Jonah Liebert

If you have built and operated an application or service that relies on an operational database in production, you will immediately understand the insane amount of value that these features deliver.

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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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We're looking for a senior-staff PM now at Honeycomb, who will drive and own a multi-year vision for a net-new, permanent and significant expansion of Honeycomb's product surface area: https://lnkd.in/g2sM_TfC I’ve sat in this role for 3.5 years now, on and off, so you’ll be inheriting a lot of my regretful decisions. But I’m here to help you navigate that! It involves big data (for real), deep OSS involvement, lots of customers who love the product, and a great team to boot. If you like the idea of thinking through how you’ll turn 10M events per second into 100k, without breaking the bank, and making it as semi-automatic as possible, without losing signal on that data, and building a compelling UI that lets people build and monitor this stuff, this might be up your alley! Wanna talk with tons of customers and spicy sales engineers who have to sometimes commit code crimes to make stuff work, and then tell you about it? Wanna make painful prioritization decisions? Wanna find a way to execute on a multi-year vision and not get lost along the way? Click the link above. Wanna eat shit in front of a customer whose exact set of constraints violates every tradeoff decision you made? And then go back to them 4 months later with the good news that you’ve fixed it all? Come say hi! Wanna try to wrap your head around someone's perceived notions of how observability works, and find creative ways to reorient their worldview? Hi hello please apply. Wanna get deeply involved in the #opentelemetry community, become a core contributor, attend lots of community events, and be continuously infused with customer problems and feedback and also overall industry directions? You know what to do. Wanna work with a very product-minded engineering team who will push you to get stuff done? Wanna be a part of a group that is usually fast, usually right on the first go of things, and isn't afraid to try things and maybe pull them back if they're not working? Wanna have fun too? Clicky clicky.

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This product was practically built for me. I’ve been waiting for something like it for years, long after I gave up writing on paper almost entirely. Heck, if it wasn’t for having kids, I probably could have gone the last the past decade with the challenge of not writing anything down on paper. Which makes it all the more frustrating at the price point it’s released. This isn’t targeted for grade school students, college students, or young professionals. It’s targeted at prosumers which share the same space as an iPad Air, and the market is already dominated by prosumers who want that product. For those who can’t afford the iPad, Amazon releases tablet computers in the $100 range. I know Remarkable is a much smaller company, and can’t compete on price with Amazon, or volume like Apple. But waiting so long for something I can’t justify the purchase price just hurts. At half the price it would have been a no brainer. It checks practically every box.

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5 Comments

Migration Complete & Holiday Success 🎉 What seemed like a monumental risk—migrating an entire platform in just over two months, right before launching our most crucial holiday promotion—could have easily been a recipe for disaster. But at Caraway Home, we don’t shy away from big challenges. Instead, we rally around them 🚀 I also want to state how incredibly grateful I am to Jordan Nathan and Connor Dault for trusting in me to lead the charge. Their confidence in my ability to steer this project was the key to our success. We dove into re-platforming our website with one goal: to modernize, scale, and prepare for the future. Every part of this migration had to be seamless—performance, speed, and scalability had to be perfect for the holiday rush, and we had zero room for error. It was a team effort that required every member to step up and give their absolute best. Using Shopify's Hydrogen-React, Meta Facebook's Stylex-JS, Next.js, TypeScript, Vercel, and Contentful, we pulled it off. The result? An incredibly fast, flexible, and high-performing site that not only supported our holiday promotion flawlessly but set us up for continued growth in the future. We were also able to reduce build times by 80%, skyrocketed organic search sessions, and delivered a smooth, seamless experience for our customers. 🌟 Our page speed improved 2x, ensuring fast load times even during peak traffic. We also maintained an average Core Web Vitals score of 90 🤯 throughout the entire holiday promotion. Engagement also saw a significant boost, with more customers interacting with our site and exploring our products than ever before. Additionally, we introduced a more cohesive style guide and design system, making the developer & user experience not only faster but also more visually unified and on-brand across all touchpoints. ✅ Multiple $ Record Breaking days during the holiday season 💰 ✅ A site built for speed and scalability ✅ Improved developer experience (editors are loving it too!) ✅ A superior customer experience This migration wasn’t just a technical achievement—it was a bold move that shows what’s possible when you have the right team and the right tools. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built over the last five years at Caraway, and I’m beyond excited about what lies ahead. Huge thanks to everyone on our team who made it possible Alexa Bravo-Fuentes, Kelsey Yin, Ethan Shaffer, Katie Krobock, Ashley Golladay, Emily Mercado, Ariel Rodriguez, Dawid Urbański, Will Lee, Neeraj K., Dellean, Juan, and the entire team for making this possible. This was truly a group effort. If you haven’t checked out the new site yet, now’s the time! https://lnkd.in/e8MQ7RyC Shop our best sellers and holiday picks, and save up to 20%. 🎁 #eCommerce #Leadership #Caraway #Nextjs #ShopifyHydrogen #HolidaySuccess #stylexjs #meta #shopify #headless #react

