Bill Sambrone

I heard a few people are suspecting this live demo showing a call to a virtual agent is not real https://lnkd.in/gnBiGDfd I can tell you that the call was real and we are able to allow the users to talk to the virtual agent with a text UI while still on the call. To find more, search the newly launched feature called 'Call Companion' under Dialogflow

31

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...

12

2 Comments

Now we have two first class data catalogs integrated with MS Fabric now available in Azure. Of course DataBricks is the heavy heavy favorite in the enterprise lakehouses as well as AI (as of the conference that just finished 🤓)

6

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

20

1 Comment

Hi folks! One of the best parts of dealing with different environments is that something new happens every day. Under that scope, I recently wrote a blog post about an intriguing Mongo log message - "RSM Not Processing Response”: https://hubs.ly/Q02rFg_l0 The goal was to provide more details about it, answering questions like what is that message, why that happens, and how to fix it. If you have any questions or even an error or message you would like more details, please send a message. Maybe an article about it? ;-) #Percona #MongoDB #OSS

15

#SeaJUG tonight 6pm at VMware in downtown Bellevue. Chris Phillipson of VMware Tanzu Labs will be talking about "The Secret Lives of Java Apps: Stories told at Runtime". Learn about runtime introspection, dependencies, compliance, etc. Learn of a novel approach about how we can take an audit of what applications are running on a target platform using Java APIs and touch upon some specific capabilities that Spring Boot provides you. RSVP https://lnkd.in/gCMYk34a Details at https://www.seajug.org/ #java #developer #seajug #springboot #jvm #tanzu

6

Find out why AIOps is essential for modern IT teams and how BigPanda is leading the way. #AIOps #ITOps

5

🌶🌶🌶 Hot take… Old problem: if we put more devs on the project, we can deliver it sooner. Same thinking, new manifestation: we can hire more overseas devs for less total money to produce the same result as our US staff. Flaw in that thinking: product development is not an assembly line. Devs are not “interchangeable”. Software is as much an art as it is science. It’s a team sport. The people on your team matters. #tech #staffing #management #hiring #jobs #layoffs #software #startup #teamleadership

25

6 Comments

Samsara's latest report highlights how industry leaders are leveraging AI to boost efficiency and safety.  Dive into the full coverage to see how AI is transforming the way we operate:

2

CockroachDB 24.1 is here! I'm excited about this release because 241 is the older of the twin primes 239 and 241, but most importantly because we built this release for organizations who need to reduce operational complexity, enhance developer productivity, and keep their data secure and resilient. We made migrations simpler, with improved SQL compatibility as well as updates to our migration tool MOLT Fetch. If you’re still running on a legacy database and want to make the leap, CockroachDB can help support your cloud-native migration. We designed this release so you can spend less time on database management and more time building. CockroachDB 24.1 features enhanced support for UDFs, Stored Procedures, Read Committed transactions, CDC Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Azure Event Hub, and our CockroachDB Cloud Terraform Provider. We didn’t forget about resilience or security either. Cloud clusters are now officially backed by a SLA of 99.999%. You can organize roles and permissions with Folders and increase security controls with support for GCP Private Service Connect. And Self-Hosted customers can use Physical Cluster Replication with fast cutback to reduce risk from major incidents or disasters. This post is just scratching the surface of the impressive work the Cockroach Labs team has done in making this release possible, so dive into the blog below for an in-depth look at what’s new. https://lnkd.in/efwZCwr9 

70

2 Comments

<rant> Yesterday morning I wrote a post about the phrase "scaling independently" while waiting for my KIND cluster to spin up, and I promised that I would give an example of where you really DO want things to "scale independently" in a separate post. Well, that post is here. Let's talk about #apachekafka and its new Raft-based metadata solution, known as KRaft (yes, it evokes Mac-and-Cheese, which is partially why I like it so much). KRaft is a replacement for ZooKeeper's former role in Kafka. In a KRaft-based cluster, the Metadata Quorum is a group of Kafka Servers that have the "controller" role. The Metadata Quorum stores information such as "what topics exist in my cluster?" and "which Broker is the leader for which Partition?" and "which follower replicas live on which Broker?". This information is CRITICAL for the availability and consistency of a Kafka cluster. In order to ensure consistency of the Metadata Quorum, one specific Controller is chosen as the leader. All write requests go through that leader. In order to ensure availability of the Metadata Quorum, there can be "follower" Controllers in the Metadata Quorum which also store the metadata updates (synchronous replication). In case of failure of the leader, one of the followers can become the leader. In this specific case, it DOES make sense to scale the Brokers and Controllers independently. Why? First, the Controllers don't actually scale. One can be a leader at a time, so the others are just providing backup (note: for reasons beyond the scope of this post, it's best to have an odd number). Additionally, before KIP-853 is implemented, it's actually really hard to add or remove Controllers to/from the Metadata Quorum without downtime. Secondly, it's possible for a misbehaving client to take down a Broker, for example by sending way too much data to a specific partition. If it's just a single Broker that's lost, most of the cluster will continue on and live to fight another day. However, losing a Controller is a Very Bad Thing. Thus, by separating the Controllers from the Brokers, we can improve the availability of the cluster. It is indeed possible to run Kafka with some servers that share the responsibility of Controller and Broker. This is great for development (especially local dev) and also in *SOME* highly resource-constrained production environments. However, I would suggest as a rule of thumb that you should probably: - Separate out your Controllers on their own isolated machines - Start with a Metadata Quorum of size 3, which allows losing one Controller and continuing on alive - Put your Brokers on another set of nodes. Now, there's another good example of how Kafka scales X and Y independently: Compute and Storage. Watch out for the next "Colt Rant" about this, coming later this week! </rant> PS—here's the link to the previous post: https://lnkd.in/gXU77rKW

