Paul Nathan

“There’s no jobs for Jr Software Engineers out there!” NOT TRUE…But there are some major issues in today’s hiring market. 1. MISALIGNED FOUNDATIONAL EXPERIENCE: The majority of aspiring SEs are either: Recent CS grads (less hands-on exp); OR, Bootcamp grads (less theory). Meanwhile...Most enterprise companies who hire a ton of SEs are looking for CS grads that ALSO have hands-on experience already. 2. MISALIGNED TECH STACKS: The majority of aspiring SEs are only experienced in NodeJS and/or Python. Meanwhile…Most of the companies who hire a ton of SEs are using Java or C# backends. Companies using NodeJS or Python backends are often smaller and can't hire as many SEs. That’s why our Enterprise Accelerator is making a difference. We identify diverse CS grads who are hungry, and we teach them the hands-on Java skills that companies are using in the real world over 3 months. Best of both worlds 😎 If you're interested in seeing some of this kind of talent--send me a DM and we'll get you connected. Want to join our next Enterprise Accelerator cohort? Stay tuned for the next webinar in early August.

77

7 Comments

The term “Developer Ecosystem” has been rolling around in my brain lately, so let’s discuss. Here’s the problem I’m noticing. The term #developerexperience is experiencing a similar problem to the term #technicaldebt. It correctly explains the problem for folks who have experience working in software and organizational systems that are inefficient and ineffective. The struggle of just getting good work out the door is real, and we know how we could make things better. We get it, so using these terms feels good because we finally have a phrase that describes a more abstract concept that we feel is important. But the value we feel in using these terms in our familiar domain doesn’t quite translate to people who don’t have experience working as or with software developers. The meaning gets lost in translation and the people who have the most influence into what organizational initiatives get funded can’t conceptualize the benefit. As I’m observing the trends in the #devex movement, I’m seeing that metrics like DORA, SPACE and the DevEx Model are highly focused on an *integrated* experience, not an *individual* experience. It’s about ensuring developers are working in concert with the organizational system instead of fighting it. The struggle is often strong and significant, but it’s easy to think it’s trivial if you haven’t been there. This nuance is pretty hidden, so it’s understandable when it gets glossed over or misinterpreted. I think this is why folks in other domains think about DevEx as emphasizing the productivity of individuals or assuming that devs want to be pampered and treated better than their colleagues. I’m curious if framing the overall problem as ecosystem health would help influence change. Would CEOs and CFOs grasp and fund initiatives more? My hunch is yes after so many years of selling the value of modernizing legacy systems, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

10

10 Comments

🚀 Exciting news in the Rust and AWS communities! 🚀 On June 8th, Werner Vogels announced **distill CLI**, an efficient, Rust-powered tool for media summarization. 📜🔧 Check out his blog for more details: [Introducing Distill CLI](https://lnkd.in/dfUT4cmf) Notably, companies like Discord and Figma have achieved remarkable performance improvements by adopting Rust. Discord moved their Read States service from Go to Rust, resulting in a 10x speed increase and nearly 100x reduction in worst tail latencies. Similarly, Figma rewrote performance-sensitive parts of their multiplayer service in Rust, seeing a 6x reduction in peak average CPU usage per machine. 🌟💪 AWS is also embracing Rust with the general availability of Cargo support in CodeArtifact, enabling the storage of Rust libraries (crates) in CodeArtifact. 📦✨ More info: [AWS CodeArtifact and Cargo Support](https://lnkd.in/dYY_fgtU) As more customers leverage Rust for their critical workloads, AWS is providing robust building blocks. AWS Lambda, for instance, can now process HTTP events more efficiently with Rust. 🚀⚡️ Learn more here: [Rust HTTP Events in AWS Lambda](https://lnkd.in/diubf8bM) #RustLang #AWS #Serverless #Performance #CloudComputing #Innovation #TechNews #CodeArtifact #DistillCLI

11

TL;dr - RIP Terraform. Time to say goodbye. I just ran into this obituary for Terraform and Hashicorp. The most probable future seems to be the maximization of sales motion and the minimization of engineering investment - just adding another product to the price list and unleashing the sales force at it. The worst possible outcome would be if IBM decided to make Terraform part of their still-born cloud offering. Or maybe we’ll have Terraform for mainframe? #terraform #hashicorp #ibm #upgrade