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While there are certainly individual variations in skill and experience when discussing modern software development the story is much more nuanced than pure individual effort.  * software development is a team sport -- individual performance is heavily impacted by the system in which they are asked to operate in.  * we pair skill and experience to this model of understanding performance by expecting people to be able to influence and adapt in direct proportion to their seniority, aka the more senior you are the more responsible you are for the outcomes of your work, the less senior you are the more your manager and management chain are responsible.  * humans want to succeed, we're social animals who derive purpose from demonstrating skill, and working collectively. All of which is to say there is no way you have over 1000 people underperforming at your company without senior leadership deeply implicated in.  If nearly 10% of your company is failing, versus just having the market move against you, you need to fire the CEO.

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9 Comments

Some thoughts on being available "off hours": I've seen a few threads on LI/otherwise about being available for work during off hours, vs having work/life separation, and changing trends there (ie: younger people are less willing to let work intrude in their personal time). As someone who has been in both situations in his career, I have some thoughts. A company will always want employees to work 24/7 (at least exempt employees). They will applaud employees who "give extra", "do what's necessary", "are good team members", or whatever other euphemisms are deemed effective to encourage this. But, employees are also generally disposable to employers (especially larger companies). This is often a rude awakening for younger people, who have been conditioned with propaganda like "your work family", etc. Generally, you should work for compensation, not some sense of obligation to a company that would discard you without a second thought for a small bump to their bottom line. Ideally, those types of expectations should be up-front and by consensus with one's employer. Generally, circumstances permitting, I will check messages off-hours, and respond/work if there's a critical situation which needs my attention (and not otherwise). However, that's inherently dependent on the employer also; if the employer makes that "hard" (eg: restricting the ability to check messages to only corporate devices), then I interpret that as a signal that working off hours is not something they value (at least enough to make it "easy"), which is fine with me. In some ways, that's a better situation, if/when the employer is implicitly making it hard to work off-hours anyway, it easier to ignore any implied pressure to do so. Anyway, that's my take, fwiw.

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Large Language Models (#LLMs) are evolving rapidly, and the demand for running them at scale is skyrocketing. #Ollama is stepping up to meet this need with its official container image on Docker Hub, excelling in local #deployments. However, there’s a catch for containerized environments: downloading #models requires the ollama serve command to be running within the #container. This extra step complicates automated deployments via #CI #CD #pipelines, making seamless model access challenging. To take your #model to production, it needs to be #container-ready—a feature Ollama has yet to fully support. The gap in #AIOps for smooth deployments gets blurred with the inference services available as an easy way to take it to production. Goal is to overcome obstacles and deliver solutions 😉 so here is to get you started on having your (O)#llama #production ready in a private #deployment from your #local to #cloud all in #oneshot . Enjoy Medium: https://lnkd.in/g9jqBQ8d dev.to: https://lnkd.in/gi_gGwam #AI #LLM #Ollama #llama3 #phi3 #mistral #S6overlay #AIOps #CI #CD #oneshot #container #docker #podmanEnjoy