12

6 Comments

Can you trust AI? 🤔 For most companies the answer is no - at least using current foundational models out of the box. ❌ Problems like sensitive data leakage and toxic content are major barriers to implementing production genAI solutions. The route towards trust lies in system architecture and the good news is the field is advancing rapidly, including increasingly easily accessible toolkits of solutions to increase trust in AI systems. 🔥 This is the hot area for new releases from major AI platform players (along with AI security), including AWS (https://lnkd.in/e45S-ehS), DataRobot (https://lnkd.in/eCWvppWR), and Databricks (https://lnkd.in/e6A7cTcH). 👨‍⚖️ Guardrail or judge models - leveraging a second AI model to police the content coming out of an original - are probably the most promising scalable solution. For many the best route is likely to be a new class of foundational models specifically designed for this task such as Llama Guard and Databrick’s new judge LLM. There is also the ability to fine tune a model (think a discriminator model from a GAN architecture) or use a general purpose foundational model. 👮‍♂️ Classic filtering techniques for sensitive data can also be applied to the result of an LLM, whether for PII, company IP, or inappropriate content. This can include regex, classic PII models (such as Amazon Comprehend), etc. 🚻 Human in the loop techniques can also be used, but are far more scalable when used to calibrate automated solutions such as those described above rather than manually verifying outputs in realtime. What’s still missing? 🔎 🎯 While techniques to improve accuracy and reduce hallucination such as RAG and AI agents have made great strides, there remains a big gap in conveying a model’s confidence in its output to end users. 💡One idea is to leverage the probability distributions used for top-p (nucleus sampling) at the token level instead at greater aggregations to convey confidence levels for entire model outputs or significant segments (e.g. each step in a chain of thought structure or AI agents framework). #ai, #artificialintelligence, #GenAI, #GenerativeAI, #llm, #datascience, #machinelearning, #mlops, #bigdata

4

1 Comment

The most intelligent Claude 3 model, with best-in-market performance on highly complex tasks. It can navigate open-ended prompts and sight-unseen scenarios with remarkable fluency and human-like understanding.

6

TL;dr - RIP Terraform. Time to say goodbye. I just ran into this obituary for Terraform and Hashicorp. The most probable future seems to be the maximization of sales motion and the minimization of engineering investment - just adding another product to the price list and unleashing the sales force at it. The worst possible outcome would be if IBM decided to make Terraform part of their still-born cloud offering. Or maybe we’ll have Terraform for mainframe? #terraform #hashicorp #ibm #upgrade

32

5 Comments

Super excited to share some massive wins from my teams in Bitbucket Cloud. On April 23rd, we shipped TWO massive new capabilities that catapult Bitbucket Cloud into a new paradigm for Code & CI/CD Management. Dynamic Pipelines are a powerful new tool for building intelligent, standardised, and scalable CI/CD workflows across your entire organisation: https://lnkd.in/eFb_6gf8 And Custom Merge Checks are your go-to tool for enforcing policy, process, and compliance controls when new code is being merged into your repositories: https://lnkd.in/efUi-M8m Check them out, get started, and stay-tuned for more! #bitbucket #CICD #devops #atlassian #pipelines

16

New post on what happens after you add a control plane and local storage for observability: you get 1000x the telemetry when it matters. https://lnkd.in/gAvkk-qP

58

1 Comment

Our customers can now create Route53 Alias records for their Amazon OpenSearch custom endpoints and gain faster DNS resolutions while saving on additional CNAME costs. Good job on the launch Sachet Alva and team - https://lnkd.in/g_aaUp7S. #aws #opensearch #route53

48

Workflows is getting better and better!  My team recently launched 4 quality-of-life upgrades to Domo’s Workflows: 1. Notifications: You can get text or email alerts that your workflow ran or failed, instead of having to manually check in on them. 2. Task Creator Access: We gave you the ability to lock down a specific queue to only see tasks assigned to you, but now you can choose to allow users to also see tasks they created in that queue. Really useful for tracking your requests, but also not opening up the whole world to everyone. 3. Code Engine Global Library: Choosing the right function for your workflows used to feel like deciphering hieroglyphs. Now we have a library with user-friendly titles, descriptions and logos that make it clear what each function does. 4. Account Data Type:  Now you can build more flexible and reusable integrations without exposing your account credentials using this feature—instead of having to hardcode a single account into a function, you can use an account variable so that each person can leverage their own credentials to talk to their third party apps. If you’re in the Domo community, these upgrades are ready and waiting for you. If you’re not and want to start building smarter workflows into your business, message me and I’ll get you connected to the right person. #domoupdates #domoproduct

57

5 Comments

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

22