Robert Sweeney

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!

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🍜Anybody up for some ramen? I am excited to share that I am back in the garage, building again (it’s actually a house in the Berkeley Hills). We are taking the wraps off of Supercog AI, a new startup focused on solving Application Integration using LLM powered agents. My co-founder in this new venture is a great friend of mine (and a former co-founder partner), Alex Osborne. Alex and I have worked around the application integration space for a long time, and we are unrealistically excited about applying the GenAI stack to this problem. Not many people relish the task to get some bits to move from system A to system B. But it’s a critical job to be done, and that’s led to a lot of brittle scripts, a myriad of inflexible “no code” tools, and a lot of hand crafted SQL. But the power of the Large Language Model, trained on a huge corpus of information, offers a remarkable tool to solve this problem. The LLM you use today already knows the APIs of hundreds of popular systems. It knows the SQL dialects of every major database. It understands the semantics and data schemas of many popular SaaS systems. It understands much of the specific domain in which your business operates. I like to call the AI revolution “the last platform shift”. That may turn out to be hyperbole, but I definitely believe we are in the very early stages of seeing what this new stack can enable. I know we are hardly the first folks to claim that “amazing stuff is coming!”. But this is why Alex and I have decided to focus on a real and hard problem. If we can prove that LLMs can power a new way to solve this problem, it will be the first successful *new* approach in 15 years.. We will have much more to share about this new platform soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in getting a peek - or even better if you have application or data integration tasks that you would like some help with - please reach out because we want to help. #genai #startups #backinthegarage

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First story on what we have been up to at Augment. Much more to come! https://lnkd.in/gC6gbADA

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Anthropic's latest Claude AI model is taking human-AI interaction to a whole new level! 🖥️🤖 The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet can now use computers just like a human would - by looking at the screen, moving the cursor, clicking buttons, and typing text. This is a major leap forward in AI capabilities. Key features: Operates based on screenshots, emulating human computer use Can perform complex multi-step tasks across different applications Self-corrects and retries when encountering obstacles2 Accessible via API for developers to build with Why it's game-changing: This opens up incredible possibilities for AI assistance in data entry, form filling, software testing, and automating repetitive computer tasks13. Imagine having an AI assistant that can seamlessly work alongside you, handling tedious computer work while you focus on higher-level tasks. While still in beta, this technology demonstrates how AI is rapidly advancing toward more human-like interaction with digital interfaces. As it develops further, it could revolutionize how we work with computers and boost productivity across industries. The future of human-AI collaboration just got a lot more exciting! What do you think about this new capability? #AIInnovation #FutureOfWork Here is a video about it: https://lnkd.in/gh8aNYEu

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A question for all of my friends in Software Engineering. Are there any reasonable alternatives to evaluate besides CircleCI that you'd recommend for running a very large set of Rails Unit and Integration tests automatically on Pull Requests? I'm aware of how we could spin up some things on AWS, but the goal is something low maintenance for a small team to increase the visibility of the tests.