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The Unexpected Slack Hack You Need: 🦝 We’ve all been there: a Slack thread spirals out of control, and before you know it, people are lost in endless back-and-forth and you have a thread 70 replies long, or worse, multiple threads 🫠. The fix? A simple 🦝 emoji. Slack’s unique "raccoon" concept encourages users to shift off-topic or overly detailed conversations, here’s how it works: 1️⃣ 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗹: When a thread goes from productive to chaotic or has more than a few back and forth replies, drop the 🦝 to signal it’s time to regroup. 2️⃣ 𝗠𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗟𝗶𝘃𝗲: The raccoon tells everyone it’s time to move from typing to talking—whether it’s a quick Zoom call or a team huddle. Live conversations resolve issues faster. 3️⃣ 𝗙𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗖𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿, 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: The raccoon keeps things respectful, but serves a real purpose—it gets the message across without adding tension. 4️⃣ 𝗘𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵 𝗔 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝗺: Make it clear in your team’s culture that when the 🦝 appears, it’s time to shift gears and solve the issue more efficiently. How do you keep Slack chaos under control? Tell me in the comments. ⤵ ---- ♻️ Repost and share these tips for improving slack communication. ➕ Follow me (𝗔𝘀𝗵𝗹𝗲𝘆 𝗩𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗪𝗲𝗹) for more insights on productivity, leadership, and career growth.

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Anthropic released another paper on their ongoing work towards interpretability of large foundational models like their Claude 3 family, built on previous work by many. Their work continues to be enlightening and inspiring. The findings in this work are generally similar to previous findings on smaller models but scaled up to Claude 3 Sonnet: 💡 they find large numbers of "features" corresponding to combinations of neuron activations and these features map to concepts that we recognize/understand: for example, features for transit infrastructure, particular people, concepts (like bias and "objects lacking sentience"). This might sound familiar from classical machine learning, but the interesting thing is that there is no single thing/neuron encoding each of these concepts, it's a particular combination of neuron activations that embeds these concepts in "superposition" in the network. 💡they observe a sort of "distance" of these feature activations that arrange themselves "near" semantically similar features. When they use their sparse autoencoder approach to learn more and more features they observe that the level of abstraction in the detected features becomes more granular, in ways that are interpretable and meaningful. 💡when they artificially fire these activation patterns during inference, it affects the output in ways that relate to the "feature". For example, asking Claude "what's the most interesting science" normally it responds Physics, but if you clamp the feature activations for the feature "Brain Science" to 10x their max values then Claude responds: Neuroscience. Ways to interpret _and_ influence the model. Great readable work [1] along with an interactive explorer of some of the "features" themselves [2] 🎂 There's an easter egg too: if you scroll in the feature explorer tool and try and select one of the "Randomly selected features from 1M" you get a message "if you want to see the rest of the features, we're hiring!" with a link to their recruiting page :) [1] https://lnkd.in/gZbparwp [2] https://lnkd.in/gC9eus53

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This resonates so much. No, you can't do it all, especially not at a startup. Since COVID I see so many people try to balance unaided parenting with full-time careers, and no, I don't see anyone doing it well. My kids are now 17, 13 and 10 and just now, when they trek to most of their activities on their own, and do their HW on their own, and cook their own meal or snack, we have finally let go of the outside help ( and this is with both parents working from home for last 5 years, outside of peak COVID lockdown, we had always relied on a designated childminder outside of school hours). Yes, working remotely does mean that I have more time and flexibility in my life, it means I can walk my kids to school sometimes, or have breakfast with them instead of rushing to the office, it means I can go and see their midweek concert at school, or be there to grab them from school on a sick day in 10 mins. But it also means that on EVERY day basis we all need clear boundaries, work hours, dedicated spaces that are not continuously invaded by children, or feelings of guilt that our children are unattended. One thing that a lot of the arrangments lack is transparency, being explicit with ourselves, our partners, our managers and colleagues on when we are making trade-offs. What helps is verbalising our plans, putting explicit blocks on calendars for pickups, doctor's appointments and school activities, letting others know when you will have periods of diminished focus due to a school holiday or a sick kid at home, and ruthlessly prioritising. Very few of us can claim to be at Julius Ceasar level of multi-tasking. Flexibility of remote work ≠ combining full time work with full time parenting

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I don't often agree with Allen but he's spot on about technical interviews. Some of the tactics that have gained popularity result in good candidates getting rejected. Other than new graduates, you can learn most of what you need to know using behavioral interviewing and drilling deep into their technical and project experience. I think other approaches were created to compensate for the fact that interviewers receive little to no training on how to interview and, strangely, feel uncomfortable asking a candidate follow on questions about an experience because it feels like they're prying. Personally, I find it's often the answers to these questions where the truth reveals itself because the answers to the follow on questions are usually answers that haven't been prepared so you get the truth.

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This is a great video about how our personal ideology impacts the way we process data and information. For me, it shows the importance of fighting against populism and "framing" in the media and teaching our children in critical thinking. https://lnkd.in/eXQdB4fR

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