Cody Coleman

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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Pathways to Tech Week #2 at  Headstarter: Being surrounded by people who are building amazing software and companies is a truly inspiring experience. My favorite speakers were: • Tariq Ahmed: First Engineer at AppLovin ($30Billion IPO) • Julian Alvarez 🚀: CEO of Wisdolia • Hamza Ali: CEO of Olostep  Here's what I have learned from them: 𝟭- "𝗙𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗶𝘃𝗼𝘁" Tariq, one of the first engineers at AppLovin, shared that AppLovin tried several things in their early stages that failed. However, the company had incredible success when it pivoted to mobile advertising; They didn't have expertise in the field. Today if you've experienced in-app advertising, AppLovin was likely behind it. 𝟮- "𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗰𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻." Julian runs Wisdolia a startup aimed at helping college students actively study. By simply asking what types of students they were. His team found that medical students were the ones the ones who converted the most into paying customers. It seemed evident because they were the most overwhelmed by the amount of information they had cram. But the evidence in their face was a lightbulb moment for Wisdolia. 𝟯- "𝗦𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘄𝗲'𝗹𝗹 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗳𝗮𝗿." Hamza, CEO of Olostep, describes his company as "a company that enables AI agents to browse the web just like humans". I was fascinated when I heard that, and as the Olostep team acquires more customers they value scrappy and people that initiative on board. Those qualities set engineers apart when building successful products.

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I got a preview of this talk. It's going to be good. If you think we've reached the end of the gen AI opportunity, then you should listen to what Roman Shaposhnik and Tanya Dadasheva have to share about the future of transformer architecture for AI.

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🚨🚨 🚨 Unlocking Innovation: The Power of the Adjacent Possible Innovation programs can stall when the team tries to ideate way beyond their collective perspective and frame of reference. Like a software engineer brainstorming genetic modification of mycelia, or a senior executive ideating process improvements which they haven't been participated in for decades. It's challenging, exhausting, and ultimately self-defeating. Enter the concept of the "Adjacent Possible" - a game-changer for innovation. What is it? The Adjacent Possible, coined by Stuart Kauffman, represents the realm of new ideas within reach based on our current knowledge, resources, and capabilities. Why it matters: ➡️ Realistic Innovation: it focuses on achievable advancements, not far-fetched concepts. ➡️ Incremental Progress: each innovation opens doors to new possibilities. How to leverage it: • Constantly explore the boundaries of your adjacent possible. What's in your line of sight is what you know best. • Combine existing ideas in novel ways. Even small perturbations from status quo can generate large innovation leaps. • Stay curious about developments in adjacent industries. Cross-domain patterns create fresh sources of ideas, while also expanding the adjacent possible. Most of all, it takes the 'genius' pressure off the team. No one knows everything, but each one of us knows a lot about something, and we can all drive plenty of innovation potential by focusing on the spaces we know best. Are you exploring your Adjacent Possible? Share your thoughts below! 👇 #Innovation #innovationsystems #AdjacentPossible

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Next Tuesday, I'm going to the AI Tinkerers meetup in PDX. Join me??? AI Tinkerers is a new AI event that's focused on fun, technical learning, sharing, and entrepreneurship. It's an event for those actively hacking, making, or starting up. No pitch decks, no validation, and there's no VC involvement. The focus is on practical, technical meetings where everyone can share learnings and contribute to a true community. Surj Patel, who previously ran the ThingPDX IoT meetup with 1500 members, is organizing this. Meetings will be on Tuesdays, starting with the first one on July 23rd at 6 PM, doors opening at 5 PM at the PastLives Space. There are already four confirmed speakers, and more are welcome. Talks are short (5-10 minutes) and focus on demos and practical assistance, especially technical help. Register at https://lnkd.in/eRZP9dps or find the event on Meetup.com.

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The Stoke Space team in Seattle has built a rocket company faster than many people can build software. Morgan Beller breaks down how this is helping them capture a huge opportunity: https://lnkd.in/gc5jv2-c 

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Just published the first issue of my new Substack - The Vertical AI Report. The future of AI is Vertical, and I'm excited to share more about how this foundational trend is evolving, hopefully from a little different perspective. As an engineer, and a founder, of a Vertical AI company I'm incredibly passionate about the opportunity that Vertical AI is creating for the world. 🔗 Issue #1 is now live, link in the comment section below. #VerticalAI