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Happy Monday, Career Karma is hiring for a VP of Engineering to accelerate our AI strategy and you can see the job description here: https://lnkd.in/gWEx6_4W This role is perfect a leader with zero to one experience – someone who has been a founder or part of a founding team and wants to shape the future not only with our current customer base of HR, Education, and Coaching companies, but also in other industries outside of Workforce Development. For context, we've built an AI platform that acts as an orchestration layer, enabling both your engineering and business teams to collaborate on creating, testing, and deploying AI use cases and our solution includes: - A no-code builder for product, operations, and leadership teams - An API for seamless integration by your developers - This allows you to launch AI companions in days, not months. Why Join Career Karma? Cutting-Edge Innovation: We are at the forefront of AI Companion technology, revolutionizing human-AI interaction across voice, text, and video. Joining us means you’ll be working on groundbreaking projects that push the boundaries of what’s possible. Entrepreneurial Spirit: We are looking for someone with the entrepreneurial mindset of a founder. Your hands-on experience in building and scaling startups will be invaluable as we continue to grow and innovate. Financial Stability: With ample runway and financial stability, Career Karma offers a secure environment where you can focus on innovation and long-term projects without the constant worry of funding. Culture of Growth: At Career Karma, we emphasize a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning. You’ll be part of a team that values creativity, supports professional development, and encourages pushing the envelope. Impactful Work: Your contributions will directly impact the way people interact with AI, making a meaningful difference in the lives of our users. We’re building something special here, and you’ll play a crucial role in that journey. Community and Thought Leadership: As part of Career Karma, you’ll have the opportunity to act as a thought leader within the AI industry. Engage with the community through technical blogs, conferences, and more, sharing your insights and helping shape the future of AI. We’re excited to bring on a leader who shares our vision and is ready to take on the challenge of driving our AI and engineering strategy forward. If you or someone you know fits this description and is ready to join a cutting-edge AI company, please send them the link above to express their interest and apply so we can reach out. Let’s continue to build and innovate together! Onward and upward, Ruben Harris https://lnkd.in/gWEx6_4W cc Amanda Day Timur Meyster

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Totally agree with Dan DiGangi here. If you don't understand the overall strategy of a business, it's hard for you to align and be fully effective. This goes from leadership down to engineering. What are you doing to try and understand that vision? Link in comments to the full interview with Dan!

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Come check out this talk if you want to learn how we built distributed queries for Iceberg + Python!

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AI & SaaS: A Tale of Two Futures What if Excel and other SaaS apps don’t vanish but evolve, blending seamlessly with AI? In a recent Interview (https://reurl.cc/eGz06j), Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, suggests the “agent era” will replace traditional applications. That’s Nadella’s vision: AI as a co-star, enhancing our favorite tools—think Excel with Python instead of Excel replaced by something else. But here’s the twist: 🔸 I see AI’s disruptive power surpassing any need for standalone software. 🔸 Why open an app when a smart agent can directly pull, manipulate, and display data on demand? Nadella believes AI + SaaS = Harmony. He sees Copilot orchestrating tasks, quietly boosting productivity. Developers still matter, refining user experiences to work with AI rather than against it. I foresee a more dramatic shift. If AI can generate everything from sales forecasts to text summaries instantly, maybe the spreadsheets and CRMs we rely on will fade away. Where do you stand? 📌 Collaboration or Disruption? 📌 AI enhancing SaaS or AI replacing it? No matter which path emerges, one thing’s certain: AI is rewriting the rules—and the next chapter of SaaS will be far from business as usual. Your thoughts? Let’s discuss. #AI #SaaS #FutureOfWork #Microsoft 

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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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Hey folks! I'd like to more formally introduce and talk about a few of the projects we're working on towards improving large-scale bioinformatics analyses (one of which was developed during St. Jude's KIDS24 Biohackathon)! If you're not aware, my team started a project called St. Jude Rust Labs (https://lnkd.in/eXY_9dJ8) where we're rewriting a more foundation for bioinformatics analysis in Rust. This cuts across more than just workflow execution, but, recently, we've been primarily focused on improving the experience of working with the Workflow Definition Language (WDL) at scale. To that end, we've released a number of projects, including: - We've written a complete lexer/parser for WDL v1.2 language (https://lnkd.in/eGWHSM2g). Anyone can use this foundation to build tools for WDL. - We've written a VSCode plugin that includes a language server protocol (LSP) for linting and validation directly in your editor (https://lnkd.in/euApG9tF). - And, announcing today, we've started down the road of writing our own WDL execution engine spread across the Crankshaft (https://lnkd.in/et_RFkA3) and Sprocket (https://lnkd.in/eUTuPE68) projects. Crankshaft was prototyped during the St. Jude Biohackathon last week—it's a _headless_ workflow execution engine, meaning that, in theory, others could come along and write drivers for Crankshaft built on NextFlow, CWL, Snakemake, etc. As I said earlier, our team is really focused on WDL specifically, so we're going to continue building out a "head unit" for Crankshaft using WDL. That being said, I would love to see other community projects popping up and using the core machinery for other workflow languages. Thanks to all of the individuals who participated on our Biohackathon team (Kevin Benton, suchitra chavan, Braden Everson, Andrew Frantz, Michael Gattas, Peter Huene, and John McGuigan)!

