Greta Huang

We're headed down the complex path of "replacing and improving upon activities you might do with your smartphone" with natural conversation. Try creating your own AI conversational agents at iyo.studio and let us know if you have feedback!

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The newest issue of The Pragmatic Engineer found a surprise uptick in eng hiring in the typically slow summer season - I'm curious to see how the macro environment impacts this uptick as we head into the fall, but I remain hopeful. I asked Gemini to give me the tldr of the article to share with my team (sorry, Gergely Orosz) and found it missed one of the most interesting pieces of the article. Gemini's highlights - Unexpected surge: Tech recruitment has seen an unusual spike in June and July, contrary to typical trends. Increased demand: Startups, especially AI-focused ones, are driving the hiring uptick. Global phenomenon: This trend isn't just limited to the US; Europe is also experiencing increased recruitment activity. Reasons for hiring: Companies are backfilling positions, investing in growth due to improved financials, and responding to increased VC funding. Challenges remain: While the job market is improving, finding qualified candidates and offering competitive compensation remains difficult for many companies. What I found most interesting - The nature of the backfills: the article finds that a lot of new headcount are actually backfills of folks that were "over-slashed" during rounds of layoffs. Not entirely surprising with the "trim the fat" and "rebuild lean" mentality, but interesting nonetheless. Either way, the uptick is encouraging (and don't always rely on Gemini's tldrs). #hiring #startups #VCbacked #softwareengineering

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Senior engineers lose money and responsibility at Meta partly because of an unwritten rule. Candidates are expected to not follow their interviewer's instructions to SUCCEED. Yes, you read that right. That blew my mind. There are other common reasons for downleveling as well. Some of these are expected but others are surprising. Kevin Landucci + Kashish Singhal, loved the simple practical takeaway for candidates. And the full episode rocked! Subscribe to ApplyPass to get more tips in your feed 🛎

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Great article from Jordan Cutler on the potential impact of a great mentor! I really appreciate the "formula" that can be used for other impactful mentor/mentee relationships. Definitely made me reflect on my current mentor/leader situation and how I can improve it. https://lnkd.in/gP-6bCic

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People keep sending me this https://lnkd.in/eVWCt_c4 and ask me questions about my commute, so I thought I would make a post a FAQs. Yes, I live in Brooklyn, New York. Yes, I work in Wilmington, Delaware. No, I don’t drive. Yes, I take the train (and the subway and a bus). Yes, it’s hybrid. No, it’s not 2 days a week (it’s 3). Yes, I wake up at 3:10 in the morning. No, I don't leave Delaware before 5 (most times it's until after 10:00 pm). Let me know if I missed any or if I should make this into a medium article. #SuperCommuter #RemoteWork #HybridWork #TrainCommute #BrooklynToWilmington #WorkLifeBalance #Commuting #EarlyRiser #PublicTransport #WorkJourney #PotentialMediumArticle #FAQ

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I am part of the Technologists for the Public Good (TPG) community, and a small group of us are hosting an informal, remote product hang today from 3 to 4 p.m. EST/12 to 1 p.m. PST for product folx who deliver public interest and government technology and services. A few of us in the #product channel for TPG were interested in connecting with other government product folx and sharing time to discuss some unique public sector product management topics. This is our second try at a monthly hang. We're hoping this can become a standing time, either monthly or quarterly! Read more about the lean coffee/unconference format for TPG product hangs - https://lnkd.in/d5i-RJpN 🤝 If you're interested in attending today's session, send me a DM and I'll share the invite. If you're new to or interested in Technologists for the Public Good, it's a growing professional organization for technologists that serve the public good. Read more about them here: https://lnkd.in/drQzCsmB

