Aaron Feldstein

Want a preview of what I'm going to be talking about in my keynote for RubyConf? You can catch a glimpse of it here!

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First blog post in a long time! I started writing a post ~2 years ago on adventures counting 130M U.S. buildings by zipcode and finally circled back to write it up properly. Everybody is a winner really, but DuckDB, Ibis, Apache Arrow, and GeoParquet were absolutely essential for getting the data into and out of all of the various engines. Give it a read and let me know what I missed! https://lnkd.in/evgVe3vD

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Today, we’re publishing our biggest piece yet.   We partnered with Puzzle to write about the next generation of accounting tools.   Our CEOs, Alex Lee and Sasha Orloff, explain how AI can turn accounting from a repetitive chore into a major source of business intelligence.   They cover everything from decreasing costs to improving accuracy and enhancing customer support.   We also hear from Fouad Farhat of Soma Capital—an investor in both Truewind and Puzzle—about the current state of accounting, and where it’s headed.   📌Check out the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eUzvZjTm

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The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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I just realized: we should start saying "build memoization" rather than "build caching." We aren't really talking about least-recently-used or time-to-live algorithms, we're talking about "don't bother recompiling this piece if none of its inputs changed." (It has been puzzling me that some people are so deeply fearful of "build cache" as a concept, and honestly I think it's mostly because most build systems have non-hermetic state scattered all over the place. Maybe a slightly more precise term for the type of caching we're concerned with would clarify the semantics in question.)

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Breaking Barriers, Building Futures: cPacket Commitment to Portland's Tech Landscape. Today, I'm excited to share some big news about cPacket continued investment in Portland. We're not just moving offices – we're recommitting to a city with incredible potential. Our new space in the Pearl District isn't just a location; it's a statement. We're creating a collaborative hub where innovation thrives, bringing our team closer together and staying connected to the vibrant heart of Portland. With plans to grow our engineering team, we're betting on local talent and the power of in-person collaboration. Some key highlights: - Hybrid work model that balances flexibility and team connection - Strategic location that supports our engineering and AI teams - A belief in Portland's tech ecosystem and its future The past few years have challenged downtown Portland, but we see beyond temporary setbacks. We're investing in spaces that foster creativity, problem-solving, and breakthrough innovations. To my friends Portland tech enthusiasts: the future is bright, and we're building it together. https://lnkd.in/gaAfKzyb #Portland #networkobservability #NetOps #WeBelieveinPortland #TechCommunity

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Hey folks! Garrett Milster and I have only posted about Sacramento Labs once, so we figured it's time for an update 😊 **What is Sacramento Labs?** We’re a small team focused on launching software products that solve real-world problems. Think of us as a startup lab—constantly testing ideas, learning from feedback, and building tools that matter, and having an impact while doing it. **How do we decide what to build?** We like to build products that: -         Solve real-world problems in mostly ignored industries -         Are small, highly maintainable, and scalable codebases -         Make the world a better place directly, or by donating a percentage of profits to a relevant charity in that space You can learn more about our philosophy at sacramentolabs.com **What you can expect from us** We’ll be posting product ideas that are in various stages of our pipeline: Early Concept, Customer Development, In Progress, Launched, Scaling. We’d love to hear your feedback! **Our latest concept: Self-Hosted Security** Here’s the problem: - Businesses often use third-party URL shorteners to share internal tools, resources, or campaigns, but these services introduce serious risks. Enterprise companies like Google, Microsoft, and Stripe have built their own internal URL shorteners for this reason – but most businesses don’t have the resources to do that. - Phishing attacks are rampant, and links from external services can be spoofed or abused. - Branding and security controls are limited, leaving sensitive information exposed. - You can’t track link activity—who’s clicking what, when, or why. - When employees leave, their shared links still work, leaving potential vulnerabilities. Our proposed solution: Self-Hosted Security. It’s a plug-and-play solution for businesses to host their own branded URL shorteners with: - SSO for secure access tied to your company’s directory. - Link expirations to ensure old links don’t stay active indefinitely. - Audit logs to track activity and improve visibility into link usage. 📢 We need your input! Would this solve a problem for you? What features would make this indispensable? Check out the landing page and share your thoughts: selfhostedsecurity.com Want to chat? Email me at [email protected] 😊 💡 And here’s something we’re passionate about: a percentage of profits from Self-Hosted Security will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Your feedback not only helps us create better solutions, but also contributes to making a positive impact. Thanks for being part of the journey!

