Jeff Blankenburg

Another day, another new, faster #LLM. Meet Claude 3.5 Sonnet from #Anthropic. "Claude 3.5 Sonnet operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus. This performance boost, combined with cost-effective pricing, makes Claude 3.5 Sonnet ideal for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support and orchestrating multi-step workflows." https://lnkd.in/ecXUMhKE #AI #genAI #CX #AIorchestration

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Google is onto something big with NotebookLM (I wish the name of the app was better, but I digress). I provided my blog/website URL and asked for an "audio summary", which created the recording below (a simulated podcast-style audio of two robots talking about me). But before you go follow that link, let me say I see it as an amazing summarization/learning tool. Just feed content in one format (say, Internet articles on Japanese cooking) and get a conversational summary in podcast form to listen during your daily commute.

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Few agencies without a technical lead are able to get by (and none thrive). Relying on contractors can be a double-edged sword: they bring specialized skills but often lack a cohesive vision that aligns technology with your customer’s long-term goals. This disconnect results in software bloat, where unnecessary features and technical debt pile up. The pain is real: without a consistent, forward-thinking approach, your business is at risk of compounding technical debt that will stifle innovation. Don’t let short-term fixes lead to long-term problems. It’s time to rethink how you approach technology, ensuring it supports—not stifles—your growth.

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In my latest conversation on The Daily CTO, I sat down with Arnaud Lucas to dive into a fundamental shift that every CTO should consider: moving from feedback to proactive input in tech leadership. It’s not just about asking for feedback after the plan is made. The real impact comes when you gather input before the planning begins, building a foundation for alignment, avoiding costly missteps, and delivering solutions that resonate across teams and customers alike. In this episode, Arnaud shares: Why timing matters when gathering stakeholder input. How a structured input-gathering system can transform alignment. Steps for implementing this approach in your own organization. Check out the episode here: https://lnkd.in/gwUTAwcm #CTO #TechLeadership #StakeholderEngagement #TheDailyCTO #CustomerExperience #Wayfair #Leadership #Innovation

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You've been there - stuck in some app, desperately clicking that “HELP” button, only to be met with either a terrible search box or a frustrating AI-powered chat bubble that offers little to no help. The truth is, users getting lost or confused is a big reason why they disengage. That’s why we’ve upgraded Appcues Launchpads to deliver help exactly when and where your users need it. Noticeable and (actually) useful without being annoying. Whether it’s a tour, a link, or a help doc, Launchpads offers self-support that’s perfectly timed, perfectly themed, and perfectly helpful. No engineering required. No annoying “ping” sounds. Just a smoother experience for your users. ps: I'm really proud of the team that brought this to life, specifically Joseph Muething, Alexandre S. and Magdiel Duarte. (But don't poach them. I need them.)

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I’m honored to kick off this series with none other than Barry Jones a fractional CTO with 22+ years of experience, to tackle a topic that so many teams struggle with: Why software estimation is broken. Episode: https://lnkd.in/gF5H29Sb In this episode, Barry breaks down: Why story points often do more harm than good The confusion and misalignment they create between teams and stakeholders A smarter way to approach estimation by focusing on task breakdowns and measuring queues instead. If you’re a CTO, developer, or product manager, you’ll benefit from Barry’s practical tips for improving your development process and avoiding the common pitfalls of traditional estimation methods. Check it out and let me know your thoughts!

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Closet Vikings and (decidedly not) Closet JavaScripters => Runic Code is in public preview! Check it out at: https://lnkd.in/ge6GN7qa What is Runic Code? It's the most awesome and, probably only(?), Viking-infused JavaScript code quiz app. What can you expect? Strengthen for all those JS battles where being able to divine the purpose of code could mean life or death! Err... maybe not death per se, but you'll still be able to amaze interviewers, colleagues, and the non-Viking-JavaScripting public with your legendary code reading skills. More updates are to come, but criticism both positive and negative will be considered in the Viking thing (parliament-ish gathering). My battles to come will include tackling: - each bit of feedback, - separation of concerns (I currently have my fetch inside App.jsx), - seeing if the bug where correct answers do indeed show up as wrong, as seen in the video, are happening, - adding a license and contributions.md to add more solved Codewars katas, - shuffling the multiple choice choices (hehe, had to double that word for clarity), - adding local storage to keep track of past scores, - and anything else that comes to mind! A thousand thank you's to anyone whose read so far and followed all my nonsense! Please do check out the repo at: https://lnkd.in/ghtg9MP5

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I talked to 5 leaders in the open source community from projects like #Kubernetes, #Helm, #OpenVEX, #GitBom, and others about the very real consequences of maintainer burnout and what we might collectively do about it. I hope you'll join us in this critical conversation. Find the full story with more from other lovely folks I spoke with at: https://lnkd.in/gerAKZgy And please follow Open.Intel for more interviews on this topic.

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I love this more nuanced approach from David Morris for determining what product ideas should get on the roadmap. The technique I use and coach most often is a bit simpler. It's "doable" vs "desirable". David's Viable + Feasible is a nice way to split out the two aspects of my "doable". I define great product management is a simultaneous exploration of the doable vs desirable space to find the optimal tradeoff between the two. So, the exercise I facilitate has people put post-its up on the wall on a two-dimensional graph where the x-axis is how "doable" the idea is. The y-axis is how desirable it is. The "best" ideas end up closest to the upper-right corner. I then draw two squiggly lines on the chart, generally meandering, going from upper-left to lower-right. The first line is quite close to the upper-right corner, meaning that only a small fraction of the ideas will be above and to the right of it. Anything above and to the right of it is considered a commitment for the roadmap timeframe under consideration. The second line is close to the first and catches the stretch goals for the roadmap timeframe. I'd love to host such an exercise for anyone who's interested, using David's nuanced version of "doable". Thoughts? Owen Farrell, Tony Reinert, and Tony Mantoan, you've seen me host these exercises many times. How well do you think this alteration to my exercise would work? https://lnkd.in/eaTGz6ep

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Neat detail: This also works if you have multiple presenters -- we'll summarize everyone involved on the title card. Super helpful if you're recording team presentations.