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I’ve been keeping a running list on things I wish I knew or did while working in product before transitioning to founding Inari (YC S23) and here's the 2nd part! Note: this pic is me on our 1st day building in SF for YC. Smiling through how fun all the incorporation paperwork was 😂 Mastering growth and distribution 💌 I never truly internalized the adage “first time founders obsess over product and second time founders obsess over distribution” until we launched Inari for the first time last year and initially heard crickets. I hadn’t worked on growth in any of my prior roles and now I probably spend 60%+ of my capacity catching up, learning basic tactics, and experimenting with new channels for Inari. I think we could be much farther along if I had mastered in-product growth and activation tactics, had reps setting up outbound and SEO systems, and built a community and audience much sooner (I also never realized how fun engaging with people online could be 😄). No excuses not being “technical” in 2024 💻 If you’re considering working on a SaaS startup and you can’t code, just go and learn to. With the recent advances in LLMs and coding assistants, there’s literally never been a better time to learn to code, unblock yourself when you run into issues, and build an MVP. There’s nobody on the planet that will care about your product as much as you will. If you’re unable to be deep in the details, identify defects, and make fixes quickly yourself, then the overall clock speed and quality bar of your product will suffer. The quality expectations for ALL startups have increased over the last few years and it’s on you as a founder to keep that rigor and velocity extremely high, so being able to unblock yourself makes a world of difference. Managing your own psychology 🧠 Surprisingly, the toughest part when transitioning to founding was managing my own mental state. There’s a constant internal uncertainty on whether you’re building something that people actually want and spending time on the right priorities. Your view on finances also completely changes. Money used to be a resource I spent on fun discretionary spend but now money feels like “oxygen”. The stakes of each day feels much heavier when you feel like you’re running out of oxygen for your startup which you're pouring your heart into. Overall, be prepared for these internal influences before making the jump! That could be better carving out the right runway, validating your idea or building an MVP before leaving your job, or bumping up your skills around building and selling beforehand.

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Whenever I get "worried" that an LLM will take my job as a SWE in the near future I look back at this benchmark leader board of real-world issues and am reminded that LLMs have been stuck at making marginal improvements bellow 20% resolved rate for over a year now. That being said, I do think AI will become an increasingly powerful tool in a SWEs belt in the coming years if it hasn't become one already. I personally use it to help me explore a problem space faster and come up with boilerplate for trivial problems and expand from there. In those cases it's like using Google and Stack Overflow and other forums, but faster. Edit: I'd like to also point out that I really like this benchmark because you cannot train a model on it unlike HumanEval. It's in essence, a true test of an llms ability to generalize and solve problems. Source: https://lnkd.in/epK2GQ2w

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Introducing Cooky Chef: Revolutionizing Meal Planning with AI! 🚀 At Headstarter AI, my team and I are excited to unveil our latest innovation: Cooky Chef, an AI-powered solution designed to simplify meal planning and cooking for busy lifestyles. Struggling with: - Limited time for meal prep? - Accessing high-quality and healthy ingredients? - Finding options for hiring a chef? Cooky Chef has you covered! Whether you're unsure of what to eat, need a meal timetable, or simply don't know how to prepare a dish, Cooky Chef guides you through every step with detailed instructions. Say goodbye to meal planning stress and hello to effortless cooking! No more guessing or stressing about meals—just let Cooky Chef handle it. Get ready to enjoy healthy, delicious meals with ease! Here's a live link: https://lnkd.in/dyZjfsSx I collaborated with Peter Kibet, Edwin Lungatso, Emmanuel kipngeno to build this project. #AI #MealPlanning #CookyChef #Innovation #TechForGood #HeadstarterAI

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Our product philosophy at Tusk (YC W24) is that humans shouldn't have to be in the loop when using AI to automate grunt work. To do this well requires some form of iteration loop given that agents don't always complete a task perfectly on their first try (true too even for your 10x human engineers). This is why we run automated lint and build checks on Tusk's code output for our customers. It allows our agent to catch and auto-fix build errors and lint issues before generating a PR. It's also why we're doubling down on giving Tusk even more tools to emulate how a software engineer would test their changes (e.g., unit tests, e2e tests, sanity tests on preview environments). Happy to chat more about how we do this. Shoot me a DM or reach out to Sohil or Jun Yu.

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Want to know more about How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale? Still skeptical of why we built horizontal sharding on RDS instead of <insert-cooler-database-technology>? Wondering if you should copy what we did? Check out out my new podcast with Software Engineering Daily as we dive deep on spicy stories that didn't make the blog post from surviving my first Figma Config conference to debating which database technology comes out on top. https://lnkd.in/gFfh7C-A

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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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Our current AI models have massive problems. They do not plan. They gravitate towards normalcy. Their world model is NOT a set of functional components. This does not mean we will not solve these issues. IMO current LLMs are likely over hyped. Future AI systems perhaps not.

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Observation: 9/10 SWE's quit at “reading the docs”. Cut through the BS with this easy trick: Take action and build. Writing code is 100x easier than the docs make it sound. “Reading the docs” gave me crazy imposter syndrome: -Git -WPF -Kafka -OAuth -Angular -GraphQL -RabbitMQ -Kubernetes In ALL cases, I conquered my fears by building. Except for WPF. I gave up on that. And Kafka, that's for another day. Forcing yourself to build/code/deploy melts analysis paralysis. Then you'll say "oh that was pretty easy". Trust me, we aren't building rockets. Practice AND Study build true mastery.

