Technology Commentary

My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.

Lensa is an app that lets you retouch photos, and it recently added a feature that uses Stable Diffusion to generate AI-assisted portraits. While fun for some, the feature reveals biases in the und…

Posted on Monday 9 Jan 2023. 1,889 words, 16 links. By Matt Webb.

The majestic structures of ancient Rome have survived for millennia — a testament to the ingenuity of Roman engineers, who perfected the use of concrete.

Why that is, is a mystery

Pronouns service - Xe's Blog

tl;dr - it’s valuable to update your LinkedIn profile to be a concise, accurate, and current summary of your accomplishment. Spend at most two hours updating it, then ask a friend (ideally a recruiter) for feedback. Incorporate that feedback and don’t think about your profile again for at least a year. While writing my notes on landing an engineering executive role, a topic that came up in feedback a number of times was how valuable it is to have a reasonably good LinkedIn profile.

I started my first executive job search when I was 25. Eventually, I got an offer to lead engineering at a startup with four engineers, which I turned down to join Uber. It wasn’t until a decade later that I joined Calm and started my first executive role. If you start researching executive career paths, you’ll find folks who nominally become engineering executives at 21 when they found a company, and other that are 30+ years into their career without taking an engineering executive role.

Since I recorded the video SQL JOINS are not the intersection of circles, I have received many comments from my colleagues that I was wrong…

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most emblematic programming languages and explore the personality traits that make them so special.

Here's a radically new way to relate to your work.

The article covers a broad level comparison between SRE, Platform Engineering and Develops. Check out the key components of each of them.

I was just on a call where I heard one of the more succinct definitions of the difference between Postman and the waves of “Full Lifecycle API Management” solutions that have come before us. API Management providers possessed a core set of API gateway capabilities that they would bundle documentation, portal, analytics, and other platform capabilities you will need-—forcing you to buy it all as a bundle. With Postman, and an API platform, you get to choose and pick all the platform capabilities you want to go with your core API capabilities—-you pay for Postman for the privilege of being able to choose. Which in my mind is the way things should be, and a very API-first way to approach things.

AWS Snowball + SpaceX Starlink + Couchbase Capella = More uptime, lower latency and better bandwidth usage at the edge

How to get more done in less time with chunking.

The personal blog built the internet, and maybe it can fix it.

I had a very interesting couple of days in Finland, hosted by those lovely folk who organize the Scandinavian Agile conference.

For any given output, I suspect fewer people will read my work.  You don’t have to think the GPTs can copy me, but at the very least lots of potential readers will be playing around with GPT in lieu of doing other things, including reading me.  After all, I already would prefer to “read GPT” […]

I have been posing it many questions about Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, and the Bible.  Chat does very well in all those areas, and rarely hallucinates.  Is it because those are settled, well-established texts, with none of the drama “still in action”? I suspect Chat is a boon for the historian and the historian of […]