Adam LaBarge

Startup425 will be hosting their "Eastside Summit" on August 1st at Bellevue City Hall during #SeattleTechWeek and you do not want to miss it! The Eastside Summit is hosted by Startup425 and its partner cities of Bellevue, Renton, Redmond, Issaquah, Kirkland, and Bothell. Join #Founders, #Investors, Executives, PolicyMakers, and those in bigtech and startups for a day of networking, education and community. There will be a series of panels around topics like... - Venture Capital & Startup Investments: Offers a deep dive into funding trends and investment strategies, providing attendees with crucial insights into the financial backbone of startups. - Eastside Startup Founder Exits: Successful founders share their exit strategies and experiences, offering invaluable insights for upcoming entrepreneurs. - Enterprise Technology on Eastside: Highlights the latest advancements in enterprise technology and their impact on both the local and global markets - Business and Technology Policy: Facilitates a dialogue on evolving regulatory frameworks to better support technological innovation and business growth Registrations have just opened.

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Not specific to coding screens so forgive me for going off-track but I feel like there can be a "you won't always have a calculator" discussion that might be interesting. In regards to open-book or closed-book, it is difficult to remember everything so referencing something you might have forgotten isn't uncommon but there is a distinct difference between refreshing your memory and searching for a solution. However, being able to research effectively is also a great skill. With access to this information so readily available and the growing popularity of AI, I can definitely see engineers trending toward having less technical fundamentals and critical thinking in favor of yielding quick results. Is it efficiency or laziness? Will it be damaging? I'm curious how it will affect the industry.

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As I continue to work on building my personal website in public, its been fun to try to bite off small improvements and get them shipped. I thought I'd get further on the actual design, but its been harder to get started on that than I expected. I'm sure there are a lot of factors, but one of them I realized has been a result of my journey from being "a designer who can code" to a "coder who occassionally designs" I wrote about it on my in-progress website and titled it "The Other Side of Growth": https://lnkd.in/emv6BKSN

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Join us in Irvine on July 17th at 6:30 PM for our latest OC ACM talk, "Systems and Software for Averting an Energy Crisis" presented by Bill Gervasi, a Principal Systems Architect for Wolley Inc. For more info or to RSVP click here: https://lnkd.in/gquYQ2z9 According to a recent Forbes article, "The rise of generative AI and surging GPU shipments is causing data centers to scale from tens of thousands to 100,000-plus accelerators, shifting the emphasis to power as a mission-critical problem to solve." making this talk particularly relevant. #acm #techtalk #gpu #ai #generativeai #nvidia #energy #energycrisis

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Hot take : there’s no such thing as a 10x dev or engineer.  There are juniors and seniors. There are people who work faster or slower. If someone on your team is producing 10x what someone else is producing, it’s either poor quality or you have someone massively underproducing. 

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🚀 Pro Tip for Tech Job Seekers! 🚀 I know I JUST POSTED but since crossing to "the other side" of job searching I am seeing a lot of what happens, and now I can puff up my chest like the software engineer I am and do what we do best: 𝓈𝒽𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝒶𝓃 𝑜𝓅𝒾𝓃𝒾𝑜𝓃. When looking for a new role, hiring agencies, hiring managers from your prospective employer, their technical teams, etc, are all looking for the same thing: The path of least resistance. It's a tough market in tech right now and has been since the pandemic stopped being a pandemic, so here's two tips to become the path of least resistance yourself: - Take your hiring process past the CV grinding phase very seriously. Once you're enrolled in tech tests and such, you're on a true to the heart selection process and shining at that stage is what gets you hired. If you're asked to do something, pay very close attention to what's being asked. If they give you source material to study, friggin' study it! - Once you get to the interview stage, your job is to be someone who the department manager will want to work with. My suggestion here is to be honest, and be frank about who you are. Don't try to portrail yourself differently, because at that stage if they think you're masquerading who you are, or if they like the character you're portraying and you end up being different, your career with them will be short lived. We're living in times where the average engineer is replaceable, and we don't admit this often enough. Thoughts on this? #TechJobSeekers #JobSearchAdvice #TechJobs #CareerAdvice #LinkedInTips #JobSeekerProTip #TechCareer #InterviewTips #LinkedInPost #JobSeekers #CareerTips

