Trevor Strieber

At Speakeasy we love working with devex leaders like Michael Heap to continuously raise the bar for what is "best in class" 🔥 We've been super lucky to work with him on what makes a great developer experience for iac and terraform. Come hear him and Thomas Rooney talk through how you can leverage OpenAPI and your API supply chain to build a provider and unlock the Terraform ecosystem. Link to the livestream in the comments 👇 #terraform #codegeneration #openapi

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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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I was in this episode of Decoding Leadership with Jade Rubick, which just came out. It was a delightful conversation, and when I first became a manager, Jade is one of the people I wanted to emulate. We talk in the first half about engineering hiring and supporting early career engineers, and the second half is more about why large scale projects fail or succeed, and the preventable problem paradox (coined by Shreyas Doshi, but a longstanding problem in our industry).

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I'm really happy with how my talk on Scaling (or...don't) has come together. Here's a sneak peek of one of the slides -- the steps we all know and love about scaling a company ;-) #bsw2024 #BoulderStartupWeek

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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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Alistair Gray gave a great talk at Write The Docs Portland, going into detail about our investment in Internal Docs at Stripe. He breaks down our thoughts about issues of fragmentation, discoverability, and document quality - and how we’ve tried to build great tools to improve the state of internal docs at Stripe across all of these axes. In Q&A, he touches on an important theme which is essentially “how do we convince engineers to use the tooling we build.” The answer really boils down to “ruthlessly build what engineers want” while maintaining our core primitives (eg, ownership, doc quality) that we know are vital to the health of Stripe’s knowledge base all-up. Let me know if y’all have any questions - happy to expand more on these themes! https://lnkd.in/em4QRFmH

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Polls can be a cheat code for earned media, and a great way to build authority. But there are levels to this. Here's how one of the best I've seen - Capital One - does it. (And what I'd do differently to increase earned coverage). Led by Shena Ashley, PhD, Capital One's Insights Center is a masterclass in leveraging polls to create unique insights that would do incredibly well via earned syndication. Here’s what they do great: ✅ Content that sticks: Crucial issues > fleeting trends. Focusing on topics like financial stability, mobility, and entrepreneurship, it's easier to rationalize investment on topics with a longer shelf life. Their insights + stories can drive coverage for months to come. ✅ Visual storytelling: Data doesn’t have to be dry, and Capital One presents original insights through clear and eye-pleasing visuals that are easy to understand. Publishers like charts, they love colorful charts, and they LOVE colorful charts that are easy to understand. Check, check, check. ✅ Strong methodologies and extensive polling numbers: Capital One frequently involves 7k+ participants in their studies - they are not half a**ing it. Well explained methodologies are table stakes to get your polls covered, and Capital One does a great job outlining their data collection process, sample size, and research methodologies.   ✅ Easy to steal: Each report has multiple easy to take stories/soundbites, and are also written as full pieces of content, which can be taken as whole. Finally --- if I could change one thing... Add a byline. Brand publishing NEEDS a byline - no news outlet wants to cover a story that can't be credited back to a human. All in all, polls can be incredibly valuable for driving earned syndication - check out Capital One's Insights Center in comments for killer examples.

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The Smartling team couldn't be more excited to introduce the AI Translation Toolkit: a suite of AI translation features designed to reduce translation costs and improve linguist performance. This feature allows #localization teams to leverage AI to streamline translation processes, without sacrificing quality. Reach out to your Smartling Customer Success Manager to learn about how the AI Translation Toolkit can improve the performance of your translators. #aitranslation #smartling #l10n #ailocalization #translatortools

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As VP of Product at Copper, I've seen some amazing things our customers have done with Pipelines. It's crazy how creative they get. Since making our customers happy is A1 for us, I'm always meeting with them to hear their thoughts, and what I kept hearing was that Pipelines could be even more useful for all sorts of different applications, not just sales. So, inspired by our awesome customers and our love for innovation, we've been working on making Pipelines more flexible. This way, we can help businesses successfully engage with customers from initial interest to delivering projects and creating loyal, repeat customers. So yes, Copper Pipelines are great for sales, but guess what? They actually have a wide range of practical applications: - Project management: Track key stages, assign tasks, and monitor progress in real-time. Flexible pipelines keep everything efficient from start to finish. - Client onboarding: Guide clients through the onboarding process with customized Pipelines that visualize and facilitate your process, ensuring a smooth onboarding experience for your customers. - Order Fulfillment: Accelerate your fulfillment processes with customized Pipelines for order tracking, inventory management, and shipping coordination. - Customer Support: Centralize issue management with Pipelines that facilitate task assignment, progress tracking, and timely resolution. There are endless ways to use pipelines. I encourage you to try a template to unlock the true power of Pipelines. Also, don’t forget to join us for our Product Pulse webinar at the end of the month to discover how you can leverage the full potential of Copper and drive success using Pipelines. https://lnkd.in/eksRg7WN Copper empowers businesses to own and manage their entire customer journey from start to finish. From handling invoices to meeting client expectations, Copper keeps everything organized and on track. I’m dying to know - how will you use Copper Pipelines to benefit your business? Let me know below! I can’t wait to read all of your creative suggestions that I haven’t thought of yet. 😉 #copperpipelines #projectmanagement #smb #crm #productpulse

