Mitchell Hashimoto

The FireHydrant acquisition of Blameless signals a major shift in observability and incident management. My Partner Jaya and I just wrote about the looming "observability crisis"—how the explosion of data and tools has paradoxically made it harder to extract meaningful insights. This deal is a direct response to that crisis. By combining forces, FireHydrant and Blameless aim to build an end-to-end incident management platform to reimagine root cause analysis from the ground up. But to *truly* address the observability crisis, it will take more than consolidation. We need AI-driven systems that: → Provide natural language interfaces to query complex systems → Automatically generate and update incident response playbooks → Offer predictive maintenance by recognizing patterns across heterogeneous data sources → Synthesize post-mortem reports, distilling insights from terabytes of data Most critically, we need to ditch volume-based pricing models that incentivize data hoarding over problem-solving. Expect more moves as the market evolves to meet the demands of increasingly complex enterprise systems.

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It has been a long time coming, but today, Wristband is finally opening its doors to the public! For those who may not know, Wristband is the company I co-founded a little over three years ago with Jim Verducci and Bryan Hsiao. Our goal with Wristband is to democratize security by making enterprise authentication more accessible to companies of all sizes. As noted by the CISA (https://lnkd.in/g6zcqJey), there is a prevalent trend amongst software vendors to price security at a premium within their products. One of the most notable examples of this is what is known as the "SSO tax," where companies lock SSO authentication to their highest subscription tiers. This practice of treating security as a luxury good poses a significant barrier for smaller companies to adopt security best practices and significantly reduces their security posture. We're trying to subvert these trends with Wristband by providing affordable, turn-key solutions to enterprise authentication features such as SSO, MFA, and multi-tenancy. With security breaches on the rise, it is more important than ever that all companies, big or small, have access to the tools they need to protect their customers' identities. In addition to opening Wristband up to the public, we're also launching on Product Hunt today! It would mean the world if you could give us an upvote on the following page 🙏 : https://lnkd.in/gZaW89rS. Finally, I just wanted to give a shout-out to my co-founders, Jim and Bryan. Those guys are grinders, and the amount of work they've put in over the last three years has been Herculean. Also, a big thanks to Jarod Reyes for being the marketing 🐐; this launch wouldn't have been possible without him. 

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Gadget's internal CI infrastructure has grown super scaled for a company of our size -- we do 160k hours of CI compute per month, or 220 days of compute per day. We really exhaustively test every change we make across all the framework versions so we don't break your shit! Remarkably though, it doesn't cost us that much. We built a custom autoscaler atop Buildkite that uses GCP Managed Instance Groups on spot instances, using t2d nodes which have really remarkable price/performance and really high spot discounts. Can't speak highly enough of t2ds We decided to use plain old VMs instead of k8s because we spin up a full k3s cluster and integration test our distributed filesystem and our serverless function orchestration stack end to end for some tests. It's caught some serious stuff I resent every moment I have to spend working on CI because I'd rather be building product or yammering on to you all, but I'm glad we made this investment because it is 1/50th the cost of our previous "normal" approach and lets us do nutty stuff like exhaustively test the matrix

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I had a super hard time finding the right Lead Engineer/technical counterpart for me at my SaaS company. After going down the "hire a technical Co-Founder path" in the very early days of Because and having it not work out (having a co-founder is like a marriage and man it's not easy!)... After hiring older more seasoned technical leaders and having that also not work out... I finally hired the gem that is our Lead Engineer today, Marlin Jayasekera 🙏 He's in his late twenties and he's a better fit for our team than all the older more "seasoned" talent I had hired historically. That doesn't mean our entire team is Gen Z btw (we aren't ageist!) but I learned so many good lessons here I thought were worth sharing for anyone building out their team. In my opinion... 👨‍💻 Your first technical leader (or any early hire for that matter) should be someone who GSD (gets shit done 💩) rather than someone who dreams all day or just wants to "direct resources." 👵 Age doesn't define you. As a 27 year old CEO, I of course embody this value but it's been so cool to see other young leadership at Because quickly earning the respect and love from older peers around them. 🤝It's so important to make sure your early leadership team sees eye to eye with you. The relationship Marlin and I have built is healthy, respectful, and supportive. We know when to challenge each other but we almost always see eye to eye. That's way easier said than done! ✨ I completely trust him to make decisions. We come together once a week for sprint planning (1 week sprints) to set goals together and then I let him and the team go off and execute on those goals. The trust between us is key to let him and the engineering team be successful on their own. What wrong hires have you made that ultimately led you to the right one? ❤️👇

