Grant Everett

Got an email "GCP's Apache Kafka service is now live" at noon. After dinner, spent half an hour confirming it works well with Timeplus. I don't think you can make the bootstrap server publicly accessible. Has to setup a bastion host or run your app within the same project/VPC. Setting up the SASL username/pwd was not easy. Follow the guide carefully https://lnkd.in/gcKEVh3g and you may need to disable the iam.disableServiceAccountKeyCreation Anyway, if your workload are in GCP already, having such Kafka service in GCP is nice way to burn your cloud credits. Yet another Kafka vendor, great.

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Project update! My application tracking extension is now doing fuzzier matching and injecting new information into LinkedIn (and other sites) to keep me from doubling up on applications. Next up: local storage and bulk import/export operations...

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How does cloud-based device testing stack up against maintaining in-house device farms? How does one begin to navigate choosing a mobile testing approach? Modernizing your testing process in today’s challenging landscape – where to begin? These are a few of the many questions Marcus Merrell and I will address in part one of a two-part webinar series on a few things you need to get started with cloud-based device testing on May 21. We can’t wait to see you there! https://lnkd.in/dJuwZqNX

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Follow up to our "Tiered Storage Won't Fix Kafka" blog post. This one explains all the benefits of WarpStream's Zero Disk Architecture beyond just reducing costs! https://lnkd.in/epjCSVMv

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"Eat your own dogfood", they say... 🐶 🍲 At #DBOS not only we do so, but we also open source the recipe! 👉 Discover how we wrote a resilient subscription app with #Stripe and #dbostransat in less than 500 lines of code! 👉 Check how we reduced accidental complexity by more than 300% (from 7 AWS components to 2!) 👉 Check out our #Auth0 integration! #serverless #typescript #nodejs #cloud #aws

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I first came across Kyle's Jepsen series (https://jepsen.io/) back in 2015 and since then I have learned a lot about distributed systems and databases through his analyses on how these systems break and what guarantees they truly uphold in case of unexpected, but realistic, failures. We had a great time talking to Kyle about how he built a business around his passion for distributed systems, the mechanics of starting a consulting business (pricing and structuring contracts) and how to get better at writing. Whichever database or queues you work with, chances are, Kyle has analyzed how it breaks. Even if you don't listen to the podcast, I highly encourage software engineers to check out https://jepsen.io/analyses and build a better understanding of the system you use in production.

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I’ve spent my last four and a half years at Brex. Joining back in January of 2020, a lot has changed between myself, the company, and the world. Over my time at Brex, I’ve seen or experienced: - Rolling out career ladders, working towards a staff engineer promotion, and moving into management - Onboarding hundreds of engineers, resulting in the growth of the company from under fifty engineers and three hundred employees to over a thousand employees - Surviving three different rounds of layoffs, and countless numbers of re-organizations - Moving from a product engineer helping to build and launch Brex Cash, to an internal platform tech lead focused on developer productivity for a rapidly scaling organization, back to working on product as an engineering manager helping to re-launch our Bill Pay product integrated into our expense management software Since 2023, I've been writing down some key learnings from my time at Brex. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eXRV8NNz #TechCareer #SoftwareEngineering #Fintech #StartupLife #CareerGrowth #EngineeringManagement #ProductDevelopment #DeveloperProductivity #TechInsights #Scalability #OrganizationalGrowth #TechLeadership #Brex #TechLearnings #EngineeringJourney

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"Ellipsis will review your code (and do a good job!)" is what I told John Biggs as a guest on the Startup Show by Grit Daily. We talked about how Ellipsis is reviewing code and fixing bugs for dozens of engineering teams. Take a listen, and sign up for a 7 day free trial at https://ellipsis.dev

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This has incredible potential as a dev tool, but what interests me most is the built-in traceability... Connecting ideation to PRs is a slow and manual process. Devs are responsible for manually tying a code change to it's conception in issue tracking systems, which is error prone and not useful unless they follow strict standards. Do I put the ticket # in the commit or the PR message? Do I use the story or the sub-task? All of this would be fixed by integrating issue tracking into the IDE with a little bit of LLM help. Developers can jump right into solving the problem instead of managing traceability.