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I'm confused by things like this. Someone publicly telling people they can't do something like getting into software engineering by going down a certain path. But at the same time, that they should also listen and buy into their specific advice on how they can do it? This guy has a "successful Udemy course" touted in his experience, and their personal educational background in coding is 2 years in "Udemy Academy". Isn't that pretty much the same path that someone with 3-6 months learning coding is likely already heading down? A freelance career building websites is absolutely okay to supplement a career path into engineering. Can it be done quickly and easily? Absolutely not. Quickly if you're lucky and you pour a ton of concentrated time and effort into it, but challenging no matter what you do. But do you need to follow a specific path, especially the one that people like this are selling? Also absolutely not. Don't let other people gatekeep what you can or can't do with your career. Only you get to decide what is right for you and what works. Obviously, don't be a fool... if you find yourself stuck or unable to find traction, don't be afraid to make some changes and experiment with something new. But maybe inoculate yourself from myriad narrow perspectives out there that are just as abundant, if not moreso, than the many people currently learning to code in a less-than-ideal market. If anyone reading this needs or wants advice on how to break into engineering, I'm more than happy to chat with you about it, without needing to sell you something to do so. #careeradvice #softwareengineering #webdevelopment #learntocode #udemy

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Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. 🌟 Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

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I also have a homebrew tap! https://lnkd.in/gq-yNh3F There aren't as many packages as my COPR. But homebrew does have stronger support for installs from package registries - for example, unlike COPR, it directly supports npm.

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AI is useful, but not as much as it's being hyped. I typically use AI for explainers. Tell me how something works, with references/sources. Writing code with AI is a waste of time. The code is either wrong or it tends to bloat my code (too verbose or repetitive). https://lnkd.in/gDmQNwnk

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It's hard to choose the right code reviewers. I just read the research paper below, detailing persistent gender inequities in who reviews code. In short: examining code reviews at Google over one three month period, the authors found that women were sent about 25% fewer reviews than men. The number is closer to 16% when accounting for factors like whether the person is actively writing code or whether they kept their job for the entire period. Even shorter: Coders send women fewer code reviews than they send to men. In my experience, this is only one part of a general problem with assigning code reviewers. As a team lead, I typically wanted code reviewers to be assigned so that: 1) The code ends up getting a good review. Reviewing is a skill, and some people are better at it than others. A good review has to be gracious, provide both positive and constructive feedback, and have a reasonable turnaround time. You also want thoughtful - ideally diverse - ideas and feedback. 2) More than one person on the team understands the code. You need this so that code can be maintained when one person is unavailable. 3) The code reviews are evenly distributed through the team. The good reviewers are often in high demand. But they can get bogged down with too many reviews. And you don't get to be a good reviewer unless you get some practice first. Like I said, that's what I wanted. In reality, these goals can be hard to reconcile. If you have one person writing a subsystem, and you really want someone else on the team who understands that subsystem, then you often have to pick a single person to do all of the reviews. That makes it hard to distribute reviews evenly. If you have someone who is a relatively new hire, and you absolutely need the best review possible, you may not give that hire a lot of reviews. That makes even distribution hard. And that's not even counting the stresses of having to worry about this while you juggle product deadlines and complicated personalities! As a result, teams tend to fall into very bad review assignment habits. There's the TL who is overwhelmed because they try to do everyone's code reviews. There's the expert who has a week-long turnaround time, but you *absolutely* need their review. There's that one developer who needs to be reminded every single day that they have pending code reviews. The article suggests automated reviewer selection tools that apply round-robin strategies can help deal with bias problems. They absolutely can - but those strategies just can't account for the human aspects of the review. My take is that code review is a bit like bug assignment - you need to assign reviewers for project code as thoughtfully as you assign the project itself. It's not something that can completely be done by a given developer in a vacuum - but it's also not a problem that a tool can solve by itself. https://lnkd.in/gTDxAhpG

