Mike North

We released a new update of our Visual Studio Code Java extension. Go try it! Bunch of new improvements and already supporting JDK 23 Early Access builds as the extension is directly leveraging javac. https://lnkd.in/g8BKsNjS #java #IDE #OpenJDK #VSCode

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Some takeaways for a Jeff Hinton interview with timeless insights. My POV as an app builder is that models are now being improved for better UX (faster response/multi-modal) and reasoning capability and cost continues to improve. The technology headroom remains strong, and the integration of LLM into all software experience will continue and expansion of the reach (invasion) of software + intelligence will also continue. - Next word prediction is not merely parroting of training data. To do next word prediction well, LLM needs and already exhibits strong reasoning behavior. This would continue to scale / improve with more data / training. - LLM is a compression of human knowledge. The compression mechanism is identifying similar concepts across domains and reduces duplications among them. This can also be a source of "creativity" as LLM "sees" correlations of seemingly unrelated ideas through this compression. LLM can be more creative as it sees similiarity / correlations across all domains beyond (human) convetional wisdom. - LLM can exceed the quality of its training data. Jeff gave an example of an experiment where a model trained on 50% intentionally incorrectly labeled data, can still perform at 90+% accuracy after training. - Multi-modal models can improve the overall world understanding and lead to better overall reasoning. It does not even need to generate multi-modal output. - Not ML specific, but an interesting life insights. Bad intuition comes from believing (or wanting to believe) everything you are told. It diminishes the ability to make a clear choice that would lead to differentiated success (or failure).

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Isn’t it funny that 60% of engineering managers see a shortage of qualified candidates while 56% plan to increase headcount? The math is not mathin’. 🧮 Maybe it’s time to rethink what makes a “good engineer”. Skills are evolving with AI and machine learning, and our criteria needs to evolve too. The “passion engineer” coding all night is rare now, and that’s okay — maybe even better — because we can introduce more diverse skill sets, experiences, and problem-solving. Let’s evaluate our talent definitions, invest in training, and embrace diverse paths of excellence. ✨ For more insights like these, check out Jellyfish's 2024 State of Engineering Management report: https://lnkd.in/eKAJ5jZy

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Accessible, Inclusive, Safe, Secure, Sustainable, Reliable, Resilient, Transparent, Independent, Human-centred. "We need a web by and for humans". humanewebmanifesto.com What an important and necessary project by Michelle Barker. Read & share!

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This is what I always told to my teams: whenever your release process requires manual intervention (such as taking hours to verify changes or deploying during off-peak hours), it indicates that your release process is fundamentally broken. This is a symptom of a low-performance team or even a company. How to escape from this trap? - Reduce number of manual test or verification by leveraging automation (living the values, what i mean here just do not having a words on the wall for automation, but you need to living the values) - Shift left. Try to leverage the shift left as much as you can. From shift left on security and shift left for health checks - Avoid code yellow manager. Sometimes the blockers is not a technical issues the blockers are coming from a manager that did not understand the points of improving the lead time for changes and deployment frequency. I called this as code yellow manager, a manager that not close to the ground, essentially they haven’t a context and hard for them to take a good decision and vision due to lack of context and understanding. - Get buy in. If this initiatives require a sponsorship from exec, then you need to synthesize the problem and pitch them.

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Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. 🌟 Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

