Sonja Okano Khan

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

Here is how I use ChatGPT and LLMs to be a better Engineering Manager. 1. Whenever there is a birthday or work anniversary (we call them Yelpiversaries) I will hop over to ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion and generate a card catered to that person. It's a small investment from me, and usually sparks some joy! I might generate a few to get something interesting. Almost everyone else will search for gifs or memes, which are a great alternative. In either case, I will also try to write something meaningful and personal (I don't use ChatGPT for this, but you could ask for ideas if you feel stuck. Tell the LLM a bit about the person and ask it to construct a concise message. Use that as inspiration, don't copy paste, it will come across cheap). 2. Understanding new concepts quickly. I had never heard of RAPID before, and when I did a Google Search I had to deal with a bunch of really weird websites and bad explanations. I asked ChatGPT to explain RAPID to me, and then I asked it to be explained for a software engineer. It was fantastic. For deep research and understanding I wouldn't just use an LLM, and I'd be careful to double check, but for well known concepts it does really well. I didn't need to be a grand master at RAPID, I just wanted to know what the heck these Product Managers were talking about. 3. Helping format data. Sometimes I want to invert a table. Passing ChatGPT a markdown table and asking it to invert it has worked out really well. I usually carefully scan to make sure it didn't change values, but so far hasn't failed and saves me a bunch of work. 4. Helping me quickly write bash or python scripts to do different tasks. As a manager, I don't write production code. But sometimes I pull down data and want to process it. For example, looking over all of our incoming support requests we have on Slack (we support a lot of internal teams). I can use an internal API to take someones slack handle, and determine their team or department. In that way I can see how much support requests we had this month from a particular area which is useful data to see how we can better support the organization. 5. Rubber ducking. Talking through problems. In general I prefer to get feedback from a human, but mentors are busy creatures, and our schedules don't always mesh up. If I'm working through a difficult problem, chatting it through with an LLM has been very helpful. I keep out personal details because paranoia, but I describe the situation and how I'm thinking about it. That's the important part that helps; forming my thoughts. Rarely is the actual output from the LLM helpful, although I can't say it never has been. People get really hung up on LLMs/ChatGPT not just solving things for them 100%, and I think these people are going to be left behind. It doesn't need to be perfect, it can even give you the wrong answer and you still benefit. But it can help get your brain looking at lots of answers.

17

33 Comments

Want to know more about How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale? Still skeptical of why we built horizontal sharding on RDS instead of <insert-cooler-database-technology>? Wondering if you should copy what we did? Check out out my new podcast with Software Engineering Daily as we dive deep on spicy stories that didn't make the blog post from surviving my first Figma Config conference to debating which database technology comes out on top. https://lnkd.in/gFfh7C-A

150

9 Comments

My two cents as a grugbrain - Just because you’re building an AI product in a hype cycle, doesn’t mean you can always rely on raising more capital. To exist long term you’ll need to slow your burn rate, embrace small teams of builders (don’t hire / overhire middle managers) and move quickly! The hype cycle brings a new horizon of exciting opportunities in innovation. This means new ideas are being introduced and tested in the marketplace in real-time. To maintain relevance you must ignore the temptation to biggering and instead focus on what users want and how they want to use it! Stay nimble my friends! 🚀

6

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.

115

12 Comments

I am incredibly inspired by and grateful for my teammates at Verse for achieving our first fundraising milestone together: we recently secured $20.5 million in Series A financing led by GV (Google Ventures) 🙌🏾 🎉 with participation from Coatue, CIV, and MCJ Collective. I've been trying to contain my excitement for weeks 😊 as am sure are my colleagues now that we can share the good news. I'd like to give a big shout out to the engineering team - Jessica Greenfield, Kaleb Pace, Shawn Toubeau, Brandon Clayton, Ryan Kladar, Ryan Triolo, Yuzhou Jiang, and Mahdi Kohansal - for the speed and precision of every line of code they've written, and to Seyed H. Madaeni, Ph.D., Matt Penfold, Shehzad Wadalawala, Dane McKay, Alison Mickey, Debi Ryan, and Tanner McAuley for leading and driving us on the business front. We'll be on the look out soon for more folks to join us 😉 As we used to say at my last job: "We haven't won yet." The path to decarbonization will be a multi-decade, if not multi-generational effort. Verse is just one organization in a constellation of thousands developing real solutions to the climate change problem. Until we achieve net zero emissions at a global scale 🌏 🌍 🌎 our mission remains to be done. #software #ai #energy #sustainability #climatechange #startups https://lnkd.in/gG-DEX5x

