Shahaf Abileah

At the beginning of this month, the infra team at Orb gathered for our Q2 infra offsite at HanaHaus in Palo Alto. Orb's customer growth in Q1 far exceeded even our optimistic projections — and is often the case in any org, this put a tremendous amount of load on Orb's infrastructure stack. Here's what is top of mind for our team as we look to the next few months: 1. We take uptime & reliability extremely seriously and have a strong track record of this — we proactively invest in our stack to avoid scrambling when issues happen. Over the last six months, we've invested in read/write workload isolation, more robust rate limiting, and making it much easier to spin up tenant-specific clusters of our core services and datastores. This has been a huge win already for our largest customers and in Q2, we're driving towards complete tenant workload isolation all the way from the API layer down. 2. Infrastructure often gets saddled with a really tough oncall rotation. At Orb, we share this workload across engineering with a larger rotation, but infrastructure owns the horizontal platform to make product engineers successful. In Q1, the infra team invested energy in aggressively making oncall better, and in the last month the number of overnight pages has dramatically decreased. Example investments include automated alerting and triage for long transactions and expensive queries. 3. When we first started building out Orb, we were careful to be pragmatic in where we spent energy with respect to scaling efforts. One of the choices we made was to use RDS Postgres as a job queue — although this has worked very well up to thousands of asynchronous jobs each minute, we've hit the EOL signs you'd expect (https://lnkd.in/gyQVEhKQ). We're spending time on moving to a different job queueing solution this quarter. 4. In Q1, we rearchitected parts of our ingestion and compute services to more aggressively pre-compute data, to avoid variable load through the API. We're finding that this is also going to help us ship much faster alerting features in Q2, enabling Orb customers to more efficiently power flows like spend management on Orb (without needing to pay for dedicated provisioning). If you're interested in joining this small but mighty infra crew, we'd love for you to apply (DM me, or look for link in the comments)

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AI is innovating a variety of industries across the US and Agriculture is no exception. 🐄 My new friend, Catie McVey, has created a new "Agtech" startup that uses patented 3D Modeling and Machine Learning algorithms to evaluate the health of cows by looking at specific characteristics such as hoof morphology and facial characteristics. Working with her to architect how to get source data from "The Stockyards" to "The Cloud" has been a lot of fun. I am constantly discovering new ways AI can make an impact in industries from legal, to healthcare and now agriculture! Read more about Catie's journey on RIoT - Internet of Things' blog #AI #software #agtech

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BIG product update here at Forwrd.ai! 🔥 Improved business logic editor 🔥 Enhanced usability for data modeling. [link in the comments] Our north star product metric is TIME TO VALUE ⏳ Achieving faster time to value often requires re-writing core product modules. These engineering tasks are complex and can be time-consuming. It’s natural to delay these crucial updates, pushing them to “later” until they become unmanageable. My recommendation: Incorporate these vital tasks into your backlog on a monthly basis. Trust me, the payoff is worth it. Regularly addressing core updates not only enhances performance but also ensures a seamless user experience. #Startup #ProductManagement 

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Workflows v2 just dropped including multiple paths, multiple charts, loops, and a brand new refined UX. Grab more details at https://lnkd.in/gEN_9Gvy and come give it a try! Observability reimagined just keeps getting better. 🚀

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This is a quick way (Bill came in below his 4 minute limit!) to learn more about what we're building with Prak.

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Polls can be a cheat code for earned media, and a great way to build authority. But there are levels to this. Here's how one of the best I've seen - Capital One - does it. (And what I'd do differently to increase earned coverage). Led by Shena Ashley, PhD, Capital One's Insights Center is a masterclass in leveraging polls to create unique insights that would do incredibly well via earned syndication. Here’s what they do great: ✅ Content that sticks: Crucial issues > fleeting trends. Focusing on topics like financial stability, mobility, and entrepreneurship, it's easier to rationalize investment on topics with a longer shelf life. Their insights + stories can drive coverage for months to come. ✅ Visual storytelling: Data doesn’t have to be dry, and Capital One presents original insights through clear and eye-pleasing visuals that are easy to understand. Publishers like charts, they love colorful charts, and they LOVE colorful charts that are easy to understand. Check, check, check. ✅ Strong methodologies and extensive polling numbers: Capital One frequently involves 7k+ participants in their studies - they are not half a**ing it. Well explained methodologies are table stakes to get your polls covered, and Capital One does a great job outlining their data collection process, sample size, and research methodologies.   ✅ Easy to steal: Each report has multiple easy to take stories/soundbites, and are also written as full pieces of content, which can be taken as whole. Finally --- if I could change one thing... Add a byline. Brand publishing NEEDS a byline - no news outlet wants to cover a story that can't be credited back to a human. All in all, polls can be incredibly valuable for driving earned syndication - check out Capital One's Insights Center in comments for killer examples.