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After years of development our team graduated Lens Studio 5 out of beta with some incredible new capabilities and things are... ✊🪵... going smoothly 😅. If you've launched a big piece of software like this you know how much fun we're having watching download dashboards and sharing reactions from LI and elsewhere over Slack. You also know we had our share of fires leading up to the launch... wish I had snapped a pic of Charmaine Lee, Roman Shtemberko, Ievgen Poloz, Danylo Cheban, and Jonathan Solichin in a meeting room fine tuning our Ai Chat feature hours before Bobby's keynote 🤣. (Sorry if I missed anyone.) In my experience this is how it always goes, and honestly it speaks to the pride the team has in their work and how much they want others to love it. I think this is what 'leaving it all on the table' looks like for sw product development. This team has been leaving it all on the table for months (years) now and I wish every single one of them could get the recognition they deserve, but trying to tag everyone without missing critical folks is way too daunting. (But please do repost/share if you worked on this project and take a little bow!) I'm honestly so proud to be part of this team -- they are our real moat. It's no surprise to me that the awesome new GenAi tools are getting a ton of attention. Lens Studio and the Lens Engine/Cloud powering things behind the scenes are at an incredibly exciting intersection between ML and AR, and there aren't any other platforms out there where you can so easily weave together camera, friend graph, game engines, scene understanding, cutting-edge rendering, and cutting-edge ML to create truly unique and groundbreaking experiences. It's the total package of technology and tools that sets this stack apart in a developer/creator landscape that is so crowded. And we're still managing to pack so much more into this platform with each release that incredible new capabilities are reduced to bullets in release notes. Ex. did you know with Lens Studio 5 we officially launched support for Gaussian Splats? Or that LS 5 was completely rearchitected to support workflow customizations through Javascript plugins? Or that we have completely overhauled how you work with animations and have a huge roadmap of improvements ahead? Even still, LS 5 is not the apex of what an AR platform *can* do -- definitely not time to pack it up and move on to the next challenge -- rather this is just the beginning. In Q3 Snap will host it's annual partner summit, SPS, in conjunction with our annual Lens Fest conference and we'll have tons more to share then. Ok, on that note, back to work.

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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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Ok, curious to get your takes on this: besides LLMs/AI/ML, what do you think are some of the key technical areas for a platform-focused engineering leader to be paying attention to in the near future? Top of my list is primarily three things: Rust, TypeScript, and Serverless. And WASM is somewhat of an emergent focus if we look at the intersection of those three. In fact, from a purely personal interest, it's probably at the top of my list. But slightly lower in a practical, immediate sense.

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I think this is the last of my ToTTs that are publicly applicable that haven't been posted. Thank you so much, Andrew Trenk for helping get these out there. One of the toughest things about leaving Google was the amount of written material I lost access to. It isn't just the infrastructure at Google that was incredible, it was the (mostly volunteer) efforts to explain the knottiest problems of understanding in software engineering. In any case, I like this one a lot. We might talk about tests needing to be hermetic, or readable, or deterministic, etc. All of those properties are absolutely good and important, but from a certain point of view, those are refinements of "actionable." And that ties nicely with https://lnkd.in/exKth93Z and some of the recent work on observability for CI from CNCF - we don't write tests only to *have* a test, we write tests to trigger an alert when something would be a problem when shipped to users. If an alert doesn't cause action, or can't be deciphered, or isn't reliable, it's a bad alert - whether that's in prod or in CI.

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San Jose becomes the first city in California to choose to implement AB 1033, allowing homeowners to sell ADUs separately from their primary residences. Representative Phil Ting, a San Francisco Democrat who authored the bill, and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan held a press conference on Friday, emphasizing that this is a new path to affordable housing. "We all know that homeownership has become out of reach for many residents in San Jose and across California," Mahan said. "We need to incorporate the innovation inherent in our region into housing policy to keep the American dream alive, and this new ordinance does just that. San Jose will continue to lead the way, but we can't solve this crisis alone, and I look forward to seeing other cities in California follow suit." “I’m grateful to the City of San Jose for seeing the impact my legislation could have on their community. ADU ownership can provide a pathway to buying a first home and can even help our seniors downsize,” said Ting. “With this more affordable housing option, increased homeownership can help create stronger communities.” San Jose has built nearly 1,400 new ADUs in the past five years, with thousands more under construction. That number represents about 23% of San Jose’s new housing stock during that same period. Now, homeowners in San Jose can sell their ADUs individually, similar to how you would sell a condo. AB 1033 went into effect this year, but cities must take additional steps and opt-in to the law. “Being able to sell my ADU was another reason to build my backyard addition, and it was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done,” said Joyce Higashi, an ADU owner in San Jose. “Not only has it increased my property value, it’s generated more rental income than I ever expected.” The Casita Coalition, a statewide organization dedicated to removing barriers to building more affordable, sustainable housing, was a strong advocate for the legislation. They developed a model ordinance that San Jose used to draft the local legislation needed to take advantage of the new law. “With homebuyers across the state facing an extreme shortage of new home inventory, we applaud Mayor Mahan and the City of San Jose for creating new possibilities for homeownership,” said Rafael Perez, Casita Coalition board chair.#SanJose #California #AB1033 #AccessoryDwellingUnits #HousingPolicy #AffordableHousing #HousingInnovation #PhilTing #MattMahan #HomeOwnership #CommunityBuilding #RealEstate #HousingReform #UrbanDevelopment