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One often overlooked aspect of AI is User Experience (UX), and it shows. Most companies treat AI as nothing more than a glorified chatbot or a personalized recommendation engine. But what if AI could make tangible impacts in the real world? Integrating AI with smart-home technology has uncovered some intriguing principles that could transform our interactions with AI. https://lnkd.in/g2bnZZhJ

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A few months ago, Billy Cheng interviewed me as the first from a new series of articles for our Code & Wild tech blog. I shared insights on what life was like at Bloom & Wild along with a bit of history about myself. Thank you for the opportunity, Billy Cheng! #TechBlog #Interview #BloomAndWild

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Life update - Left Meta after 7 years to jump back into the startup world, and moved back to SF to immerse myself into the AI ecosystem 🚆 This is the last stop on this train.  Following close to 7 years at FB>Meta across SF then NYC, I left this month to dive back into the startup world (now with AI ✨) and explore curiosities/obsessions. I’ve wondered many times what this moment would feel like, and now that it’s happened, I can share that for me it’s a mix of feeling nostalgic, nervous, and excited. I joined Facebook in 2017 after years beating the startup drum (to a point I had gotten burned out) and was hoping to learn from the best on building product/culture, hack on interesting things, and work with cool people. I told myself I’d only be there for up to 2 years before jumping back into a new startup/area to apply my learnings to. ⏩ 7 years later, I found myself immersed and valued working alongside the most talented and fun trenchmates/colleagues tackling problems at scales I couldn’t even have imagined - fun fact my first coding task was a change to News Feed touching billions of users. Why leave / why now?  Short Answer: ChatGPT lit my fire again 🔥 Long answer: I got exposed to developing/deploying ML and AI at Meta and found it immensely fascinating. Even when I switched from an Eng role to a Product/PM role, I found myself tinkering on nights and weekends with the latest happening with GenAI and its potential. While I’m extremely bullish for how Meta will continue to enable and leverage this technology, my explorations revealed both the vast realm of problems these technologies can assist with but also the challenges in bringing these from proof-of-concept to production. I believe AI will lead to fundamental changes about how many of us work and live and decided I couldn’t wait any longer to roll up my sleeves and dive in. While it’s bittersweet to leave such a great team and company, I’m excited for new experiences and jumping back on the horse of learning, prototyping, and solving interesting problems out in the wild! Stay tuned for more as I share my learnings and experiences! 👷 🌉 P.S I've officially moved back to SF, if you or anyone you know is around and would like to connect/jam out, let me know!

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Here comes another daily Headstarter post, but this one has a twist. 🌪️ If you search for Headstarter on LinkedIn right now, you'll see HUNDREDS of posts from our amazing SWE Fellows in the 7-week fellowship. They're sharing what they've learned from top speakers, showcasing incredible projects, and talking about the meetups they've attended. It's all truly inspiring! As many of you may know, I've also been sharing my journey in the Headstarter & SWE grind, contributing to this vibrant community. 🙌🏽 But you know what we need more of on LinkedIn? Realness.💯 Today, we had Project 2 due, and while everyone else has been showcasing their insanely impressive projects, I struggled. 🤕 Despite managing to complete all the daily assignments on time – like the network reach-out, the AI Mock Interview for DSA prep, and posting about lessons from the Pathways2Tech event – I haven't YET cracked this week's project: the inventory management tracker. 💻 I followed the tutorial to the letter, only to be met with errors and confusion for hours. It was frustrating, disheartening, and felt like a setback.🤦🏾‍♂️ But here's what I learned: 💡 Sometimes in life, no matter how many times you try, you might not succeed right away. And that's okay. My plan moving forward? 📈 - Run through the tutorial again and take detailed notes. - Embrace the learning process and keep pushing forward. - Ask those who have completed their projects for advice as Headstarter isn't just a fellowship, but a community of software engineers! The difference between losers and winners is that losers quit, while winners take their losses in stride until they achieve that first win. If you're out there in any program, remember to value understanding the content over speed running through a course. It's not about how fast you finish, but how well you grasp and retain what you've learned. 💯 Keep pushing, keep learning, and never give up. Our journey is about growth, resilience, and ultimately, triumph. 💪🌟 Build. Measure. Learn. Repeat this process over and over again until you not only win but excel.🏆 (Day 12 Of HAI.OK Track Daily Posting ✅) #Headstarter #Learning #Growth #SoftwareEngineering #Coding

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I have been going through some of my old writings and posting them on Substack. Here is an essay I wrote explaining object oriented programing, back in 1993 when OOP was the hot new thing. Take a look:

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