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One of the coolest things we've been building at Truewind is our document parsing and extraction engine.   A lot of accountants deal with scanned or photographed documents like receipts, contracts, invoices, and bills.   For us, the goal is to make sifting through and classifying that information a lot easier.   Matthew Duong has been leading the charge on this project, and recently wrote about the experience on our engineering blog. In particular, he explains why ditching schemas and using PostgreSQL’s JSONB has made such a big difference for our platform.   If you’re interested in the technical side of how we’re refining accuracy and speed in document processing, definitely give it a read.   Here’s the link: https://lnkd.in/gN3Sgext

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Building an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant auth platform is a lot like making the perfect brisket. 🥩 ▶️ It’s tough to get it right. ▶️ It takes patience. ▶️ It takes precision. There’s no shortcut to transforming a tough cut of meat into something tender and irresistible. A great brisket takes time, and rushing it leads to disaster. Every step matters. From trimming the brisket 🔪 to adjusting the smoker’s temperature. 🌡️ You’ve got to carefully plan, season with the right tools, and let it smoke low and slow until all those tricky parts come together. But when it's done? People are lining up to get a bite of those tasty burnt ends. 😍 The same goes for an auth platform. There’s no shortcut to building a secure, scalable platform from scratch. You need the right foundation. 🔒 But the end result? Companies are eager to sink their teeth (and their code!) into something that protects each customer’s data and drives revenue growth. Now if you'll excuse me... I made myself hungry. Comment below: Team Ribs or Team Brisket? #Enterprise #Security #MultiTenant #Authentication #ProductDevelopment #DataProtection #RevenueGrowth #TexasBrisket #BurntEndsAndAuth

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For folks selling in the cybersecurity market, how do you think about the trade-off between exposing product capabilities self-serve vs. gating behind a compliance check? At Stytch, we’re big believers in product-led growth. As a dev-focused company, we know and understand that our target audience likes to see how things work. They like to get into the details. They want to try it. That’s why our auth products are all free to get started, with the details of our API in the docs. But our device fingerprinting products are a bit different - to access them, we require a basic compliance check, proof that you are who you say you are and have a legitimate (non-nefarious) need for our product. Having to gate products isn’t fun; we’re proud of our solutions and want people to try them out. But we also want to make it more difficult for attackers to set up easy lab environments for brute force testing. This GitHub repo is a perfect example of how that plays out in practice; without precautions, your cool sales demo becomes a reliable testing site for new evasion tactics: https://lnkd.in/gaNFXnF2 Anyone else building security products who’s dealt with this kind of trade-off? How did you balance encouraging product discovery/PLG with maximizing product security?

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Earlier this week, I mentioned that we shipped over 30 new endpoints for the Vanta API at the end of June. Another exciting set of improvements centered on controls: adding and removing custom controls, updating control metadata, assigning control owners, adding and removing test or document (evidence) mappings to controls, etc. These building blocks allow you to bring your program into Vanta – keep the work you've already done, gain a high-level view of your security and compliance program, and benefit from continuous control monitoring. Thanks to Bo Y. and Eric Yuan for building these new endpoints!

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Ever been in a meeting where the CTO starts talking about "complex database work" and you just know—deep down—they're stalling because they really don’t want to do it? Yeah, we’ve all seen it. Instead of tackling a simple feature request, they spin it into some mystical tech problem, drop a line about "focusing on growth, not features," and suddenly your whole idea is on life support. Brilliant deflection. And if you’re using an outsourced tech platform? Welcome to the development queue of death—where good ideas go to die, or get resurrected with a price tag that makes you wonder if you’re paying for an actual resurrection. Even worse, that “innovative feature” you paid through the nose for ends up farmed out to your competitors. Feels good, right? You end up feeling stuck—constrained from growth, forced into clunky workarounds, battling limited resources, and hoping the CTO stops having bad days. But here’s the thing—DIY tools like OpenAI, Claude, Anthropic, and a growing list of others are rewriting the script. The old song and dance of "we can’t because it’s too complex" is getting real tired—if you know where to look. Still hesitating? Keep in mind, while you're sitting there debating, others have already grabbed the tools and moved on. Can you relate? How often have you seen a platform bottleneck your business? In Leadgen, it's practically a rite of passage. Let’s hear your stories—how did you handle it?

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Seriously!!! Your development will be easier, faster and delightful. Write it, build it, run it, love it, share it, send it, ship it Technologic Technologic Technologic 👁️❤️Apollo Language Server and couldn’t imagine developing without it anymore. And if you use VS Code, the Apollo extension can bring the language server right to your fingertips in your IDE with the Rover CLI ✨ No links for this post, just watch this video!