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Friday insight 💡 replay: The Role of Startups in Moving Platform Engineering Forward #Startups #Engineering #Platformengineering Cory O'Daniel Colton Dempsey

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What’s Next: RunWhen's Kyle Forster talks open source and microservices SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer speaks with RunWhen's Kyle Forster about a better way for companies to support gigantic code bases.

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🔎 📲 ✨ Big news at Thanx — with the release of our new Content Management System our customers can launch INFINITELY CUSTOMIZABLE mobile apps and change the look-and-feel in real-time. Nearly every visual element of their app experience is now configurable within Thanx. No dev cycles, app store approvals, or one-time fees required. How much did YOUR loyalty program try to charge you last time you wanted to make a change? How long did they quote for the update? With Thanx, the answers are $0 and today.

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🌶 DORA metrics are great, but they don't cut it alone. We sat down with Jellyfish's Head of Engineering, Eli Daniel, to hear his take on what engineering leaders *should* be measuring. In this episode of Level Up, Kenneth Rose and Eli talk about: ▶ Feelings aren't facts—you need data to run an engineering org ▶ One set of metrics probably aren't going to cut it to make good decisions ▶ Engineering leaders need data as much as a sales leader 🎧 Listen to the full episode and let us know your favorite metrics to build and manage an efficient engineering team 💬 👇 Get the full episode link in the comments👇 #dora #engineering #leadership

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🔥 Eli Daniel, Head of Engineering here at Jellyfish, brought some serious insights to OpsLevel's latest Level Up episode! Here's a sneak peek into what they discussed: ▶ How to choose metrics tailored to your organization's goals ▶ Tips for analyzing where your team's time is being spent ▶ Scaling metrics for better alignment and resource allocation ▶ Why DORA metrics are just scratching the surface ▶ Balancing quantitative and qualitative metrics for a complete picture of team performance Check it out! 👇👇👇

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Another great upcoming collaboration between VeUP, Elkstone and AWS. A combination of venture building value attuned to SaaS tech start up / scale up founders Take a look at the event coming up below

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This right here. These are the moments you live for as an Engineer. Domo.AI is a game-changer. Our customers are amazed at what they can do. Raw data to critical business insights... in seconds. Bring on the #ai #revolution

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I spoke with Eric Ignasik and Michael Sols from The Software House about dealing with silos at work. 🎙️ We discussed how Technology Managers can help their engineers gain deep operational expertise and take full responsibility for product/feature delivery. The best practices I described in this interview come straight from Payhawk. It doesn’t mean they can simply be copied — but they might be inspiring to some. Happy reading 👋🏼 ➡️ hubs.ly/Q02xn9j-0 #softwaredevelopment #cto #softwaredelivery

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New on the Review: Conventional wisdom teaches managers to avoid “anti-patterns,” general practices that are deemed unproductive, like micromanaging. But Will Larson, a veteran engineering leader and CTO at Carta, argues that not every anti-pattern is bad, and makes a case for the three that eng execs should explore: 🔍 1) Shying away from micromanaging. “New engineering managers are often advised to ‘step away from the code.’ But an extremely high-functioning exec understands the domain they are operating in at some level of detail,” he says. “As you get too far out of the details, you just become a bureaucrat. Too many well-meaning engineering managers end up as bureaucrats.” 📏 2) Pushing back on flawed metrics. “Often when people start measuring, there's always a concern that their measurement is flawed. And that's true for all functions,” he says. “But I’m a believer in measuring something imperfect, but useful, versus holding out for the perfect metric while measuring nothing in the interim.” ☔ 3) Serving as the umbrella for your team. “In the past, I used to think I was energizing my team by sparing them the details. But now it feels like lying to them,” he says. On a tactical level, Larson adjusted this habit by buffering less information. “That means even if it’s disappointing for folks, I’d rather them process news bit by bit, rather than deal with a huge ocean of mess all in one moment.” Link to the full article in the comments.

