Darren Clark

In other news today, Delta Lake UniForm is now Generally Available. No more data silos, interoperability FTW! UniForm allows you to use a single table format for your lakehouse, getting the top-of-the-line performance and features of Databricks and Delta Lake, but being able to access the data using *any* engine that supports *any* of the common lakehouse formats Delta Lake, Iceberg, or Hudi.

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Spotlight on Professional Integrity: Navigating Job Title Inflation and Role Misrepresentation on LinkedIn We've all seen it—profiles on LinkedIn that seem to inflate duties or job titles beyond their true scope. This trend raises several critical questions for both professionals and employers: 1. Why Does It Happen? - Is it driven by competition, a desire for recognition, or pressure to appear more accomplished? 2. The Impact - How does this affect team dynamics, company culture, and the credibility of professionals within and outside the organization? 3. Company Policies - Should companies monitor LinkedIn profiles and hold employees accountable for misrepresentations? What are the ethical considerations involved in such monitoring? Here are some thought-provoking questions for the community: • Have you encountered instances of role inflation on LinkedIn? How did it impact your perception of the individual? • Should there be clear guidelines and consequences for misrepresenting one’s role online? If so, what should these look like? • How can companies support employees in showcasing their true achievements without feeling the need to exaggerate? Let's discuss! Your insights on maintaining professional integrity in our digital age are invaluable. #ProfessionalIntegrity #LinkedInEthics #WorkplaceCulture #CareerGrowth #Leadership #mentorship #accountability #askTheToughQuestions

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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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Ticket velocity isn't the *only* measure of an engineering team's effectiveness. At a high level, the best engineering organizations can predictably deliver against the priorities set forth by the business. That involves proper monitoring (through metrics) and coaching by effective managers. Here's a few non-velocity metrics I use to measure my organization: - Tenure of the team. - Platform uptime. - Number of critical issues in the last 8wks. - Automated code coverage percentages. - *Employee* vs customer detected bugs. - Number of requirements missed during project planning. Read more about my leadership style here: https://lnkd.in/geP2m7DJ #metrics #engineeringeffectiveness #team #leadership #software #tech #startup #management #dora #space #agile #projectmanagement #podcast

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Today, we recognize International Women in Engineering Day, celebrating the important contributions of women engineers worldwide. Ideagen supports many global organizations that rely on engineers for the safety and sustainability of their operations, including those in aviation and aerospace. We spoke with Jo Field, President of Women in Transport, Sally Longstaff, Safety Analyst at Emirates, and Michelle Low, Senior Regulatory Affairs Engineer and Senior Program Manager at Boeing, who share insights on the current state of diversity in aerospace and aviation. Watch our on-demand webinar as the panel explores what can be done to make the industry more inclusive for women of all backgrounds. #INWED24 #engineering #STEMCareers

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Hi guys! It's me again =) Posting every week trains discipline. That's good. What was interesting in the tasks over the past week: - A GraphQL API with Amplify is not always straightforward if you're not using the Amplify CDK. I chose not to use it to better understand the basic functions and avoid spending hours debugging problems later. - Real-time translation is quite expensive. I’ll calculate later and compare if it's cheaper to run a service with a stable diffusion translation model. - Java lambdas take a long time to start but work fairly quickly with Netty under the hood. - CDK + CloudFormation is great, but it doesn't synchronize the real state with what is written. It only applies changes. What's next: - Authentication via Cognito and Google. - I will add bookmark synchronization for authenticated users. - I will read the documentation on how to speed up lambdas in Java. Maybe using GraalVM will help. - I will add image sharing to the application. P.S. You can download the app here: https://lnkd.in/eZ8dkgRv #AWS #Cognito #AWSLambda #CloudFormation

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I have a new blog post that discusses our journey in speeding up Docker builds for a large rails monolith - https://lnkd.in/gT9HVnWv

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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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As per Brandon Suponchick, CTO of Aviture, in his session at the Kansas City Developer's Conference called "The Agile Architect: Building Product From The Trenches, Not The Tower," one of the many insights he shared was the importance of testing but even more foundational is that code needs to be testable. In order to have "architecture that evolves at the same pace as your business requirements," we need to start with code that is easy to test, and tests should be holistic and stable. If code design is poor and difficult test, our ability to change systems and deploy quickly will be limited. We need to be able to ensure our code will not break through sufficient tests. This includes unit tests. #KCDC #KCDC2024

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We published an article about all the awesome product observability features of Segment we have today and upcoming in the near future. Bookmark this if you are a Segment user!

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My Recharge side project right now? Overhauling the automated E2E tests in our CI/CD pipelines. It's taught me a ton about our environment. Like a lot of fast-growing software companies, we built a ton of E2E stuff when we didn't have a whole lot of solid unit and integration testing. Over time, that's all gotten a little crufty, and it takes us longer than it should to execute individual deploys. Our objective is to get this down to a level where the whole suite can comfortably be executed by any engineer, and it can serve as a training ground for new engineers to learn the business. In doing this, I've discovered tons of inefficient code through long-running tests, features I didn't even know existed, and a whole lot of solid work that's been done over the years and flying under my radar. Totally recommend digging in here for anyone trying to learn more about the code they support.