32

5 Comments

I'm asked two questions a fair amount: 1. Is Kubernetes going to stick around for a while? 2. What's the future of Kubernetes? For answer one, yes. For answer two, Serverless Kubernetes. Once platforms like GKE Autopilot, EKS Fargate, and Azure Container Apps allow all application stacks/third-party addons to work, there will be more and more people moving towards the "Serverless" model. I break it down in the latest episode of Cisco's Cloud Unfiltered podcast. You can listen to the podcast at the link below or watch it at the YouTube link below. #kubernetes #devops #platfomengineering https://buff.ly/3VRRqGA https://buff.ly/4c7Cydb

15

2 Comments

Developer downtime: don’t overwork your devs. It’s memorial weekend and I’m lazily sitting on my porch. My kids keep coming in and out of the house, but get stuck because the sliding door keeps coming off the rails and won’t open. Well, since I’ve got nothing else scheduled for the afternoon I investigate the issue. Turns out sliding doors have a bunch of adjustment screws. I adjust them till the door slides smooth. Left in the broken state my kids learned to hit top left side of the door before opening it. Bringing this back to work, I know customer success teams that have a cheat sheet of these maneuvers. Give devs space to observe, we naturally fix these issues.

15

1 Comment

Do this and make your shell script 10X better! set -euo pipefail Here's why it makes a difference: -e: Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status. This prevents the script from continuing with potentially harmful errors. -u: Treat unset variables as an error and exit immediately. This helps catch typos and unexpected unset variables that could lead to bugs. -o pipefail: This option prevents errors in a pipeline from being masked. If any command in the pipeline fails, that return code will be used as the return code of the whole pipeline. Using set -euo pipefail can save you hours of debugging and ensure your scripts run as intended. A small change with a huge impact! 🌟

17

7 Comments

See how simple it is to create chatbots with Microsoft Azure On Your Data and vector embeddings from an existing Elasticsearch index: https://lnkd.in/gBHZbkjq #ElasticSearchLabs #RAG #VectorDatabase

2

I can't write code at night... Said no engineer ever. Why are companies so focused on having all engineers available during the same hours during the day? Hire contractors to do some of the work during off hours. What could possibly go wrong? They get work done and avoid needless meetings? If you can hire a contractor that has set up a specific technology 100s of times and they can get it done in a day, over asking one of your employees to try to hack it together over weeks, why wouldn't you? Let them do it in off hours!

7

3 Comments

🔥Let’s Do DevOps: Make Tofu/Terraform More Failure Tolerant with AzApi Provider!🚀 Tofu (the artist formerly known as Terraform) isn't built to be terribly failure tolerant. Example, generally data calls when finding no resources, return a failure that exits the entire terraform workspace. That's not always ideal - sometimes you want Tofu to rightfully find no resources and return an empty list/set. This article talks about how you can hack around Tofu's limitations in Azure, and make your Tofu (and Terraform too) more resilient and failure-tolerant with the AzApi. https://lnkd.in/gaAN8Wpn

23

2 Comments

i wrote a doc called "llm-for-sre" over a year ago. what was i missing? what's actually working today? --- Can sort of do today: - Generate code - terraform - yaml for k8s (deploy app, create clusters, add healthchecks and limits) - exponential backoff + jitter to http endpoint (go, python, java, js) - Deploy configs - write a canary deployment strategy using any CD tool you want - "now use circleci instead" - Observability - instrument code - create prometheus rules - create SLO and burn rate alerts - General advice - how to set up a multicluster app - what should i do when something breaks? Imaginary wishlist: - Extracting patterns - watch all my logs, find patterns, what should i fix next? - connect to SLOs, alerts - dependency analysis, finding temporal + topological causality - all things "AIOps" etc - Discovering dependencies? - Finding predictive signals? - Look through old postmortems, find themes or common mitigations, recurring patterns. - extract summaries for training - Incident Response - collect my logs during an event - calculate impact  - integrate under a curve for me?   - do SOAP:  - Subjective - SLOs - "it hurts when i do this" - customer impact - Objective - add to context all my yaml etc  - Analyze - think through every model, context - Plan - which generic mitigation should i perform - Systems Control - watch SLO, error rate, take action! - rollback, drain, other generic mitigations - Forecasting - predict traffic, quota, usage, cost Oncall people stuff - handoff analysis, "oncall logbook" ingestion, handoff generation, "situational awareness" assistant - find similar pages/alerts going on across the organization - impact assessment (see: calculate impact above) Next Experiments: - Toil reduction / Automation - transform folder of bash scripts and docs into $other code + scheduler + database? - Architecture: can an LLM read diagrams?  other architecture docs?  can it make suggestions, see gaps?   - Incident analysis: can an LLM read postmortems / incident reports?