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Looking forward to sharing how we at basys.ai are leveraging Generative AI to tackle healthcare’s biggest challenges. PS: Also looking forward to sporting my basys vest in the #BayArea PPS: What I’m not looking forward to is the second cross-country flight in less than a week. #GenAI #BasysAI #GenerativeAI

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To all my fellow Arizonans in particular… Here’s the Cliff Notes version of why our Silicon State focus on “atoms” in addition to bits is SO on point for our times. The world of atoms shall be underserved no longer. And Avanced Manufacturing (of all kinds of things in all kinds of industries) is right on the $! 🙏🏼🌵🚀 https://lnkd.in/gNbGmPsC

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I went to see what the kids were building at the Crusoe hackathon this week, and I was pretty impressed with what they did. This hackathon showed that with the right approach, industries burdened by slow, outdated methods can leap forward in a matter of hours. This is just the beginning. In just 24 hours, developers tackled long-standing problems, demonstrating how AI will disrupt traditional industries by enabling rapid iteration. Verdigris, the winning team, developed an AI system that identifies homeowners eligible for zero-cost electrification upgrades by analyzing mortgage data and generating personalized marketing materials with AI-created images. Daylight’s project streamlined the slow permitting process by mapping stakeholder relationships from dense documents in record time. Project Aria linked environmental impact statements to legal precedents in seconds, potentially saving years. NEPA Ninjas and Carbon Connect showcased breakthroughs in regulatory data processing and synthetic market data for carbon credits. For enterprises, the takeaway is clear: embrace rapid AI-driven innovation to tackle entrenched problems and streamline complex processes.

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CBO Interviews: Mladen M. Hoyss on Shaping the Future of Nothing OS | https://lnkd.in/eFyYx9n6 Getting the chance to talk with Mladen was a surreal opportunity, and I’m truly grateful to the Nothing community for choosing me to be their voice. It’s moments like these that bring my journey full circle. My history with Mladen’s work goes back to the early days of Blloc. While I couldn’t use the Zero18 phone, I’ve been following Blloc since the beginning. I got into the closed beta testing of Ratio, their minimalist launcher. At that time, I was heavily addicted to my smartphone. Ratio had a profound impact on my usage habits, significantly reducing my screen time. I was so impressed that I continued using it across three to four different phones, often proudly sharing screenshots of my reduced screen time on social media. When I heard about Mladen M Hoyss joining Nothing I thought, “This is a collaboration that was bound to happen.” The transition from Ratio to Nothing OS has been an evolution in my smartphone experience. It’s fascinating to see how Mladen’s philosophy has been integrated into a more comprehensive and fun environment at Nothing while still maintaining the core principles of mindful technology use. This interview has not only provided insights into Nothing’s design philosophy, but also allowed me to connect the dots in my personal journey with mindful technology use. I’m excited to see how Nothing continues to evolve and grateful for the opportunity to be part of this community-driven conversation about the future of technology. #NothingCommunity #NothingOS

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Want to do less prompting and apply a more systematic approach to solving hard tasks with language models? Check out our DSPy meetup May 1 in SF. Here's the agenda: 5:30 - 6:00 ▶ Arrival + Networking 6:00 - 6:30 ▶ Lightning talks by our friends at Weaviate and Cohere (along with Mikyo King) to help you understand how to pre-process data at scale, and diagnose & resolve common issues in both RAG and LLM technologies ​ 6:30 - 7:30 ▶ Hands-On Workshop with Stanford researcher Omar Khattab (he built the DSPy framework) 7:30 - 7:40 ▶ Delve deeper and interact with our speakers in Q+A ​ 7:40 - 8:30 ▶ More networking & Happy Hour Register: https://lu.ma/dspy

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Chat with Miles Clements about building Linear For me companies are like design problems: you have context, constraints & goals unique to you. Then you look for a solution that has a good fit to your unique problems. The company problem also evolve over times the solution Directly applying what others have done doesn’t work that well, yet there is lot emphasis on playbooks, pattern matching and playing copying what other companies are doing in industry. https://lnkd.in/ghxjJwYU

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Smart execution is the key to success in hardware startups Boom Supersonic's Blake Scholl discusses: - The importance of leveraging existing technologies - Refinement over reinvention - Prioritizing practical and user-centered design

