa's limitations around history and publishing states. We ran four major migrations (stories, custom pages, slideshows, and videos), building support in Muse and shimmed compatibility for Viking. Traffic gradually decreased from a torrent to a trickle, leading to the gloriously uneventful shutdown. Next, we will deprecate Viking by Q2 2025, unifying our users in the Muse ecosystem to create the industry's most innovative CMS. Special thanks to the entire Story Creation team: Chase Gruber, Chris Speziale, Daniel Arita, Danny Feliz, Dasha Lary, Dawin Camillo, Eric Saam, Frederica Chen, John Laslo, Kelly Filush, Morgan Cohn, Sarah Pai, Tyler Greenfield! Thanks also to DaD, Engagement, Helpfulness, Cloud Engineering, Test Engineering, and Operational Excellence! Finally, we recognize Malsgufa itself. Developed as a unified CMS backend to support Business Insider's expansion into new markets, it served our global newsroom reliably for a decade, publishing millions of stories despite no major changes in recent years. While it became less sustainable as our business evolved, it deserves our respect. Thank you, Malsgufa. May you rust in peace.

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Check out this conversation I had with Amir Bormand on The Tech Trek Podcast on effective management and how individual contributors can leverage their manager to move their careers forward

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🎺 Feature Friday (is that a thing? I'm running with it...) New on capture.dev this week - take your product feedback beyond random screenshots and use your camera and mic to add extra context to those more difficult to explain issues. Think of it like a Loom, except: 👉 Devs get all of the technical info they need, like network requests and console logs, for zero extra effort. 👉 Record directly in your browser, with no extra software or extensions needed Free to try now over on capture.dev

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Your most important outcomes as a PM will not be driven by you. At least, not entirely. For outcomes that truly matter to the business (revenue, retention, CAC...), your work needs to work in symphony with all the other departments to have impact. This was my key takeaway from Nick Boccone's Outputs vs. Outcomes workshop at #ProductTO last night. Outcomes are events. They can happen without your involvement. Outputs are actions you and your team take. Sometimes, they inform outcomes — but never on their own. It led me to revisit this recent podcast from Leah Tharin featuring Kyle Poyar; this might sound like "just GTM stuff" that doesn't impact you... but until you realize how the business engine works, and the role each department plays in that engine, you're very limited in the outcomes you can drive as a Product Manager. https://lnkd.in/gg3s28-R #growth #productmanagement

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A handy visual guide for Product folks about to contemplate and communicate, well, just about anything. As with so much in our domain, simple at surface, elaborate to execute, but priceless when proper.

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