Bryan Mikaelian

Do you think you need to hire developers as w2 employees to build a highly-skilled, devoted and culturally aligned team? Let Blueprint show you otherwise. Here's how we're changing the game: 1️⃣ Unmatched Quality: Quality is our creed. Our vetting process includes interviewing with former CTOs and senior software engineers, ensuring only top-tier talent makes it to your team. 2️⃣ Long-Term Commitment: Forget the turnover and churn worries! Our developers stay longer than industry norms for W2 developers (average tenure of 2.2 years), providing stability and continued expertise to your projects. 3️⃣ Cultural Integration: Culture isn't just an add-on for us. We dive deep to understand your core values and ensure every developer we match with your team enhances and embraces your company culture. 4️⃣ Equity is Optional: Save your cap table for your growing startup! We ensure that our developers are passionate believers in your product right from the start - without incentivizing them with equity. We rigorously test for craftsmanship, ensuring they value not just a quality end result but also the journey of creation. 🌟 Shoot us a DM to connect and see how we can improve your staffing strategy. #StaffAugmentation #InnovationInStaffing #TechTalent #CultureFit #LongTermGrowth

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During my time at LoopQA, I've found that an effective model for leveraging automation involves a clear division of responsibilities between development and QA teams. I'll caveat this by saying, I generally advocate for developers to refactor the automation they break, but the reality is that most organizations aren't willing to invest their time into it. Hence, having a dedicated QA team for E2E tests often proves more practical. Here's a typical and highly functional workflow: Local Development: -Developers work on their local environments. -They run unit tests and integration tests to ensure their code is functioning as expected. Dev/Test Environment: -Code is merged into a shared Dev/Test environment. -Unit/Integration Tests: These tests must pass before any merge can occur. If they fail, the merge fails. -E2E Sanity Tests: These are also run, but they can fail for both valid and invalid reasons. Developers need to be adept at identifying actual bugs versus new legitimate failures. -Automation teams step in to refactor failing E2E tests to ensure stability. A common problem here is when dev teams opt not to refactor failing tests, leading to false negatives and potential issues down the line. Stage/Pre-Prod Environment: -After passing all tests, the code moves to the Stage/Pre-Prod environment. -Any merge to this environment is contingent on passing E2E tests along with unit and integration tests. Production Environment -Finally, the tested and validated code is merged into the Production environment. Key Insights: -This model ensures that unit/integration tests act as crucial gatekeepers, providing immediate feedback to developers. -E2E tests, maintained by the QA team, ensure overall system validation and highlight integration issues early. -Collaboration and clear division of responsibilities between dev and QA teams maximize the value of automation, leading to robust and reliable code delivery. #SoftwareDevelopment #QA #Testing #DevOps #SoftwareQuality #Automation #ContinuousIntegration #ContinuousDeployment

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Hey #DevRel and #Community peeps: while it's still uncertain if I'll be at #devrelcon, I would like to pass on a discount code that could hopefully make it easier for you to attend. It looks like a lot of really good content, with more practical and actionable content than I've seen in years, so hopefully you'll be able to attend! And maybe I'll see you there too! https://lnkd.in/gCakgrMb

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Thank you to Jason Lengstorf for talking with me at CityJS Conferences about reducing stress for #softwareengineers, and sharing practical tips for advancing a coding career. + Get a sneak peek at "Web Lunch", Jason's latest series. Link down below!👇

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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.

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🔥 New episode of The Headcount People drops TOMORROW 🔥 In Episode 12, I have a conversation with my friend Alisa Avelar, the former VP People at Docker, Inc, Modo Labs, and Toptal. I have to say, Alisa strikes the perfect tone in this pod: speaking both to the head and to the heart. Her ability to drive strategic value and outcomes to the C-suite PLUS serve as a trusted resource to employees is what makes her such a dynamic HR leader. Whether you're an experienced HR exec or aspiring to lead a People function one day, this podcast will be a great listen. Here is just a short snippet of what Alisa has to share – and be sure to check back tomorrow for the full pod! #podcast #peopleleadership #hrleadership #theheadcountpeople

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In 2009, Aza Raskin wrote about browsers helping you log in to web apps https://lnkd.in/eBD534Xb In 2011, I blogged about it in https://lnkd.in/ecQwwG39 (it was actually my second blogpost ever) and acknowledged that: > The hard part would be to get both FireFox and Chrome to say “Yes, let’s fix this blatant UX caveat.” Fast forward another 13 years, this dream is actually coming true thanks to FedCM! <3 Read all about it here on the IndieWeb Wiki: https://lnkd.in/eHP-bnBV You can self-host your own identity provider, register it in Chrome Canary, and then use it at websites, blogs, unhosted apps, solid apps, etc that accept self-hosted identities. This is so amazing... Thanks Sam Goto, Tim Cappali, Aaron Parecki, Jan Schill, Theo and many others for making this happen!

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Familiarity Levels at Work, and Meeting Scheduling Novice: You are surprised by their calendar blocks Journeyman: You already schedule around their blocks Expert: You know why those blocks exist and when they are negotiable Elite: Already synced over chat

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3 Discovery blindspots from 50 Discos: 1. It's not a real Discovery! 2. Ignoring crucial context 3. Lack of value https://lnkd.in/e3U4tde2 What've you spotted? #discovery #productdiscovery #continuousdiscovery #disco #discoinferno