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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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Check out the latest in our "Debuggability" blog series! This blog is authored by Kevin Downey Jason Johl and me and talks about how we built a Debuggability Paved Road at Intuit using Ephemeral Containers and Argo Workflows. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Also, what tools do you build as-a-platform to help debug service, compute and network issues in Kubernetes at scale? #intuit #kubernetes #debug

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How do you build a mixed reality headset from scratch? Alfred J., VP of Hardware Engineering at Reality Labs, recently joined the Meta Tech podcast to take us through the full process of bringing a Quest device from sketch to scale. Listen to episode 68 now! 🎧 bit.ly/4gYZehx #LifeAtMeta #engineering

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Big Project + Competitive Mkt. + Tight timelines = 🤯 😳 😱 This week at #nsight2024 we'll talk about cutting edge ways to attack these age-old problems during our session "🐘 How to Eat An Elephant (and the competition)". Join David King & I as we team up with our partners at U.S. Bank (Angeline Kordiolis / Bart Musil) to discuss the principles behind Elephant Carpaccio and how you can apply it to solving problems in your market! Let's GO, 🚀 #nsight2024 .

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Hey folks! Garrett Milster and I have only posted about Sacramento Labs once, so we figured it's time for an update 😊 **What is Sacramento Labs?** We’re a small team focused on launching software products that solve real-world problems. Think of us as a startup lab—constantly testing ideas, learning from feedback, and building tools that matter, and having an impact while doing it. **How do we decide what to build?** We like to build products that: -         Solve real-world problems in mostly ignored industries -         Are small, highly maintainable, and scalable codebases -         Make the world a better place directly, or by donating a percentage of profits to a relevant charity in that space You can learn more about our philosophy at sacramentolabs.com **What you can expect from us** We’ll be posting product ideas that are in various stages of our pipeline: Early Concept, Customer Development, In Progress, Launched, Scaling. We’d love to hear your feedback! **Our latest concept: Self-Hosted Security** Here’s the problem: - Businesses often use third-party URL shorteners to share internal tools, resources, or campaigns, but these services introduce serious risks. Enterprise companies like Google, Microsoft, and Stripe have built their own internal URL shorteners for this reason – but most businesses don’t have the resources to do that. - Phishing attacks are rampant, and links from external services can be spoofed or abused. - Branding and security controls are limited, leaving sensitive information exposed. - You can’t track link activity—who’s clicking what, when, or why. - When employees leave, their shared links still work, leaving potential vulnerabilities. Our proposed solution: Self-Hosted Security. It’s a plug-and-play solution for businesses to host their own branded URL shorteners with: - SSO for secure access tied to your company’s directory. - Link expirations to ensure old links don’t stay active indefinitely. - Audit logs to track activity and improve visibility into link usage. 📢 We need your input! Would this solve a problem for you? What features would make this indispensable? Check out the landing page and share your thoughts: selfhostedsecurity.com Want to chat? Email me at [email protected] 😊 💡 And here’s something we’re passionate about: a percentage of profits from Self-Hosted Security will go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Your feedback not only helps us create better solutions, but also contributes to making a positive impact. Thanks for being part of the journey!

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It’s eye-opening to see how AI model businesses are dealing with tight margins despite big investments. 🤯 Aidan Gomez’s comments about the “zero margin business” highlight the fierce competition and price cuts in the industry. 💸 With giants like OpenAI and Anthropic lowering prices to stay ahead, it’s a tough time for startups. The future of AI might depend on finding new ways to make these technologies profitable. 🚀 #AI #MachineLearning #TechTrends #Startups https://lnkd.in/ejkDu_wT

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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?

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