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I can say – without hyperbole – this is the best song about web performance I've ever heard. Well done, Scott Moore ⚛. 👏👏 https://lnkd.in/gj5GjMCD #webperf #webperformance #loadtest

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In late 2023 we reported that MySQL and MariaDB’s REPEATABLE READ did not, in fact, provide repeatable reads. The MariaDB team has been hard at work this past year. They’ve added a new flag, --innodb-snapshot-isolation=true, which causes REPEATABLE READ to prevent Lost Update, Non-repeatable Read, and violations of Monotonic Atomic View. Jepsen has not yet tested this, but it looks like MariaDB might, with the new flag enabled, offer Snapshot Isolation at REPEATABLE READ. https://lnkd.in/dw_SFhjh https://lnkd.in/dc_9-P26

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Tech friends, don’t treat every “symptom” as a task list item, not all issues/needs/wants are acute. Build based on wholistic customer needs that further the mission statement, customer satisfaction and the profit line. You have a finite amount of time, energy, and runway.

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When you start digging into a big dataset like we did for this year’s Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report, there’s some obvious stuff you go in looking to answer like “what percentage of open source maintainers get paid for their work?” or “who is paying them?” But perhaps the most fun part is when you find a little nugget of data, hiding in a dusty corner under a pile of other stuff, that reveals something you didn’t expect to see. 📦 👀 It’s antiquing for data nerds! 🕯 🛋 🎩 Well this next finding was one of those dusty data points, that we weren’t exactly looking for, but popped out and said “ 👋 over here!” — Maintainers are spending 3x more time on security than they did a few years ago. — We are always interested to learn more about how maintainers spend their time. So for this year’s survey, we asked them, as we had in our 2021 survey, to break down the amount of time per month they spend in the following areas on their projects: 🔒 Security work 🔧 Day to day maintenance work 🌱 Building new features 💰 Seeking financial support and sponsors ☑ Other While the percentage of time spent on day-to-day maintenance work stayed pretty consistent between the 2021 and 2024 surveys, from 53% in the previous survey to 50% today, the other percentages changed quite a bit. Perhaps the most significant “look over here” change was that maintainers now report they are spending 👉 almost 3x more time (11%) on security work than they reported in 2021 (4%) 👈 . It makes sense that maintainers spend more time on security, given that they are also seeing increasing demands for their time from corporate users of their projects, security companies giving them potential vulnerabilities to investigate, and pressure to comply with new security requirements and initiatives like the OpenSSF Scorecard and the NIST Secure Software Development Framework, among others. Not to mention, you know, things like the xz utils hack 😳 , that has some maintainers looking over their shoulder a bit (more on that in upcoming posts!). If we’d known going in we were going to see this rise in time spent on security, we probably would have added a followup question to ask maintainers what’s changed. But we don't have to wait til next year! I have a chance to ask that followup question in a few weeks, when we do our webinar discussion about the survey results with some of our favorite maintainers Gary Gregory, Seth Michael Larson, and Jeffrey Clark, plus Tidelift's own Luis Villa and Lauren Hanford. You can sign up for the webinar to hear the answer live on October 17 at this link: https://lnkd.in/g_f4zyj7 And if you want to read more about this surprising finding, check the comments section to download the full report or read today’s blog post.

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What do you have to do to build an application that scales? How can you architect your backend so it's ready yo grow? In this week's episode of The Scripting Den Podcast, I cover tips and patterns to apply to your backend architecture so it can scale when needed. Check out the full episode here: https://t.co/jfmnhuyMGp

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There's an oft-cited stat from Pendo that 80% of software features are rarely, if ever, used. While it's impossible to know the accuracy of that, it's not hard to believe. I've been part of multiple feature factories, where emphasis was put on new features to 'claim' rather than taking time to ensure we've actually solved the desired problem before moving onto the next. If you're a Product Manager/Leader in the Indy area, join us on August 14 for a conversation around best practices for measuring product success. We'll have food, drinks, and hopefully some great learnings! (Registration link in the comments)

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What if you could see every critical detail of your testing pipeline in real time? 👀   Rodrigo Martin from New Relic explains how test-related observability can reveal hidden issues and provide the data you need to optimize your DevOps processes.   In this episode, Rodrigo shares a framework for tracking events and monitoring key metrics, showing how these can be leveraged to reduce flaky tests and speed up pipeline performance.   Whether you’re new to observability or looking to refine your current strategy, this episode is packed with practical tips that will get you excited about what’s possible in test tracking. Check it out! 👇👇👇 https://lnkd.in/eeYvGEZU   #observability #SDLC #software delivery lifecycle #softwaretesting #debugging #reliability #testsuitereliability#DevOps #DevOpsreliability #pipelineperformance #flakytest 

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Have you heard the news? Our team at Pendo.io is excited to be offering our Product-Led Certification Course for free! The course covers the fundamentals of being product-led and provides actionable product-led strategies to drive growth for your organization. Register now while it's still free to take the course and earn your certification! ⬇️ #ProductManagement #ProductInnovation #BusinessLeaders #Product

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