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Join us in Irvine on July 17th at 6:30 PM for our latest OC ACM talk, "Systems and Software for Averting an Energy Crisis" presented by Bill Gervasi, a Principal Systems Architect for Wolley Inc. For more info or to RSVP click here: https://lnkd.in/gquYQ2z9 According to a recent Forbes article, "The rise of generative AI and surging GPU shipments is causing data centers to scale from tens of thousands to 100,000-plus accelerators, shifting the emphasis to power as a mission-critical problem to solve." making this talk particularly relevant. #acm #techtalk #gpu #ai #generativeai #nvidia #energy #energycrisis

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I started writing regularly about AI. If you're an innovators or product developer eager to apply the latest in AI, whether you're in a startup or a big company, consider checking https://lnkd.in/gGdW8PYe I won't teach you ML, but I share real-world insights from launching - and sometimes failing at - numerous ML features on a large scale.

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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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It's been very cool watching this go from idea to reality. I'm glad to see this new tool making its way to customers! Check out the blog to see how you can use it to experiment with #RAG applications using #Elasticsearch

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AI is advancing into the coding realm everyday. Soon, our focus may shift primarily to designing and architecting components in the containers we layout, with only the occasional need to tweak code here and there 😅. This evolution might be akin to memory management in the past only required for specific use cases where we need to dive deep.

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From IC engineer to C-Level exec, the most effective people I've worked with have one thing in common: they break down and decouple decisions. Optionality, trade-offs, last responsible moment, one-way and two-way door decisions, slicing, MVPs, proof of concepts etc. are all techniques they use for breaking decisions down and getting them made. The best engineers did this when working on code. Rather than trying to decide on all the functionality at once they'd be able to say "I can break this story down into smaller pieces of value that we can get released to users fast" or "we don't need to deliver this piece of functionality now, we can wait until we see how user's respond". The best architects, product managers and business leaders do the same thing. It's a real skill to decouple decisions. It's a real skill to be able to defer parts of a decision to next or later (or even never) to enable faster movement and lower risk. I have always been impressed when I witness it. Often it's obvious with hindsight and sometimes its completely out-of-the-box and you would have never have realised.

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First off Larry Diehl is one of the brightest ppl I ever had the pleasure to work with. His technical insights and experience are only matched by his pragmatic approach in building products. I've personally witnessed and experienced him doing so in complicated dense domains and his discipline, awareness, and ability to navigate complex + dense topics (e.g. type theory and formal verification) while keeping a pragmatic product development roadmap is truly astonishing. Secondly, I've had the privilege of seeing Larry build Colimit in real-time! It truly is a seamless gateway to bring reliability and thoroughness to apis backed by solid and principled fundamentals. Like it or not...everyone building APIs IS building distributed systems. However, not all of us have the time, expertise, and skills to build and test them reliably. Larry Diehl and Colimit are paving the way to bring that to the masses. It's truly a space that needs more love and attention. Hoping to bring Colimit to some of our teams in due time too! Super excited for what's to come! #formalverification #distributedsystems #apis

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