Oleg Vaskevich

It's my first post on the Gusto engineering blog, and it's all about #RailsConf! https://lnkd.in/e4zCVUQ4

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Keep Learning New Things... Indeed, the path to efficiency requires discipline, consistency, and sacrifice. I can't believe that it is already the 3rd week of the Headstarter Fellowship! To be honest, I felt quite lazy throughout this week, with low dopamine levels. However, I'm getting back on track and am ready for the next week of the fellowship. During the previous week, I had the opportunity to work on some exciting projects: - The Pantry App Project: I focused on the Firebase backend, learning how to integrate features such as authentication, analytics, and database CRUD operations. Live: https://lnkd.in/dCGFCiH5 Github: https://lnkd.in/dWpHgc4y Pathway to Tech Event 2: Here's My Key Takeaways: Dennis Crowley: Founder of Foursquare ($150M Revenue) When asked about the ideal tech stack, He emphasized the importance of being "willing to fill in gaps." It's not just about knowing specific technologies but being able to and ready to learn. His experience on failures "People quit on themselves or quit on their startup.", reminding me to stay resilient and never quit Tariq Afaq: First Engineer at AppLovin ($30Bn IPO) Tariq's talk was packed with valuable information. when he mentioned that this field is more than just coding, like being an engineer we can solve problems under pressure and get things back on track He also mentioned that you don't need to be super intelligent to succeed. Instead, focus on creating in-depth products, being quick and responsive, and working hard. Julian Alvarez: Ex-Meta, CEO of Wisdolia ($20K+ MRR) The most energetic speaker at this event! , His thoughts on how startup founders stick to their ideas rather than believing in their team's capabilities become the reason for their failure something exceptional and new for me to learn. His startup Wisdolia— is truly something. It generates flashcards for you from any YouTube video, blog, article, or PDF. I can already see it becoming a vital part of my learning routine! Hamza Ali - CEO of Olostep I was deeply inspired by Hamza Ali's vision for Olostep, which is enabling APIs to interact with the web as humans do. It's truly a brilliant idea that showcases his commitment to shaping the future of tech. 🔗 Here's the link to the recording: https://lnkd.in/dzX6Saaz

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I'll be speaking at GOTO Chicago next Tuesday, 2024-10-24, on JVM performance techniques in Jepsen: https://lnkd.in/dZWviHim Jepsen is a Clojure library for testing distributed systems correctness. We'll talk about how Jepsen records and analyzes histories of up to a billion operations with the help of a new file format, faster lazy and persistent data structures, bit-packing, memory-adaptive caching, associative folds, and thread-safe transactional executors. Come learn about some of the lesser-known corners of the JVM and how to write faster, more efficient programs in any language. This talk will benefit intermediate to advanced engineers interested in performance optimization, parallelism, and medium-sized datasets, while also offering insights valuable to both beginners and senior engineers.

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One of the simplest techniques for improving sensitivity in your experiments is eliminating or reducing dilution. Dilution is akin to throwing more hay in the haystack, thus making your ability to find a signal extremely challenging. In this blogpost, David Press and I explain dilution and provide some practical guidance on how to handle it. We also provide some examples showcasing how enormous is the impact from eliminating dilution. For ML applications, having a way to handle dilution can lead to 100x+ sensitivity gain.

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Today, we’re publishing our biggest piece yet.   We partnered with Puzzle to write about the next generation of accounting tools.   Our CEOs, Alex Lee and Sasha Orloff, explain how AI can turn accounting from a repetitive chore into a major source of business intelligence.   They cover everything from decreasing costs to improving accuracy and enhancing customer support.   We also hear from Fouad Farhat of Soma Capital—an investor in both Truewind and Puzzle—about the current state of accounting, and where it’s headed.   📌Check out the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eUzvZjTm

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I'm excited to share some great news. The startup I joined less than 2 years ago, Anonym, has been acquired by Mozilla! I couldn’t be more excited to join Mozilla and work with the amazing teams there. Like Anonym, Mozilla believes that we need a free and open internet supported by digital advertising, and that digital advertising doesn’t need to compromise people’s privacy. You can learn more about the acquisition by reading Mozilla's blog post (https://lnkd.in/eVkbmzkb) and the AdExchanger article (https://lnkd.in/euckaKPR).

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I've been sick the last week. Not being able to do much besides sit around and consume a painkiller-heavy diet, I took the time to finish reading "An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management" by Will Larson. Now, I am not a manager. I work mostly as an individual contributor. What I found most valuable is that this book offered me a new perspective to look at organizational- and team challenges. Many of the topics discussed I could not map to my personal day-to-day responsibilities, but they do allow me to place in context the various environments in which I have worked, and currently work in. This awareness is valuable in its own right. The book mostly takes the form of "If you're in this situation, here are the things that I had to take into consideration, and here are the tools that helped me". It is clear that the author has a rich experience and is able to offer a lot of context. As such, I think that it's doubly important to approach any novel problem with a "it depends, but how about..." approach, as opposed to reaching for the book's suggestions verbatim. Ultimately, I have to concede that I will probably have to re-read this book in a year or so, which I am sure will present me with more "a-ha" moments. Additionally, the hardcover edition is beautiful and makes a fancy addition to any coffee table. Would recommend!

