Kenaniah Cerny

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...

12

2 Comments

"You can have a great strategy for the next billion-dollar developer product, but the battle is won in the trenches of daily iterations." I love this clip from Lee Robinson (VP Product, Vercel). Lee helped scale Vercel to 1M+ developers and has some of the clearest thinking of developer marketing that I've read. We talked about: - Getting into the developer's mindset - 3 pillars of a great developer experience - Why developers don't trust your marketing A few quotes from Lee: "Most developers don't adopt a tool the first time they hear about it. It's probably the 10th time." "Great documentation is great writing. The tech industry is plagued with jargon and fluff. It would be much cleaner if people wrote more like how they talk." "The battle is won in the trenches. It could be a two-paragraph docs change or a small UX improvement. For every developer that complains, 100 more won't say anything." 📌 Watch now: https://lnkd.in/g-g-u3E5 Also available on: Apple: https://lnkd.in/grhhYVyh Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gGyvBKmX Newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gGkkYG4M

115

3 Comments

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.

33

12 Comments

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

53

9 Comments

At InVision, we worked with some amazing software vendors. I know I've talked about most of these in the past; but, I just want to give a final shout-out to some of my favorites: * LaunchDarkly - feature flags completely changed the way we approached product development. And, allowed us to all but eliminate our incidents and outages (shameless plug for my own book: https://lnkd.in/ehxiy6bY). * Postmark - delivered all of our outbound emails and powered our inbound reply-by-email workflows with flawless uptime and befuddling performance. * Pusher - powered our real-time collaboration via WebSockets, bringing our UIs to life and keeping browsers synchronized. * Intergral | FusionReactor APM - gave us deep insights into our JVM performance, allowing us to track down SQL, API, and processing bottlenecks. * Datadog - truly world-class metrics, alerting, and monitoring. * Adobe ColdFusion / Lucee CFML - the programming language and application server that allowed us to move fast, keep things simple, respond to users, and build wonderful things. * Cloudflare - your CDN, WAF, and web workers took a beating so that our origin servers could stay online. * Amplitude - connected me to the users by giving us insight into what our users were actually doing (or not doing). At one point, I think we had over 300 different SaaS subscriptions; so this list is faaaaar from exhaustive. And, I'm sure I'm forgetting other beloved services. And, many of our teams worked with entirely different technologies. This is just my little corner of the organization. And, I couldn't have done it without them. Thank you so much! ❤️

113

18 Comments

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!

10

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

19

As an open-source maintainer, contributor, and advocate of many years, as well as someone who’s built a business around open-source hardware, I have some insight into both sides of the “fair source” (really, “source available”) debate. On the one hand, especially with the rise of cloud platforms and the challenges they bring for traditional OSS licensing, I completely get the desire for companies to want to strengthen the moats around their products while retaining a measure of source availability and even community contribution while building mindshare and adoption. On the other it feels like at least some of the players want to have their cake and eat it, with some of the licenses being thrown around being perhaps more restrictive than many might realise, and in my opinion leaving questionable value in having source available at all, perhaps beyond being able to say “we’re building in public”. It’s an interesting thing to watch. Even in the hardware space, where we have a slightly wider moat than most (because our market is very niche, and having physical things made in real factories is still expensive and hard, even with ready-made designs) we’ve had to experiment with closed licensing for some of our more commodity products, but the negative feeling within our (amazing) community has been palpable pretty much any time we’ve done that. It does feel like there’s more potential tension here in the future, continuing the theme that we’ve seen with things like BUSL etc. I for one am certainly watching with interest. https://lnkd.in/em2YWHNS

4

🛠️ Okay y'all, looking for advice: I'm running a handful of small apps for Build Carolina's Development Studio initiative. These are low-utilization apps for relatively small audiences. I'm leaning heavily on Rails at the moment but expect to bring on some JS-stack projects in the near future (likely Next, but I'm always open to the flavor of the week in JavaScript 😅) Here's what I'm finding for hosting: - I still know Heroku best, but I just don't trust them to not enshittify further. 🫠 Every new app here is a liability when Marc decides he needs another island or whatever. 💰 - I'm using a lot of Render and like their devex philosophy, but their pricing is weird (per-service + premium tiers? Pick one!), the big feature gaps in their platform have gone long-unaddressed, and their support has been poor. 🤖 - I'm experimenting with Fly.io: great pricing, but a weird mix of UI-vs-CLI workflows and segmenting project resources is unintuitive. I feel like I'm going to wake up to a huge bill because I accidentally over-provisioned something here. 💸 I'm curious what other folks are doing for small-scale artisanal app hosting in 2024+. Are we all running our own EC2 clusters? Is everyone just writing Next apps for Vercel? Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy looking for a backend host in a static SPA world. 👴 ❓ Tips/tricks/tales welcome. Where are you hosting your lil' bytes right now?

13

39 Comments

Question for engineering leaders (managers, directors, VP's, etc): I'm curious about the current landscape of developer productivity analysis + management tools - things like LinearB and Jellyfish. Which tool, if any, are you using? Any opinions/pros/cons on the tool you're using (or the entire domain overall)?

21

✎ Transparent border: https://lnkd.in/epMKzciT Quick rebound off of Dave Rupert's post about the utility of `border-color: transparent`. It's a helpful technique for reducing janky behavior and creating sturdy themes in a design system.

65

7 Comments

Thanks for attending, especially Gregory Burd and Kresten Krab Thorup, the original authors of HanoiDB! We'll be back next week for more. Follow me on YouTube to get notified or catch up on past streams: https://lnkd.in/ea4rXxEx #RustLang #Databases #Erlang

5

We've been making some cool examples of things that can be built with substrate.run lately. Here's a simple chatbot that can help you cook: https://lnkd.in/eEZm-nRJ If you're working on building a chatbot, take a look and see what it might look like to use Substrate 🧑‍🍳

19

2 Comments

So many things to unpack in the wake of another company squeezing their open source users towards licensing. Thinking of the current OSS climate and the lack of participation of companies generally as well as not being able to endorse using a solution fearing that a company will pull the rug out from under you once you're fully integrated with a solution. https://lnkd.in/gVpME4Uz

2

1 Comment

In the U.S. on Thanksgiving a regular tradition is folks share what they're thankful for. This needs a little context - I used to build on an open source CMS that while it had a robust plugin ecosystem, plugins, themes etc didn't have to guarantee they'd work together, and always support the latest CMS version. Unfortunately it wasn't uncommon for an automatic update on a client's site interrupting a much needed vacation or camping trip. I have spent multiple trips sitting by a campfire on spotty 2g internet trying to use an IDE on my cellphone to fix goofy php issues, or using the mobile interface to try to enable/disable plugins to try to identify where the problem came from. What I'm thankful for: I have never both before I worked at HubSpot and while I've worked at HubSpot - needed to fix an issue that caused a client's website to go down while on vacation. Developers need to rest and recharge too. Happy Thanksgiving to those in the U.S. #HubSpot #HubSpotDevelopers

16

2 Comments

Let's be clear: trust in WordPress and Automattic is broken for good, due to hostile and erratic decisions like this one. At this point, I strongly recommend to avoid Wordpress for the next website you consider building, and turn your attention to other CMS on the market. Remember that security, stability and trust have a cost. https://lnkd.in/e-4BzeDF

5

The difference between a decision and a data-driven decision is like the difference between a shot in the dark and a carefully aimed arrow. Which decision do you want to make?

2

Make an indoor map and embed it on your website in seconds. It really is this easy with Mappedin.

24