pkaler

> I'm really struggling to see how to make architectural decisions with an agent.

I walk to work and home with ChatGPT Voice and AirPods. I ask it to be Socratic and I just start rambling the top of thing on my mind. After 20 mins of back-and-forth it's usually teased an answer out of me or I've teased an answer out of it.

I'll most likely be at Polyglot. I did a very small part to help organize one of the very early ones.

I'm sitting here at my desk overlooking Cordova Street. The street that Apache Cordova is named after. I've seen this debate for almost two decades now.

Teams jump on the latest cross-platform framework assuming that it will reduce headcount cost at the expense of having a lowest-common denominator app on each platform.

The latter is true but the former is false.

What ends up happening is that teams start as 20 iOS engineers & 20 Android engineers. They adopt something like React Native. Then you end up with a team of 20 product engineers and 20 tooling and framework engineers.

I've seen that countless times in the last two decades.

My mother worked in a factory that sewed drapes for film sets before she retired. My brother-in-law used to be an operations manager for a warehouse that rented equipment to film sets.

There is just a very long tail of services and a robust supply chain that is required for most industries to be successful.

I was never a prolific blogger. I do write a LOT internally at work and I write very long messages in group chats.

With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.

I'm also currently reading "On the Calculation of Volume". It is fantastic.

Meta-comment about the post. I used to read and write book reviews like this all of the time. Not anymore. ChatGPT and Claude can do a just a good of a job. Now I'm looking for what you think, a unique insight, what did you feel from a book review from a humanoid. LLMs do a fine job summarizing.

Yup.

Woke up at 6am. Child 1 woke up at 7am. Dropped her off at daycare at 8am. All the other children were being dropped off by their dads, too. Full day of work ahead. Dinner at 6pm. Bath at 7pm. Bedtime and story at 8pm. Usually calls with Bangalore from 9pm to midnight but it's Labour Day over there. Sleep at midnight.

Rinse. Repeat.

As others have said, levels and titles are generally for compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to:

  - L1: Intern with undergrad degree
  - L2: Intern with graduate degree
  - L3: Junior
  - L4: Intermediate
  - L5: Senior
  - L6: Staff
  - L7: Senior Staff
  - L8: Principal
  - L9: Distinguished
  - L10: Fellow

Each company has their own numbers and names but it generally progresses like that. Impact and scope scales as you head up the ladder.

L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role. And people without the headroom get managed out if they can’t get to L5.

Staff+ is usually “special”. It means that people count on you to drive initiatives and you have something special other than just writing code. You are able to make product and business impact.

Distinguished and Fellow are very rare. Large FAANG companies will only have a handful of these engineers. It means you’ve made industry-wide impact like inventing map-reduce or DynamoDB or Kubernetes.

SIMD and data locality. You probably want to check across three vectors simultaneously and load the coordinates next to each other.

I'm guessing here. I haven't written video games in 20 years but struct packing/alignment was super important on the Sony PSP back then.

I'm actually working on an app for myself to remind me of that.

For example, there is a full glass of water sitting on my desk from 9am. It's noon. I haven't taken a sip. Until now.

Constant reminders do work.

Agree!

Most orgs should just be shipping features. Before starting an Experiment Program teams should be brainstorming a portfolio of experiments. Just create a spreadsheet where the first column is a one-line hypothesis of the experiment. Eg. "Removing step X from the funnel will increase metric Y while reducing metric Z". And the RICE (Reach-Impact-Confidence-Estimation) score your portfolio.

If the team can't come up with a portfolio of 10s to 100s of experiments then the team should just be shipping stuff.

And then Experiment Buildout should be standardized. Have standardized XRD (Experiment Requirements Doc). Standardize Eligibility and Enrollment criteria. Which population sees this experiment? When do they see it? How do you test that bucketing is happening correctly? What events do analysts need? When do we do readouts?

That's just off the top of my head. Most orgs should just be shipping features.

Beg to differ. I live in Yaletown in one of the Concord Pacific towers. David Lam Park and George Wainborn Park are vibrant as is the whole seawall. My kid goes to the daycare along one of the parks.

I'm sitting at my desk in an office in Gastown in a low-rise. The streets are covered in feces and broken crack pipes.

I have a 9 month old and we are drowning in toys. We have bought very few of them. The article is clearly not written by a parent because it barely touches on Buy Nothing Groups on Facebook.

We've barely bought any clothes either. They all come from Buy Nothing groups. Kids grow out of toys and clothes every 3 months. Parents are desperate to offload this stuff.

And my wife has become a hoarder as have other parents in the neighbourhood. Buy Nothing groups seem to set off some sort of hoarding affliction in parents.