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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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Video from my recent talk is now available! Learn about how we're building our own developer tools to make frontend engineering fast and fun at Datadog

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🎺 Feature Friday (is that a thing? I'm running with it...) New on capture.dev this week - take your product feedback beyond random screenshots and use your camera and mic to add extra context to those more difficult to explain issues. Think of it like a Loom, except: 👉 Devs get all of the technical info they need, like network requests and console logs, for zero extra effort. 👉 Record directly in your browser, with no extra software or extensions needed Free to try now over on capture.dev

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What are you doing this Friday at noon, Boston time? WRONG! You're joining me for a roundtable chat with Jellyfish's own CFO, Joanne Cheng on what many engineering leaders get wrong during budget planning. Treat yourself to some good tips and tricks for leveraging data effectively and driving financial impact at the company level. Come hang out, share your own tips and experiences, and meet other leaders. Click it --> https://lnkd.in/eDxaJ4tZ

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Come join us on Nov 13 at 10am PT / 1pm ET for a live webinar, How Notion Engineering uses Notion. We'll dive into how our engineering team uses our own tool to create workflows that enable us to work faster, better, and more collaboratively. We’ll show you how we: 🏗️ Quickly access important information via our engineering teamspace 🚦 Track project status and assign tasks—directly in Notion 🏃 Automate workflows to save time and help us build more swiftly Don't miss out! Register here: https://lnkd.in/gB9NcYmB

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My two cents as a grugbrain - Just because you’re building an AI product in a hype cycle, doesn’t mean you can always rely on raising more capital. To exist long term you’ll need to slow your burn rate, embrace small teams of builders (don’t hire / overhire middle managers) and move quickly! The hype cycle brings a new horizon of exciting opportunities in innovation. This means new ideas are being introduced and tested in the marketplace in real-time. To maintain relevance you must ignore the temptation to biggering and instead focus on what users want and how they want to use it! Stay nimble my friends! 🚀

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Back at it today with a new episode of Product Shorts! Let's talk GraphQL 😈 What is it? How does it work? What's a schema? What are queries and mutations?! How does Gravitee's GraphQL Rate Limit policy work? Fear not! I have answers for ya (and, more importantly, I have links to resources from my engineering counterparts). Quick overview in case you don't have the 5 minutes to watch a whole video of my blabbering: 🤘 GraphQL is a query language and server-side runtime for APIs . It allows clients to request only the data they need from multiple sources; the data is then served (typically) over HTTP via a single endpoint. 😍 GraphQL's main advantages come from efficient data transfer through a single endpoint for a better developer experience. See comments for more resources. K bye!

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With more cycles at the end of year, I've had some time to write some blog posts! Here's one about some ideas around dependency management and roadmapping cross multiple teams and orgs. I've found that coordinating these efforts and rendering this information in different forms to be expensive, and these patterns ease that cost: https://lnkd.in/eAkyUic4. Tell me what you think, or what patterns you have!

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Navigating the Pitfalls of Rapid Scaling: A Lesson in Cultural Cohesion Targeting CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and CEOs, this discussion highlights a common challenge during post-Series C expansion: integrating top-tier talent without sacrificing cultural cohesion. In a past experience, our team aggressively hired industry-leading engineers to boost technical prowess and market standing. However, emphasizing technical skills over cultural fit led to a fragmented team dynamic, impacting project timelines, innovation, and morale. Here are actionable insights for leaders navigating similar challenges: Strategic Onboarding: Beyond technical orientation, emphasize immersion into company culture, mission, and values. Cultural Fit Assessments: Include cultural alignment in hiring criteria to ensure new hires complement existing team dynamics. Transparent Communication: Regularly communicate the company’s vision, helping new hires understand their role in broader goals. Leadership Development: Encourage leadership skills that align with your company ethos through mentoring and peer learning. Feedback Mechanisms: Use feedback loops for employees to express concerns and suggestions about integration. Balancing rapid hiring with cultural integration is key. By valuing human elements as much as technical ones, we create a scalable, innovative, and harmonious engineering environment. I invite fellow leaders to share their strategies for maintaining cultural cohesion during rapid growth. What has worked for your organization?

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NotebookLM is awesome: keep up the great work! The Podcast-style summaries compel me to update an old apocryphal tale of a famous CS professor’s response when you asked them for a quick meeting: “Thanks for your email. You asked: do I have time to meet to talk about your latest idea? I don’t have time. If your idea is good, I recommend you give a talk. Please invite me. I won’t attend your talk. If the work is solid, you’ll write a conference paper. Please send me the PDF. I won’t read it. If the conference paper turns into something of archival quality, you’ll write a journal article. Again, please send the PDF. I won’t read that. If the program of work has impact, you’ll write a book. Please send me the book. I won’t read that either. If the book is significant, someone I respect will write a critical review. Please send me that link. I won’t be reading that either. You see, what I’m really looking for is you as a guest on that reviewer’s podcast, so I can listen to it while walking the dog.“

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Great take from Orel Zilberman - Slack is killing your productivity. Derrick Schommer and I heard this message while doing ICP interviews. DevHuddle has features available (and some on the roadmap) to fix the interruption-tax of async communication tools that are treated as sync communication tools. It helps to have a culture of truly async collaboration to increase everyone's velocity. https://lnkd.in/eypeaVXV

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