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My personal website is now pretty close to bulletproof. Hosted entirely on S3 and Cloudfront Zero backend code Searchable Articles using 100% client-side code No more worrying about my poor little EC2 instance running out of storage or CPU or having services fail -- basically zero devops and nothing really to hack. It's a style of architecture I've been meaning to implement for years and I was surprised how well it actually worked in this case. I wrote up a quick article about it on my spiffy new website. Looking forward to see what actually DOES fail... https://lnkd.in/g64kSsJr #devsecops #webdev #appdev #programming #cloudarchitecture #architecture

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This is super cool. The declarative approach OSO takes with authZ is the key to making this work. I can also quite easily see the integration with Wasp down the road :).

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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)?

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This is a cool project, and another example of the emerging "replace stateful storage with S3" trend. I do wonder at what point someone will package this sort of thing up into a FUSE filesystem to make it generally usable across existing services. Or maybe every service has unique enough needs that it's better to handle it custom each time. https://lnkd.in/etcVBfVf

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If you are working with Docker... I highly recommend looking at the Slim toolkit. https://lnkd.in/gX_Gb9Kf Why? Slim allows developers to inspect, optimize, and debug their containers using its xray, lint, build, debug, run, images, merge, registry, vulnerability (and other) commands. It simplifies and improves your developer experience building, customizing and using containers. It makes your containers better, smaller and more secure while providing advanced visibility and improved usability working with the original and minified containers. Don't change anything in your container image; minify it by up to 30x to make it secure, too! Optimizing images isn't the only thing it can do, though. It can also help you understand and author better container images. Keep doing what you are doing. No need to change anything. Use the base image you want. Use the package manager you want. Don't worry about hand-optimizing your Dockerfile. You shouldn't have to throw away your tools and your workflow to have small container images. Node.js application images: from ubuntu:14.04 - 432MB => 14MB (minified by 30.85X) from debian:jessie - 406MB => 25.1MB (minified by 16.21X) from node:alpine - 66.7MB => 34.7MB (minified by 1.92X) from node:distroless - 72.7MB => 39.7MB (minified by 1.83X) Go application images: from golang:latest - 700MB => 1.56MB (minified by 448.76X) from ubuntu:14.04 - 531MB => 1.87MB (minified by 284.10X) from golang:alpine - 258MB => 1.56MB (minified by 165.61X) from centos:7 - 615MB => 1.87MB (minified by 329.14X) Rust application images: from rust:1.31 - 2GB => 14MB (minified by 147.16X) Java application images: from ubuntu:14.04 - 743.6 MB => 100.3 MB

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AWS re:Invent is less than two weeks away. Want to accelerate your AI initiatives? Let's connect in Vegas and discuss how Meibel enables your engineering team to build Explainable AI into your products and experiences.

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These are the boring, yet impactful aspects of API operations I am here for--low-tech, economy impacting, real-world stuff like the API deprecation notice from the Department of Labor.

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– I was basically the Leonardo da Vinci of system design… if Leonardo had been really into Kubernetes and had a concerning addiction to coffee. Trying to build the perfect system that anticipates every future need is often worse than creating one designed to change quickly. I shared some of these experiences on the Pulumi blog today – check it out: 👉 https://lnkd.in/dAh_k_D5 #SoftwareEngineering #Architecture #Engineering #PlatformEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #Pulumi

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Today, while reviewing Layerpath's monthly changelog process, I had an "aha" 💡 moment: we were telling only half the story! 🤔 Like many product-led companies, we've been feature-focused. But our users don't just buy features - they invest in our vision, approach, and community. Here's what I learned from studying companies I admire (Notion, Figma, Canva) and adding our own Layerpath spin: 1. Multi-format storytelling is key. ↳ Fun fact: As a company that helps others create stunning demos and content, we're putting our own tech to work here! 😉) 2. Product updates should reflect company culture. ↳ Shoutout to marketer Swathika who walks the talk - using Layerpath to create our own help docs and resources!) 3. Community insights drive innovation ↳ Your feedback shapes not just what we build, but how we think. 4. User success stories inspire possibilities ↳ Because real impact > feature lists 5. Transparent communication builds trust ↳ Sharing both wins and improvements builds stronger relationships The best updates aren't just about what shipped - they're about the value creation, problem-solving, and community building. Sometimes, the best playbooks need personalization - what works for others should inspire, not constrain, your unique story—taking this learning forward at Layerpath! What's your take on product updates? How do you prefer to learn about new features and improvements? #ProductLedGrowth #StartupLessons #BuildInPublic #ProductUpdates

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