74

11 Comments

An axiom: technology diversity creates non-linear complexity in multiple domains. It is a class of almost-technical-debt that many software developers and early managers vastly underestimate. This axiom makes many software developers sad, because it means writing that new component in Rust or whatever probably isn’t a great idea. We must learn at a Systemic level to manage the inherent risks that added complexity brings, and be intentional about allowed complexity rather than perversely proud of inadvertent complexity. Many software development process problems are one of accidental or previously understated costs for complexity resulting from unnecessary technology diversity. #meatbasedengineer

37

15 Comments

One reason I pulled yesterday's post out of what I'm writing for the book is that salary is almost a separate book on it's own - and one likely better written by somebody else. In my own career managing software engineers, I've seen it handled so many different ways: - When working for a very large media company, I don't recall knowing the salaries of my team. Instead, I worked in percentages that were tied to performance bands. - A few other times, I had approval, but the salary adjustments happened in HR or at a departmental level above me. I communicated the adjustment along side a review (usually), but didn't make the decision. - Another time, I got a spreadsheet with the team, their salaries, and a bucket of additional cash I could spread between them. So, right-sizing one salary might mean short-changing somebody else - unless I went back to HR and tried to make the bucket bigger. Each company has handled salary adjustments (and starting negotiation, but that's a chat for another time) differently, giving different levels of autonomy for their direct managers. These constraints and context aren't always communicated to the team - I can't recall if I ever shared this with them, for instance. If you've managed folks, how much control have you had over their salary adjustments when the time came? And did you wish you could tell them how little you had?

5

1 Comment

🌟 Exciting News from the Cloudflare Blog! 🌟 🔍 Reclaiming CPU with Go's Profile Guided Optimization Golang 1.20 has introduced Profile Guided Optimization (PGO), allowing the compiler to fine-tune optimizations based on real-world system performance. At Cloudflare's Observability Team, we've leveraged this to significantly reduce our CPU footprint across globally distributed Go-based services—achieving a CPU usage reduction of 2-7%! In Cloudflare scale account for 71 CPUs per day. By implementing PGO, they have freed up valuable resources, enhancing our ability to serve customer requests more efficiently and improving overall customer experience. Dive into the technical journey of adopting PGO in the latest post and see how even small optimizations can lead to substantial savings, further optimizations via BOLT or LTO optimizations, and other tuning. 📈 Check out the full article for a deep dive into our process and results: https://lnkd.in/eFFtCgDn #Cloudflare #Technology #Innovation #Golang #Programming #Careers #CPUOptimization #CPU #profile

2

EKS Anywhere removed support for Bottlerocket because "Bottlerocket's image-based architecture and constrained surface area do not align with these bare metal use cases" Meanwhile at Sidero we're putting Talos on Oxide Computer Company racks, Ampere gear, Raspberry Pi's, and a ton of other hardware. Talos is both smaller, more secure, and more usable than Bottlerocket will ever be. This isn't a technical problem, it's a business model problem because AWS can't compete with itself. They have to artificially limit their products to not steal from existing revenue streams. https://lnkd.in/e8-cRy_W

42

3 Comments

Interesting conversation for those just beginning their careers, in engineering or beyond. Thanks for sharing Andy Greenwell!

3

1 Comment