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At Speakeasy we love working with devex leaders like Michael Heap to continuously raise the bar for what is "best in class" 🔥 We've been super lucky to work with him on what makes a great developer experience for iac and terraform. Come hear him and Thomas Rooney talk through how you can leverage OpenAPI and your API supply chain to build a provider and unlock the Terraform ecosystem. Link to the livestream in the comments 👇 #terraform #codegeneration #openapi

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Have you ever thought about how compliance laws are a lot like design systems? I recently spoke with Joe Toscano, founder of DataGrade, and he made a fascinating comparison. Joe explained how Brad Frost's atomic design methodology took an engineering approach to design: → Creating standardized elements → Templatizing them → Scaling them across a system This led to the rise of human interface guidelines (HIGs) from tech giants like Google, Apple, and IBM. But here's where it gets really interesting: Joe argued that privacy laws and regulations are like the ultimate HIG for product design. Just like how HIGs provide rules and constraints for design systems... Compliance laws set guardrails for what we can and can't do with user data. If we design something that isn't compliant, it doesn't matter how sleek the UI is. Legal requirements become the top-level framework we have to design within. That's what got Joe into studying laws - to understand this new "design system" for building products. So next time you're cursing a lengthy legal doc or trying to make sense of GDPR... Remember, it's all just part of the atomic design of compliance. — Do you agree with the analogy of compliance laws as the ultimate design system? Why or why not? Hear more of Joe's unique perspectives on the intersection of product, privacy, and law on the latest episode of The Minimum Viable Podcast.

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The past two years at StarTree, working with the Apache Pinot community, have been fantastic. I’ve been able to get to know some incredibly talented people, and it’s validated my perspective that the advent of event-driven architecture is real and pressing, and even more interesting than I realized. Looking back, I’d never spent that much time focusing on analytics and the huge set of tools and concerns that attend it. It’s a critical ecosystem with a history deeper than digital computing itself, and I anticipate a lot of fruitful work with the Pinot community in the months and years to come. That being said, it’s ironic that my time working with this community has crystallized an important idea I’d been developing since before I joined it. The disruption introduced into our world by the perfect storm of the cloud, microservices, and ubiquitous Kafka has created an entirely new approach to building business software. It’s new, uncharted territory to be explored—and I want to help map out as much of it as possible, together with the hundreds and thousands developers who are doing the work of building applications in this new world. That’s why I’ve decided to transition from StarTree, and return to Confluent as VP of Developer Relations. The most valuable thing we can do as developers is write differentiated code that provides meaningful value to our customers or users. That code sits atop a huge stack of what is, with respect to their businesses, undifferentiated software—various kinds of frameworks and infrastructure components—that solves hard problems that application developers shouldn’t have to spend time on. They shouldn’t build that software, but they need to know how to navigate the terrain and make choices in the space they can trust. The problem is that the event-driven revolution has thrown a somewhat stable stack into relative disarray, so some of us are lured into creating little bits of data infrastructure in that unknown area between our code and Kafka. Those of us who are able to avoid that temptation still aren’t totally clear on what all that terrain looks like, and what infrastructure should even live there. History suggests this could take another five to ten years to stabilize. It will require the input of many communities, vendors, and a world full of developers. In my opinion, Confluent is the company that is best positioned to significantly move the needle on this problem, and that’s why I’m excited to (re)join them. One company can’t do it all, but their vision of the Data Streaming Platform is exactly what I’m talking about here. The opportunity to lead a world-class developer relations team at the company which has pioneered the journey so far, and is building the most comprehensive vision for its next stage, is a tremendous one. I’m delighted to be back, and eager to do my part to help chart our course to the future. It is, as I am wont to say, a wonderful time to be alive.

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Today, we launched Salt AI Beta (v0.5), a significant step in making AI workflows accessible for developers. Our team's hard work streamlined creation and deployment, simplifying AI development so builders can focus on delivering value. This launch is just the beginning. 💅Congrats Caitlin Sowers Charlie Basil Jim Benedetto Chris DeWolfe Aber Whitcomb Chase Richter Anabel Krishnan Philip Sahyoun Alex Duffy Marie Paoli Ruby Malamed Ryan Wang Emil Zakirov Polina Lunina Nick Darabi Josh Brooks @earl Artemiy Shirokov Tyler Marques Katie Baker Learn more and get started: https://lnkd.in/gwAnFNu8 #SaltAI #AIWorkflows #DeveloperTools #ComfyUI #BuildTheFuture

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