Steven Snider

It is CRAZY how much weaker OpenAI GPT-4o is at coding from the completions API than GPT-4. I'm not sure if this is the intended result, but very surprising nonetheless. The training recency is very evident, i.e. it knows about much more modern things, but the difference between its logical output is great with GPT-4 just thinking in a much more sophisticated fashion.

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Progress = your QA release process growing from 15 minutes to 5 hours. A stat that’s both invigorating & frustrating at the same time. But I think the single best thing you can do to delight your customers is to personally guarantee “it just works”.

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One of my favorite topics, as the first article for June, how to get projects unstuck, when something gets in the way. Something every project manager deals with at some point in their career. #projectmanagement #pmi https://lnkd.in/gpBTEZqG

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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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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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"I asked 100 devs why they aren’t shipping faster. Here’s what I learned" > QA processes represent the tradeoff between quality and velocity. Developers will often accuse QA of being to “nitty” and adding useless repetition to the dev cycle. Taylor, who has worked at a series of high-growth startups and now runs one, described the QA process like this: >Me creating a test spec for QA. QA finding problems (because QA will always find problems) >Getting list of problems 2 days later >Fixing merge conflicts because more code has shipped since I last pushed. Plus context switching >Back to QA* In the amount of time it takes QA to review code, underlying context might change, making the change more involved. https://lnkd.in/gZ3-TW3a

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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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Clair Brings Earned Wage Access To Gusto Clients Earned wage access fintech Clair has partnered with payroll, benefits, and HR management solutions company Gusto. Under the agreement, employees at many of Gusto’s 300,000 supported businesses will be offered access to On-Demand Pay via Gusto Wallet. Gusto is Clair’s first partner to announce participation in the new embedded EWA product. Embedded earned wage access provider Clair and payroll, benefits, and HR management solutions company Gusto are teaming up this week. The partnership will allow Gusto to offer earned wage access (EWA) to their small business clients. Founded in 2019, Clair offers an embeddable EWA tool. Clair’s clients, which include Trinet, 7Shifts, syncHR, use the EWA tool to help their combined 12,000 business customers offer their employees earlier access to their paychecks with no interest. Once employees set up a Clair spending account, they can receive a paycheck advance at any time for hours they’ve already worked. Clair offers end users banking services powered by Pathward, N.A., including a virtual and physical Mastercard debit card, access to fee-free ATMs, and does not charge monthly service fees or require a minimum balance. “Emergency expenses often arise and employees need a secure and convenient way to cover those unexpected costs,” said General Manager and Head of Product at Gusto’s Members business unit Dan Loomis. “Due to these needs, we decided to add an on-demand pay offering to Gusto Wallet and knew it would be crucial to find the right partner to bring it to life in a seamless, compliant way. We evaluated all the major players in the EWA space and Clair stood out as our ideal partner, bringing both the compliance framework and technical capabilities we need to offer wage advances right inside our existing app. We’re proud of this industry-leading collaboration that expands the possibilities of embedded financial wellness benefits.” Under today’s partnership, employees at many of Gusto’s 300,000 supported businesses will be offered access to sign up for On-Demand Pay via Gusto Wallet. The company anticipates the move will help employees increase prosperity by delivering not only earlier access to their pay, but also to financial and work productivity tools. Gusto is Clair’s first partner to announce participation in the new embedded EWA product. Gusto was founded in 2011. Originally known as ZenPayroll, Gusto provides a cloud-based payroll, benefits, and HR management solution. The company’s tools help businesses with things like time and attendance, hiring and onboarding, talent management, and more. Company co-founder Joshua Reeves is CEO. Photo by Karolina Kaboompics The post Clair Brings Earned Wage Access To Gusto Clients appeared first on Finovate. https://lnkd.in/gTVkNfYH via Finovate https://finovate.com/ July 16, 2024 at 07:19PM

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I'm really happy with how my talk on Scaling (or...don't) has come together. Here's a sneak peek of one of the slides -- the steps we all know and love about scaling a company ;-) #bsw2024 #BoulderStartupWeek

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Exciting to see Adaptive tackling the slow payments issue in construction with innovative financial management tools! 🏗️ It's clear their platform addresses crucial inefficiencies in the payment chain, benefiting small- and medium-sized businesses in the industry. The team has closed their $19 million Series A round—looking forward to seeing how they expand and enhance financial workflows for even more construction companies. 💡 A great example of tech-driven solutions making a big impact where it's needed most! 🚀 #ConstructionTech #FinancialInnovation #SMBs https://lnkd.in/eBJq3Q93

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We've all heard the horrifying tales of software projects spiraling out of control - bloated budgets, missed deadlines, lackluster products. What if you could wake up from these nightmares for good? My new guide covers everything you need to know about the key approaches for building software: 💻 Do it yourself (you're a product developer) 💻 Outsource it 💻 Build an in-house team 💻 Use a combination approach I break down the pros and cons of each option, so you can choose the right path for your product vision and avoid common pitfalls. No more sleepless nights wondering if you're on track. No more cold sweats thinking about looming disasters. Read the guide today and ensure your software build is a developer's dream, not a nightmare on Dev Street: https://lnkd.in/ehDG_JsN

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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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I find interesting the hype about counting downloads for a given tool as a metric for success. I guess it helps to show how popular something is, but I would love it if people also considered other aspects, such as project governance and project activity. Anyway, let's follow the trend (evidence in the comments): - Selenium Java downloads: 98.5M in May 2024 - Selenium active users in the last 30 days: 2.6M. Happy automation!

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When I joined PagerDuty in early 2021, I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into. The event mgmt capabilities were pretty basic, automation was a separate product and still on-premise only, and it was pretty much just the on-call tool. Watching PD reinvent itself since I've been here has been awe-inspiring. The absolutely jaw-dropping amount of innovation in AIOps, the integration of the now SaaS-driven automation, the lens of customer service operations, the addition of Jeli for post-incident reviews, and the continual improvements in core incident response has been accelerating our customer capabilities every day. And finally, seeing how GenAI is transforming everything in a way that enhances how folks are delivering services has surprised the curmudgeon in me. If you want the grand tour, Jeffrey Hausman delivers a great story on how we are addressing Operational Excellence. It's worth a look. https://lnkd.in/g82nbgzy

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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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Legend-State Over Redux? I recently connected with Jay Meistrich, the mind behind Legend State, and I've began using it on some projects. The speed and simplicity of Legend State has left me thoroughly impressed. No more dealing with reducers, dispatchers, etc. - just dive in and try it out! I love where this is going! Try it out! https://lnkd.in/gCpv_gS5 #LegendState #Impressed #Simplicity #StateManagement #Javascript

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Great article by Ray Carnes. In my 20+ years in the software industry I've seen companies learn and relearn the basics again and again because each generation of leaders think things are "different this time" because of such and such technology. The frameworks, platforms, underlying technology changes but the principles and foundations are still the same. #softwareengineering

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