I agree with much of this thread, and think it is an opportunity for folks to write about upleveling engineering practices at smaller orgs.

That is not the way that incentive gradients run for engineers at AppAmaGooFaceSoft, to be true.
But there’s a huge amount of value in e.g. teaching Rails shops enough about Ansible and Vagrant so that they’re able to adopt the “cattle not pets” treatment of servers, dev boxes, and laptops that is standard at companies with teams working on developer productivity.
And as someone who will certainly have a shrine to Hashicorp built in the corner of any company I ever run in the future, I do think it actually is possible to have a fair degree of rigor and engineering skill at companies with 1, 2, or 12 engineers.
I also think it’s important for large software firms, who build ecosystems that almost every software engineer interacts with, to understand that their customers are intelligent professionals who have resource/time constraints rather than second class engineers.
For one thing, “If you’ve never used Kubernetes can you even computer” probably corrupts the hiring profiles more than desirable. There are many talented engineers currently working for firms which are not high status software firms; happily give them job offers when possible.
For another, when you’re building products for developers, you have to understand that even if the customer is in a small eng org at a legacy institution they’re *neither stupid nor necessarily unsophisticated.*

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More from @patio11

4 Nov
Isn't this just *obviously* the way the typical consumer's most important transaction should want to work? People are worried if they can make the math work. Me, less so, but that aside: few would say "Sign me up for the traditional sell/buy process!" with this as an option.
Ignoring the "new experience" thing which is product speak for "We stitched everything together in a web app", substantively:

1) You ask Opendoor for a quote.
2) They give you a hard quote and accept sale contingent on you winning target house.
3) You share pre-qual letter.
A "pre-qualification" letter is a document from a mortgage broker or originator that says "Contingent on you submitting a bunch of documentation, indicatively, we think we can underwrite you for a mortgage up to $X." Most common use is showing to seller to say "I could swing it."
Read 12 tweets
4 Nov
*picking Lillian up from school*

Construction worker: Sensei, is that the last of them?
Me: Pardon?
CW: The kids. Are most of them [past the construction site or should I stay directing traffic]?
Me: I'm afraid I don't know; I came from the other way.
CW: Not from school?!
Me: No.
CW: You're not the English teacher?
Me: No, she's a young Filipina woman and I *gestures*.
CW: ... So you're not a teacher?
Me: Correct.
CW: Why the PTA badge then?
Me: ...
CW: OH I GOT IT. Sorry. Thanks.
And *sigh* the possibility of this dialog happening with a police officer is why I am very, very careful to put on my PTA badge prior to getting close to the school.
Read 5 tweets
4 Nov
I'm doing some podcast editing (for the first time in almost five years!) and Descript ( descript.com ) is as close to magic as anything I've ever used.

There's some AI/ML under the hood which lets you edit audio as text. It's mindblowing.
Auto-generated transcript includes:

"Uh that's an interesting question, let me think, OK, [actual content]"

Highlight first part of answer, hit delete; it makes a seamless edit between the question and the contentful part of the response.
Not quite as good as an NPR editor but muuuuuuuuuuch cheaper and faster, and you really have to be familiar with Descript and listening closely to know it happened. (I periodically smile when I "catch" another podcast I listen to clearly using it.)
Read 6 tweets
2 Nov
Tailscale, Magic Wormhole, and ufw (Ubuntu's I-can't-believe-its-not-iptables) finally make me feel like I have something approaching rigor in my personal and project networking, and are *so* much easier than my previous methods for achieving this.
I wouldn't recommend them for consumers but if you are e.g. running a business and want the thing a networking team would ensure you have w/o having a networking team, these are *amazing.*
Tailscale makes setting up VPNs trivially easy; this lets you keep almost all of your infrastructure strictly off of the public Internet.

ufw just decreases pain of software firewall administration.

Magic Wormhole makes getting things between VPNs for e.g. operators trivial.
Read 5 tweets
2 Nov
The Nubank F-1 (registration statement similar to S-1) is extremely, extremely interesting if you geek out about either neobanks or the possibilities of fintech around the edges of the legacy financial system.

sec.gov/Archives/edgar…
The highlighted sentence is, ahem, extremely favorable. Image
The sentence immediately after it is not, and since this is commonly misunderstood by startup founders it is worth mentioning this:

If 90% of your customers are coming to you organically and you have a successful paid marketing channel *one of those two claims is not true.*
Read 4 tweets
30 Oct
I broadly endorse this thread as descriptively accurate.

Some of the many implications of filtering by pedigree:
1) Not a new suggestion but *do not optimize job searches around unsolicited resumes.* Find someone inside target firms, and almost literally anyone in engineering is better than /dev/null, to get excited about you working there.

2) Given “plausible” is essentially binary…
… people early in their career may want to intentionally spend first 2-3 years on getting one plausible name versus whatever your top option would otherwise have been.

3) If you are hiring for a startup, resumes of good engineers who’d not read as plausible are your opportunity
Read 10 tweets

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