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Its about solving the problem, not 'having AI' in the system. This is from last March, but the Wave 1 vs. Wave 2 distinction does seem to be playing out. Less 'generate me content', more 'synthesize vast amounts of relevant data and aid in decisonmaking or signal extraction'. https://lnkd.in/ehFBFC32 They don't talk about multi-agent systems here, but looking forward to more startups with a focus on leveraging agentic design patterns (https://lnkd.in/ed5rMmFe) to streamline real world workflows.

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🍜Anybody up for some ramen? I am excited to share that I am back in the garage, building again (it’s actually a house in the Berkeley Hills). We are taking the wraps off of Supercog AI, a new startup focused on solving Application Integration using LLM powered agents. My co-founder in this new venture is a great friend of mine (and a former co-founder partner), Alex Osborne. Alex and I have worked around the application integration space for a long time, and we are unrealistically excited about applying the GenAI stack to this problem. Not many people relish the task to get some bits to move from system A to system B. But it’s a critical job to be done, and that’s led to a lot of brittle scripts, a myriad of inflexible “no code” tools, and a lot of hand crafted SQL. But the power of the Large Language Model, trained on a huge corpus of information, offers a remarkable tool to solve this problem. The LLM you use today already knows the APIs of hundreds of popular systems. It knows the SQL dialects of every major database. It understands the semantics and data schemas of many popular SaaS systems. It understands much of the specific domain in which your business operates. I like to call the AI revolution “the last platform shift”. That may turn out to be hyperbole, but I definitely believe we are in the very early stages of seeing what this new stack can enable. I know we are hardly the first folks to claim that “amazing stuff is coming!”. But this is why Alex and I have decided to focus on a real and hard problem. If we can prove that LLMs can power a new way to solve this problem, it will be the first successful *new* approach in 15 years.. We will have much more to share about this new platform soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in getting a peek - or even better if you have application or data integration tasks that you would like some help with - please reach out because we want to help. #genai #startups #backinthegarage

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Quarto v1.6 was just released! 🎉 As someone who works with Quarto a lot, two features in this release are game-changing: 📝 _brand.yml Support Define your organization's branding once, deploy it everywhere - from HTML docs to presentations. Your brand stays consistent across HTML, Typst PDF, RevealJS slides, and dashboards without juggling multiple theme files! 🎯 Contents Shortcode Write your code once and display its output anywhere in your document. Finally, you can structure your narrative exactly how you want without fighting with code chunk placement. The release includes other nice improvements (landscape mode, better RevealJS navigation), but these two features are transformative for my workflows. Interested in learning more? Check out: 📚 Full release notes: https://lnkd.in/eM_6XWDq 🎨 An unofficial implementation of Stanford's identity guidelines: • Live demo: https://lnkd.in/g-x5y6CV • Source code: https://lnkd.in/ghCDWYqg 📖 Get started with brand.yml: https://lnkd.in/eTeT-qnR #quarto #rstats #python

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We're in the pets phase of LLMs right now, but the cattle phase is coming and it'll change everything. Yes, again. What do you mean "pets" and "cattle"? Servers used to be our pets. We bought, named, cared for, and persisted them individually. If we wanted a new one, it was a big commitment. If one went down, it was a big loss. But then servers became cattle. Today we manage them as a group of commodity assets. We want one, we clone it. If one goes down, we replace it with another. This change delivered an era of distributed, high availability applications with limited downtime. Cheap storage, containers, cloud, clusters all met riding on top of Moore's law. And machine learning changed too. Computer vision was first. We went from small, neural networks running on CPUs via Matlab to a larger networks running in on GPUs via C++. AlexNet kicked off the deep learning revolution, eventually Transformers in NLP, and then ChatGPT. So, today we call our LLMs by name but this is just the start. There will be more LLMs variations than there are people on Earth.

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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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Check out the latest in our "Debuggability" blog series! This blog is authored by Kevin Downey Jason Johl and me and talks about how we built a Debuggability Paved Road at Intuit using Ephemeral Containers and Argo Workflows. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Also, what tools do you build as-a-platform to help debug service, compute and network issues in Kubernetes at scale? #intuit #kubernetes #debug

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Santana Row shopping center in San Jose has implemented a ticketless parking system that eliminates the need for drivers to take a ticket upon entry and pay at a pay station upon exit. Instead, drivers can simply scan a QR code (see photo) posted throughout the garage using their phones, enter their license plate number and credit card information on the website that pops up, and a camera will read their license plate and open the gate as they exit. While this system may seem convenient and efficient, I think there is a significant security concern! There is a risk that perpetrators could replace the posted QR code with their own, which would redirect drivers to a fake website where they would unknowingly enter their credit card information. This could lead to unauthorized charges and potential identity theft. It is crucial for the shopping center to address this security concern by taking appropriate measures to protect drivers' personal and financial information. They must ensure that the QR codes posted are authentic and that there are no vulnerabilities that could allow perpetrators to manipulate the system. As an alternative solution, pay stations could be installed for shoppers to use instead of relying on their own phones.