108

2 Comments

Alistair Gray gave a great talk at Write The Docs Portland, going into detail about our investment in Internal Docs at Stripe. He breaks down our thoughts about issues of fragmentation, discoverability, and document quality - and how we’ve tried to build great tools to improve the state of internal docs at Stripe across all of these axes. In Q&A, he touches on an important theme which is essentially “how do we convince engineers to use the tooling we build.” The answer really boils down to “ruthlessly build what engineers want” while maintaining our core primitives (eg, ownership, doc quality) that we know are vital to the health of Stripe’s knowledge base all-up. Let me know if y’all have any questions - happy to expand more on these themes! https://lnkd.in/em4QRFmH

26

If you have a YC interview coming up - reach out and our team of YC Alumni can help set up some mock interviews

16

After an absolutely amazing 3 years (to the day quite literally), I am leaving Retool for my next adventure. It’s been a wild (and fun) ride of growing and scaling engineering from a group of 13 to an org of 100+, building 4 net-new product lines, and expanding the business. The thing I’ve always held strongly is that the team here *just ships*, and reflecting on my time, it’s heartwarming to think about how much landed: not just our new products in Workflows, External, Mobile, and RetoolDB, but everything ranging from runtime rewrites, to new component libraries, multiplayer, debug tools, our AI suite, new source control systems, a new IDE — the list just goes on and on. Retool is an incredibly special product, company, and organization to me — not just because of my time and experience there, but because of what we are trying to do: bring more good software into the world, especially when most internal tools don’t get the TLC they would otherwise need to be good. It spoke to me from first principles as a builder (both software and orgs) when I first joined, and continues to do so today all the same. It’s an incredible group, and one that I’ll miss so dearly. David Hsu and Anthony, thanks for bringing me in several years back and leading this charge. And for those reading who aren’t familiar with Retool, you should absolutely check it out; it’ll accelerate your eng team, but more importantly, your business overall. As for me, in terms of what’s next: I’m excited to build again. More to come there, but after a 10 year hiatus, I'm back to the startup-founding days!

787

132 Comments

My team has been hard at work building the next generation developer experience at Stripe—so proud of them for unveiling a step change for people building on Stripe. Today, we're introducing three big new features: 1) Sandboxes: the next-generation of Stripe test mode. You can *finally* create multiple, isolated environments—handy for building a new feature, or just playing around with something new safely. 2) Workbench: our reimagined developer space, available everywhere in the Stripe dashboard. Inspect anything on the dashboard and get under the hood with the raw JSON in just one click. 3) Event Destinations: our webhook tools are evolving to make it easier to get just the events you need, and now delivering to cloud destinations for the first time. Check out the next generation of Stripe—and get early access—here: https://beta.stripe.dev

86

5 Comments

I agree with Zac- this early moment in the Gen AI maturity curve is exciting. We've seen how text interfaces can help lower barriers to use and inspire creativity. I believe that we have not really scratched the surface on how we deeply integrate these language interfaces with the rich visual/spatial semantics of how humans work and interact with computers. There's a lot of "semantics" built into how we have visually organized our computer programs, how we visualize data, and how we like to arrange ideas on whiteboards and in diagrams. You can see some glimpses of the future in: 1. chart understanding tasks in multi-modal models 2. UI gestures that imply context that can be incorporated into conversational history 3. agents that can interpret and interact with UI elements. The UX challenges are intertwined with the AI science challenges. If you're interested in helping us invent this future, come join us! We're hiring.