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From revolutionizing the passenger experience with biometrics and enhanced cabin designs, to the drive towards sustainability, the next few years are set to redefine the aviation industry. The next generation of air travel undeniably promises a whole host of opportunities, but the years ahead will also be full of challenges. Whether its addressing the skills shortage or updating risk management to keep pace with industry changes, there’s a lot to consider for stakeholders across the entire aviation industry. We explore the top 10 areas every aviation organization should be aware of for 2025 and beyond in our guide: "10 Key focus areas for the future of aviation". Download your free copy below ⬇️ #aviationsafety #aviation #flightsafety

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From IC engineer to C-Level exec, the most effective people I've worked with have one thing in common: they break down and decouple decisions. Optionality, trade-offs, last responsible moment, one-way and two-way door decisions, slicing, MVPs, proof of concepts etc. are all techniques they use for breaking decisions down and getting them made. The best engineers did this when working on code. Rather than trying to decide on all the functionality at once they'd be able to say "I can break this story down into smaller pieces of value that we can get released to users fast" or "we don't need to deliver this piece of functionality now, we can wait until we see how user's respond". The best architects, product managers and business leaders do the same thing. It's a real skill to decouple decisions. It's a real skill to be able to defer parts of a decision to next or later (or even never) to enable faster movement and lower risk. I have always been impressed when I witness it. Often it's obvious with hindsight and sometimes its completely out-of-the-box and you would have never have realised.

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For managers looking to onboard new engineers - giving them clarity on what to work on is (according to https://lnkd.in/gz8d4-4Q) one of the most important things you can do. I remember this lesson from bringing on many interns (Hi, everyone from Learn!), and even new managers. One thing you can do is make a pool of "new hire" work - get everyone from your team(s) to find some of those tasks that they never seem to have time to get around to, and tag them "new hire" in your backlog. Then, when you have someone just getting started, work with them to pick a few of these up. I'd recommend making sure they're a) not too difficult, but b) involve touching a few different places in the codebase, so they get familiar with it. MOST IMPORTANTLY - don't just throw things at them and then walk away. Make sure they have someone on hand to help them, preferably someone who has enough tenure. Remember: It's dangerous to go alone! ⚔

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Welcome Mitwa Patel to join Seradex as a co-op Software Developer in the spring/summer of 2024. During her tenure, she'll be working on converting Crystal reports to Telerik reports and adding test cases to QA automated testing for Windows-based ERP application. The new redesign report will remove imperfections, improve usability, and Seradex branding. The new test cases will be integrated into TestComplete which will be triggered by Azure DevOps pipeline. This integration will significantly reduce our manual testing timeline and inform any bugs to the developers immediately after auto-build and auto-deployment are completed. #ReportConversion #DataVisualization #QAautomation #AzureDevOps #TestComplete #ContinuousDevelopment #ContinuousIntegration

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First off Larry Diehl is one of the brightest ppl I ever had the pleasure to work with. His technical insights and experience are only matched by his pragmatic approach in building products. I've personally witnessed and experienced him doing so in complicated dense domains and his discipline, awareness, and ability to navigate complex + dense topics (e.g. type theory and formal verification) while keeping a pragmatic product development roadmap is truly astonishing. Secondly, I've had the privilege of seeing Larry build Colimit in real-time! It truly is a seamless gateway to bring reliability and thoroughness to apis backed by solid and principled fundamentals. Like it or not...everyone building APIs IS building distributed systems. However, not all of us have the time, expertise, and skills to build and test them reliably. Larry Diehl and Colimit are paving the way to bring that to the masses. It's truly a space that needs more love and attention. Hoping to bring Colimit to some of our teams in due time too! Super excited for what's to come! #formalverification #distributedsystems #apis

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🌟 Attention Engineering Managers and Technical Leaders! 🌟 In just two weeks, on June 28th at 10 AM PDT, I’m excited to host an interactive roundtable on Feature Flags and Delivery in conjunction with ELC! 🚀 Why Attend? This is a collaborative discussion where your expertise and curiosity are key! Whether you're experienced or eager to learn, your contributions are invaluable. 🔍 Discussion Points: - Decoupling Processes - Boosting Team Efficiency - Optimizing Feature Delivery - Tracking Platform Usage Expect rich conversations on best practices, unique implementations, methodologies, and the latest tools enhancing feature flagging and delivery. Who Should Join? - Engineering Managers - Technical Leads - DevOps Engineers - Software Developers This roundtable is your chance to: - Share your experiences - Gain new insights - Network with peers - Discover practical recommendations RSVP Now and mark your calendars for June 28th at 10 AM PDT! Let’s collaborate and elevate our skills together! #EngineeringManagement #TechLeaders #FeatureFlags #DevOps #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamEfficiency #TechRoundtable

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Want to learn more about building customized Intelligent agents for RAG applications? Here is your gateway. please check out my latest article utilizing brand new features of Qdrant's Hybrid search and LlamaIndex agents to create this platform. stay tuned to my Medium space for more articles like this. Ollama, Mistral AI #GenAI #LLM #VectorDB

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