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~40% of Frec’s customers are engineers working in tech, many of whom expect frequent and large capital gains. They also prefer to self-manage their money, which makes Frec an ideal platform. Meet Evan: an engineering leader who upgraded from investing in ETFs to direct indexing. Direct indexing appealed to Evan because it offers comparable returns to his ETFs while saving him money on advisory and ETF fees. “ETFs are true and tested, and giving folks a different way of investing in the market while saving more money is really appealing.” He’s used many other robo-advisors and other fintech tools, but “Frec seems to maximize tax loss harvesting opportunities better than any other product that I’ve used.” He also likes Frec's transparent fee structure.  “I feel like with a lot of other companies, that’s muddled in with the cost of investments,” he told us, “and you don’t really know how much you’re paying or how much you’re not saving as a result. I think Frec does a really good job of laying all of that out and giving you a true understanding of the cost of these investment products.” Read more about his Frec journey here ⬇

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This is a good article on using LLMs in the real world. It covers many aspects that we learned at Nurish over the last few months and more. Using LLMs is an inexact science, but has its own needs in processes and tools. While most of the attention has been on the LLMS, their capabilities, and RAG, there are mundane issues that need to be taken care of, issues where the solutions for pre-LLM development are not that well-suited. These include version management, integration, testing, data management, quality assessment, and more. This article covers many of those practical aspects. Eugene Yan, Bryan Bischof, Charles Frye & more https://applied-llms.org/

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Since the YC deadline to hear back for W25 is coming up next week, here’s the story of how we went from 2 students coding in an MIT dorm room to being full-time YC founders building Delve in SF. For all you founders anxiously waiting to hear back, just keep building — you’ll be successful regardless of the decision. -- In Fall 2023, my co-founder Karun Kaushik and I were studying AI at MIT and spending all of our free time building an AI medical scribe to help doctors. We had vaguely heard about YC from a friend who had just gotten accepted but had no plans of applying whatsoever. However when the YC deadline rolled around, we spontaneously decided to put in an application on the very last day. We spent that whole day in Karun’s dorm room typing up the application and filming all the required videos. We finally hit submit the minute of the deadline! By the next day we had already moved on. We went back to the usual rhythm of coding in the dorm room, calling with doctors, attending conferences, etc. If anything, we were even more motivated now to get more traction and be successful regardless. Later that week, while we were eating in the dorm kitchen, I noticed I got an email saying we had a YC interview scheduled. My heart rate spiked. I jumped up out of my seat and immediately told Karun. I never seriously considered YC, but for the first time it hit me that it might actually be a possibility. When the day of the interview rolled around, we did mock interviews with former YC founders and focused mostly on calming our nerves. More important than the actual content of the interview, we wanted to show our excitement for building and hacking together as co-founders. Unfortunately the interview caught us by surprise. The group partners didn't seem to care as much about our actual AI medical scribe. Instead, they seemed more curious about a side idea we had listed in our application that we wrote up in a day. The idea was about streamlining HIPAA compliance (since we had to go through HIPAA for our AI medical scribe). By this point, we were already seriously considering pivoting into this and had made a lot of progress on the idea. The YC interview was our tipping point Not too long after, we got an ominous email titled “YC.” We were freaked out. I could not sleep the entire night. Then, in the middle of class the next day, I got a phone call from Karun with Surbhi on the other end of the line. My heart rate spiked. I ran outside of the classroom. That turned out to be our acceptance call:) -- For everyone out there still waiting to hear back, just keep grinding. Build as if you’ve been rejected and you might just be pleasantly surprised. I’m also always here to help with mock interviews/give advice! We’ve helped a handful of friends through the YC app process and are always here to support other founders!

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TRIPLE BAM! If you missed it, here's the recording of our live Q/A with Jay Alammar and Joshua Starmer PhD! We talked about many AI topics, answered lots of great questions, and talked about two great books: Hands-On Large Language Models: Language Understanding and Generation, and The Illustrated Guide to Neural Networks and AI!!! https://lnkd.in/dcPHs7YQ

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Ever wondered where the perfect balance between tranquility and innovation lies? For me, it’s Seattle. Unlike the Bay, Seattle has a more serene environment that’s perfect for focusing on building products and businesses. The city’s vibe encourages deep work and creative thinking, free from the overwhelming hustle. But let’s be honest, Seattle’s founder and investor communities aren’t as vibrant as those in SF. Yet, this city holds a special place in my heart – a blend of my love for startups and the charm of Seattle. I believe in Seattle’s potential and I’m on a mission to help ignite its startup community. From connecting with fellow founders to engaging investors, let’s come together to build something extraordinary here. Seattle has all the ingredients to be a startup hub – talent, innovation, and a supportive ecosystem. What it needs is a spark. Let’s be that spark.

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