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I've been hearing a lot about "the end of the Jr Developer" lately and how no one should take software engineering anymore. Sure, the market is a bit of a mess right now with lots of layoffs and a bias toward hiring senior developers but what happens in 10 years when those senior devs are retiring or moving into managerial roles? It's the same with anything, if you aren't training the next generation of developers you are heading for a crisis sooner rather than later. We are trading short term gains for long term pain. AI might be steering use towards another dotcom or crypto style bubble but software development isn't going anywhere and ChatGPT isn't going to take any of our jobs. #softwaredevelopment #ai #softwareengineer

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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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I think it's important for leaders to share their failures*, and this seems to qualify. I was hoping to make a quick 20-minute video to demonstrate my thought process when working with code, but it turned into a 75-minute video that demonstrates a big part of software development is struggling until you find a solution. To those just starting out your careers (and everyone else), there is no shame in struggling. It is only through struggle that we grow. It's fine to be out of your depth. It's fine to ask questions. It's fine to not know everything. A growth mindset will help you (eventually) overcome the obstacles thrown your way. (*Another way of thinking of failures is framing them as struggles, which just means they're something you encountered on your journey toward success.) #opentowork

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I've been hard at work, getting ready to stand up Pixel Valley! Got a lot done on the conversation engine and created a quick StreamLit app to test it. Doesn't look like much, but I feel this is a big deal because it is "not just another chatbot". As you can see here, I am having a coherent conversation with an entire group of agents, that are each responding or not responding as appropriate. This was created with off-the-shelf gpt-3.5-turbo. Instead of using expensive fine tuning, it is accomplished using a combination of clever prompt engineering, RAG, and AI function calling. It's getting close!

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Let's assume we drive 1000 miles a month. Cheapest EV car: Nissan Leaf @ $30,000 MSRP Monthly payment with 10% down ($3k) and a 7-year loan: about $400 Gets about 3.5 m/kWh. @ .12 $/kwH = $.0342 per mile. Fuel: $34.20 + Loan: $400 = $434.20 /mo Cheapest Gas car: Nissan Versa @ $16000 MSRP Monthly payment with (the same $3k down) and a 7-year loan: about $200 Gets about 35 mpg @ $5/gal = 0.1428 per mile Fuel: $142.80 + Loan: $200: = $342.80 /mo This doesn't include the cost of installing a sub-panel in your home, and differences in insurance (which EVs are higher). Also, EV batteries need to be replaced somewhere between 10-15 years. I'm all about electric vehicles (and definitely want one), but saying they are cheaper comes from a very privileged place, and still isn't true.

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I'm seeing a lot of these "expert answers" about frontend development and what does HTML, CSS, and Javascript do. So many of them over complicate it: HTML is content authoring. You are writing a document and should use the tools and formatting available to make it as clearly understood as possible. Most people should be able to write some HTML much like most people can post dross on social networks. However there is a big difference between a coherent, semantically correct HTML doc and some div/span catastrophe. The latter is more like the local racists latest rant with no punctuation, swimming with spelling mistakes, and they've tied themselves in knots over the fact there was once a rainbow flag in Morrisons. CSS is not just about making things "look nice". Yeah it'll make things look better but it's main purpose should be to improve usability, legibility and make your content more understandable. Finally Javascript - Javascript is usually unnecessary and I reckon 90% of the internet could do without it. A lot of the things that Javascript has introduced has made the internet worse, less stable, and less accessible. It's main purpose has been to make frontend development more like a programming discipline, rather than the design discipline it originally was. This is coming from someone who has built their career around frontend development 🤷‍♂️

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