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The Power of Shared Vocabulary "What’s Flo got that Alice doesn’t? A shared vocabulary with the short-order cook. Not only does that make it easier to communicate with the cook, but it gives the cook less to remember because he’s got all the diner patterns in his head. Design Patterns give you a shared vocabulary with other developers. Once you’ve got the vocabulary you can more easily communicate with other developers and inspire those who don’t know patterns to start learning them. It also elevates your thinking about architectures by letting you think at the pattern level, not the nitty-gritty object level." ― Eric Freeman, Ph.D. & Elisabeth Robson, Head First Design Patterns: Building Extensible and Maintainable Object-Oriented Software https://lnkd.in/dPYV-8jF #refactoring #extremeprogramming #modernagile #agility #tdd #testdrivendevelopment #legacycode #continuousimprovement #maintainability #softwarequality #codequality #softwaredesign #lean #oop #solid #designpatterns

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Technical debt is entropy. It’s like rust, spreading over time without proper care. People don’t need more time to “design properly”. People don’t need more time to refactor. No special budget or planning is required. How is technical debt/entropy resolved then? With a “clean code” philosophy and commitment. Unit test to code coverage. Leave code better than you found it. Have standards and refactor to those standards as you go. It requires specific skills and discipline. Technical debt is not a management problem it’s an everyone problem. Either your software rusts or it’s properly maintained and cared for.

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I've been testing GPT-4o since its recent release. While I haven't really had a use for the multi-modal (images, audio, and text) capabilities yet, the improvement in speed of response is noticeable. Not just noticeable from a spec sheet perspective either—it's noticeable in how the product works in real use cases. I've been thinking about why that is, and here's my theory: there's a breakpoint somewhere based on latency and response speed. Above this breakpoint, interactions feel sluggish and disruptive. Below it, they become seamless and effortless, akin to a natural conversation. Previously, I posted about how Llama and Gemini models seemed noticeably more usable than GPT-4, with my preference being Llama whenever possible. This new experience with GPT-4o further emphasizes the importance of optimizing both latency and throughput in AI systems. This chart from ArtificialAnalysis.ai shows that GPT-4o has a total response time of 1.5 seconds for 100 tokens, compared to GPT-4's 5.7 seconds. This speed difference isn't just a matter of numbers—it's fundamental to achieving a smooth and efficient user experience. When latency drops below a certain threshold, the interaction becomes fluid and engaging, making the AI more practical and user-friendly. It also makes its mistakes more tolerable. This improvement transforms how we use these models in real-time applications, making AI interactions faster and more intuitive. It underscores that achieving low latency and high throughput is no longer a nice-to-have but a critical requirement for practical AI deployment.

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If you've ever had to deal with inconsistent UX, multiple generations of design systems, and the perpetual back and forth between UI and backend developers - there's hope, you are not alone. And let me just say it out loud - there's no "full stack" development - it is simply impossible for an engineer to stay up to date on all the development across JavaScript, frameworks, Node.js, Kubernetes, Java, etc. You either have deep and somewhat narrow, or broad and shallow. These problems are quite common for everyone who has inherited an existing product (which is like 99.9% of us). This blog post by Kyle Shevlin about building a tightly-enforced composable design system resonated with me. #UI #designsystem #react https://lnkd.in/gStEWHtC

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What’s your browser of choice? If you don’t say Microsoft Edge, I might be about to change your mind, because it just got even better. The latest version is here, and it's packed with some cool new features that'll make your browsing experience smoother than ever. First up, Edge now comes equipped with a built-in internet speed test tool. No more guessing whether or not your connection is fast – just a quick click, and you'll know if you're cruising at top speed or if it's time to call your internet provider. It's nestled right in your sidebar toolbox for easy access alongside utilities like a calculator, translator, and unit converter. This latest update also patches up a couple of security vulnerabilities, keeping you and your business safer. How do you get things rolling? Microsoft Edge takes care of business with automatic updates in the background. But if you're itching to get your hands on the latest and greatest right this minute, just head over to your Edge settings and hit the refresh button. #TechUpgrade #MicrosoftEdge #SpeedTest https://lnkd.in/eBNe64VT

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Should the entire development team attend all of the sprint events? No, because it’s inefficient and a waste of time. Right? Years ago I battled a tough client who didn't want the developers to attend the Sprint Review. He wanted them to, in his words, “just keep coding”. I argued…how will the team learn about what the customer and the business needs? His predictable answer was “better requirements documentation”. Software engineers are professionals who need to deeply understand the problems to be solve. The intent of sprint events is to provide context for these problems and enable collaboration. Ask your developers if they are receiving value from sprint events. If not, don't exclude them. Fix the events so they enable the development team. #scrum #agile #collaboration

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The feeling your engineers get when they sit down for a deep work block and that Slack ping comes in... Want to quantify the impact of interruptions on developer productivity? Ask about Uplevel's advanced Chat Interruptions model, which provides a unique (and uniquely accurate) picture of how your team is actually spending their time. #developerproductivity #deepwork #engineeringleadership

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Not specific to coding screens so forgive me for going off-track but I feel like there can be a "you won't always have a calculator" discussion that might be interesting. In regards to open-book or closed-book, it is difficult to remember everything so referencing something you might have forgotten isn't uncommon but there is a distinct difference between refreshing your memory and searching for a solution. However, being able to research effectively is also a great skill. With access to this information so readily available and the growing popularity of AI, I can definitely see engineers trending toward having less technical fundamentals and critical thinking in favor of yielding quick results. Is it efficiency or laziness? Will it be damaging? I'm curious how it will affect the industry.

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Have you tried the new AI powered JOE chat bot? What are some key challenges in testing generative AI applications. Have you seen the latest solution for AI in Mobile App Testing? Find out in this episode of the Test Guild New Shows for the week of April 28. Featuring automation awesomeness contributions from: mabl Dan Belcher John Gluck Selenium Roy de Kleijn HashiCorp IBM Paul Bruce Armon Dadgar ☁️ Marek Šottl RWX JFrog Yonatan Arbel and More! #automationtesting #devsecops #softwaretesting 🔁 Thank you for REPOSTING 🔁

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