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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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This was a thoughtful article that I read as being about platform engineering, among other things. In a resource-constrained company, we need to get better at promises and stop trying to do everything possible for everyone. https://lnkd.in/gUnrpATA

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At Sprout Social, Inc., we used our own tool to improve our customer support strategy. The TLDR: Using our Inbox Activity Report, Sprout decreased our average social media response time by 55%. That’s huge.  Sprout’s Smart Inbox is one of the most popular aspects, and this video sums up why.   See how social can be the missing link to business success and impact:  https://bit.ly/4b63vxk

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We're in the pets phase of LLMs right now, but the cattle phase is coming and it'll change everything. Yes, again. What do you mean "pets" and "cattle"? Servers used to be our pets. We bought, named, cared for, and persisted them individually. If we wanted a new one, it was a big commitment. If one went down, it was a big loss. But then servers became cattle. Today we manage them as a group of commodity assets. We want one, we clone it. If one goes down, we replace it with another. This change delivered an era of distributed, high availability applications with limited downtime. Cheap storage, containers, cloud, clusters all met riding on top of Moore's law. And machine learning changed too. Computer vision was first. We went from small, neural networks running on CPUs via Matlab to a larger networks running in on GPUs via C++. AlexNet kicked off the deep learning revolution, eventually Transformers in NLP, and then ChatGPT. So, today we call our LLMs by name but this is just the start. There will be more LLMs variations than there are people on Earth.

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Hey friends - have you used Kafka and can share pain points & feelings on usability? I have a friend working on a project to improve the dev-friendliness and would love to chat (just 15-30 mins) if you're open to it -- comment below :)

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Options in a start up are often referred to as paper money, a lottery ticket, or otherwise suggesting a lack not just of liquidity but of worth. Through the last three startups I've gotten my value back. One was an ESOP (shares repurchased over time), one was fully sold (traditional m&a), and one was a buy back. Point being, my view is skewed the opposite way to see significant value in options. How do you view and value options in a start up?

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🚀 Looking to talk to software engineering organizations! 🚀 At FIDIL, we are introducing https://fettle.dev – our innovative SaaS platform designed to ensure your engineering health is on track. We're on a mission to make engineering excellence accessible and measurable for every organization. That's why we're looking to speak with small to medium-sized businesses to understand your challenges and ensure Fettle is the perfect fit for you. With Fettle, you get: 📊 Out-of-the-box insights with our premade Fettle Functions. 🛠️ Customizable functions to meet your unique needs and goals. 🔍 Quantifiable insights to ensure your organization is progressing toward its engineering goals. 🛡️ Guardrails to prevent teams from veering off course. ✅ Accountability to ensure standards are consistently met. Would you be interested in a short chat to help us shape Fettle to meet your needs? Drop me a message or comment below, and let’s ensure your organization isn't just busy but also making meaningful progress! 💪 #EngineeringExcellence #TechInnovation #Startup #ProductDevelopment #CustomerFeedback

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Exciting to see Adaptive tackling the slow payments issue in construction with innovative financial management tools! 🏗️ It's clear their platform addresses crucial inefficiencies in the payment chain, benefiting small- and medium-sized businesses in the industry. The team has closed their $19 million Series A round—looking forward to seeing how they expand and enhance financial workflows for even more construction companies. 💡 A great example of tech-driven solutions making a big impact where it's needed most! 🚀 #ConstructionTech #FinancialInnovation #SMBs https://lnkd.in/eBJq3Q93

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Strategic alignment across product and field is complex and not easy to get right, but it's a pleasure to work alongside Brett Crane, Trevor Jett (Childers), and Jarod Greene. It's wonderful to be in conversation with them, sharing what we have learned, in this webinar: https://lnkd.in/gc-qp7Hk

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Two exciting updates from Asana AI last week that you won't want to miss: 🌟 First, read about our latest work with Anthropic to test Claude 3.5 Sonnet and our process for testing new LLMs on our #engineering blog: https://lnkd.in/gJJfMta2 🌟 Second, my team is expanding, and I'm currently hiring! If you're interested, apply here: https://lnkd.in/grNWvw65 #AI #engineering #hiring #AsanaAI #teamexpansion #llms

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