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Recently, Eric Ignasik and Michael Sols from The Software House asked me about my first steps as a VP of Technology at Habito. It's been a fun 8 months in a supportive environment with fantastic people! 😉 This interview discusses a few improvements ‌I made with a big emphasis on why servant leadership is important to me. Hope you’ll learn from it, ➡️ https://hubs.la/Q02Bw-Bv0 #softwaredevelopment #cto #softwaredelivery

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This week, Google ushered in the agentic era with Gemini 2.0! ✨ For developers in particular, Gemini 2.0 offers significantly more power 🔋 and possibilities. My absolute highlight is Jules, our new AI-powered code agent. Imagine your team has just finished a bug bash, and now you’re staring down a long list of bugs: ➡️ You can offload Python and Javascript coding tasks to Jules. ➡️ Jules handles bug fixes and other time-consuming tasks while you focus on what you want to build. Jules creates comprehensive, multi-step plans to address issues, efficiently modifies multiple files, and even prepares to pull requests to land fixes into GitHub directly. He (?) gives developers more productivity, progress tracking, and complete developer control. ⚙️ We’re making Jules available for a select group of trusted testers today, and we’ll make it available for other interested developers in early 2025. More here: https://ow.ly/WkLp50UqAb4

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I’m incredibly excited to announce Goodfire Ember — the first hosted mechanistic interpretability API, with inference support for generative models like Llama 3.3 70B. This makes large-scale interpretability work accessible to the broader community and is already being used by partners like Rakuten, Haize Labs, and Apollo Research to improve model performance, increase security, and extract new understanding from models. We think this is the start of building a set of tools to accelerate alignment research, as well as unlocking a new development paradigm that harnesses the latent intelligence already present inside models. Try it yourself: https://lnkd.in/eVc34XD2. Read more about our launch: https://lnkd.in/erNbcTmG X thread: https://lnkd.in/ecPu5Mrt If you think aligning AGI is the most important problem in the world, we’re hiring at https://lnkd.in/gapupaYQ.

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Anthropic's latest Claude AI model is taking human-AI interaction to a whole new level! 🖥️🤖 The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet can now use computers just like a human would - by looking at the screen, moving the cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text. This is a major leap forward in AI capabilities. Key features: Operates based on screenshots, emulating human computer use Can perform complex multi-step tasks across different applications Self-corrects and retries when encountering obstacles2 Accessible via API for developers to build with Why it's game-changing: This opens up incredible possibilities for AI assistance in data entry, form filling, software testing, and automating repetitive computer tasks13. Imagine having an AI assistant that can seamlessly work alongside you, handling tedious computer work while you focus on higher-level tasks. While still in beta, this technology demonstrates how AI is rapidly advancing toward more human-like interaction with digital interfaces. As it develops further, it could revolutionize how we work with computers and boost productivity across industries. The future of human-AI collaboration just got a lot more exciting! What do you think about this new capability? #AIInnovation #FutureOfWork Here is a video about it: https://lnkd.in/gh8aNYEu

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It’s hard to believe I’ve been at Crayon six months already—it’s been an exciting time! GenAI seems to be everywhere right now, and I'm happy to be on a team using LLMs to their fullest 💪. We've been hard at work building Sparks, and now we want to share some of those learnings with the wider enablement community. Today, we launched our AI Toolkit: a curated collection of LLM prompt recipes for compete automation. If you’re a Crayon customer, you can run these right away using Sparks ✨ . But even if you’re not a Crayon customer, you can use these recipes with any off-the-shelf LLM. The recipes cover a range of topics, from running SWOT analyses to scouring 🕵️‍♂️ news sources for competitive insights. They're super handy for anyone looking to automate their compete program! It’s an exciting time to be building in the AI space, and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished so far. 2024 has been a great year, but I can't wait to see the great stuff this team builds next year! In the meantime, check out the AI Toolkit here: https://lnkd.in/eF96ntUY

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