29

3 Comments

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

22

You're eager to get promoted as a junior SWE–I’ve been there. To rise through the ranks, you'll need to lead projects that unlock meaningful value for your customers. Luckily, I've walked this road many times over the past 3 years at Wayfair. These 6 steps comprise my battle-tested formula for success: 1. Establish credibility as a competent engineer. Your manager will be taking a risk by investing the team's resources to complete your project. Their reputation is at stake as much as yours, so give them every reason to believe your leadership abilities are worth taking a risk on. 2. Find a problem worth solving, then sell it. Look for high-impact issues your team can feasibly address. Choose one, ideate a few potential solutions, then write a data-driven document that enumerates these options and emphasizes WHY the problem is worth solving. You’ll need everyone’s buy-in, so craft a compelling narrative that drives conversations and facilitates alignment. 3. Eliminate ambiguity as early as you can. The more unknowns there are, the higher the risk of failure. Clarify that ambiguity early and often using these 3 strategies: a. Consult with subject matter experts on your team about the problem and its potential solutions. b. Build small proofs-of-concept to demonstrate feasibility of higher risk components. c. Proactively communicate roadblocks, so others can help you push past them. 4. Document your chosen solution. To ensure your team is building toward the same north star vision, author artifacts like technical specifications and scrum tickets that clearly define: a. The thing you're trying to build, and b. The steps required to build it. Add visual elements like recorded demos, UX mocks, or system diagrams to help others quickly grasp the desired end-state. Crystalize your understanding of the solution and spread that knowledge throughout the team. 5. Drive execution and lead by example. Parallelize tickets when possible and sequence blockers accordingly. Ruthlessly deprioritize features that aren’t essential to the initial release. Put instruments in place to measure the success of the project and quantify business impact. Set a high standard for code quality by leading the implementation efforts yourself. Review code written by other engineers to ensure it satisfies the requirements. 6. Identify key learnings for next time. Congratulations on delivering your project! Take advantage of this valuable learning opportunity to reflect on what worked and what didn't. Organize a time for your team to go through this process together, and extract action items for individuals to follow up on. Remember, failure is in the eye of the beholder. Either you win or you learn. P.S. I'm still perfecting the art of project leadership too, you're not alone. Which steps of this formula do you need to focus on this week? Comment below so we can all learn from each other!👇 #softwareengineering #leadership

32

12 Comments

🤔 It may be an unpopular opinion, but I think it's always best to be first to the party 🥳 Innovation is the engine of growth, and the partnership between MikMak and DoorDash is a testament to this principle. This first-of-its-kind integration is a game-changer, revolutionizing how consumers shop and brands sell. Imagine this: you're scrolling through your favorite social media platform, see an ad for a product you love, and within moments, you can have it delivered to your doorstep via DoorDash. This is the power of MikMak's integration with DoorDash, a seamless fusion of social commerce and on-demand delivery. But this partnership isn't just about convenience; it's about empowering brands with valuable data and insights. MikMak's closed-loop attribution provides a granular understanding of consumer behavior, enabling brands to optimize their marketing strategies and drive sales. 🚀 This is the future of omnichannel shopping, a world where every interaction is a potential purchase, and every purchase is a data point. MikMak and DoorDash are leading the charge, and I'm excited to see where this journey takes us. 🗞️ Read the Press Release here: https://lnkd.in/e-VqFtSb? #MikMak #DoorDash #Omnichannel #ecommerce #innovation #marketing #attribution #data #insights #partnership #futureofretail

68

6 Comments

We're headed down the complex path of "replacing and improving upon activities you might do with your smartphone" with natural conversation. Try creating your own AI conversational agents at iyo.studio and let us know if you have feedback!

1

Over the last 1.5 years my team has been on a mission to reimagine the middle tier technical architecture for commerce experiences at Netflix. One of the most important learnings for me is how incredibly important it is to be intentional about how you approach getting work done with other humans. I decided to write a few learnings on the topic: https://lnkd.in/gscaJfVa (and a Substack option if preferred: https://lnkd.in/gpfy86xT).

14