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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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"Build in primitives" -Andy Jassy, #Amazon CEO https://lnkd.in/gHMYt7NX Happen to take the time to read this year's Annual investor letter from Andy Jassy. Deep in 2nd half, it talks about how Amazon started thinking about "building in primitives" and how it has been game-changing for them and their customers. Probably old news for some, but eye-opening for me. Definitely a good read!

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Protip: If you use a 3rd-party API in your app, check in frequently. APIs change. One of my favorite projects, my resume map (https://lnkd.in/g8zbx_H), was based on Mapbox's Javascript library and used Stamen's toner map. Stamen decided to shift their tile service to Stadia Maps. Mapbox decided to update its library and rebrand it as MapLibre. Ever break all the things? So, after a few quick updates, it's back online, just as pretty as it ever was. #map #maplibre #stamen #stadia #gis

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Sup fam!! Relationships are everything!! They're the core of your engineering platform. Your team's design docs, software patterns, pull requests, and GitOps workflows all need to pass through a complex network of relationships before becoming meaningful to stakeholders. Before that, they're just bytes sitting on Jeff Bezos' disks. How are your relationships doing? Which relationships need some light touching up? Which ones need some serious investment? How about that one person on that one team? How about on _your_ team? Are you tracking these gaps with the same effectiveness you're tracking tech debt? It takes an intentional effort to build meaningful connections and to show peers you're a stakeholder in _their_ success. It's worth your time -- not to mention you'll feel great!! Want to optimize your engineering platform? Start by investing in your relationships!

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"I asked 100 devs why they aren’t shipping faster. Here’s what I learned" > QA processes represent the tradeoff between quality and velocity. Developers will often accuse QA of being to “nitty” and adding useless repetition to the dev cycle. Taylor, who has worked at a series of high-growth startups and now runs one, described the QA process like this: >Me creating a test spec for QA. QA finding problems (because QA will always find problems) >Getting list of problems 2 days later >Fixing merge conflicts because more code has shipped since I last pushed. Plus context switching >Back to QA* In the amount of time it takes QA to review code, underlying context might change, making the change more involved. https://lnkd.in/gZ3-TW3a

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Ok, curious to get your takes on this: besides LLMs/AI/ML, what do you think are some of the key technical areas for a platform-focused engineering leader to be paying attention to in the near future? Top of my list is primarily three things: Rust, TypeScript, and Serverless. And WASM is somewhat of an emergent focus if we look at the intersection of those three. In fact, from a purely personal interest, it's probably at the top of my list. But slightly lower in a practical, immediate sense.

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🚀 Tired of flying blind when it comes to company spending? I’ve got great news! Airbase just launched spend analytics to give you high-definition on-demand visibility into company spend. You’ll see spend by vendor, department, subsidiary, project, and more to surface savings opportunities and areas for process improvement. Make smarter decisions faster with better analytics. We’ve also enhanced our Vendor Management capabilities to build better relationships with vendors. DM me if you’d like to learn more. 📊

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One of the simplest techniques for improving sensitivity in your experiments is eliminating or reducing dilution. Dilution is akin to throwing more hay in the haystack, thus making your ability to find a signal extremely challenging. In this blogpost, David Press and I explain dilution and provide some practical guidance on how to handle it. We also provide some examples showcasing how enormous is the impact from eliminating dilution. For ML applications, having a way to handle dilution can lead to 100x+ sensitivity gain.

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What’s the key difference between a junior and senior software engineer? It's often how and when they ask for help. Junior engineers might struggle in silence for a long time only to open a PR that doesn't follow best practices or doesn't fulfill all of the acceptance criteria. While there's value in the journey, knowing when to ask for help is crucial. Sharing what was tried and what didn’t work can make a huge difference. Senior engineers typically communicate progress and obstacles clearly like, "I tried A but hit problem X, then tried B but it’s incompatible with our frameworks, and C works but will need cleanup in the future. What does the team think about the best approach?" If you're a junior engineer, you may want to ask for help sooner than you think than you need to. For engineering managers, it's important to create a safe environment where juniors feel comfortable seeking guidance but also have room to grow. What do you think is the best approach to grow junior software developers?

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