Anton Popov

At Localyze we just finished our annual performance reviews cycle. This year I got feedback not only from my manager but also anonymous 360° feedback from peers and, for the first time, feedback from my direct reports. Of course, there are always areas and ways to improve, but overall I am very satisfied with the review. Nothing unexpected was brought up, and there was lots of positive feedback and a bit of actionable advice how to improve. Like many software engineers, I often experienced signs and symptoms of the impostor syndrome during my career. However, after more than 16 years in the industry, I finally feel confident about my technical skills and experience as a software engineer. But as a manager, I still have lots of doubts. For too long, I avoided doing people management because I thought it would be too hard and demanding for me having meaningful, helpful and sometimes difficult conversation with reports on a daily basis. And I have high expectations of what makes a good manager. Having integrity is an important aspect, I want to be recognized a transparent, trustworthy, and emphatic leader. Therefore, this short paragraph from my performance review was my highlight. It makes me very happy, and I am very proud that the people around me perceive me being empathic and see it as one of my greatest straights.  Because the feedback was anonymous, I don't know who to thank. But: Thank you very much, teammate. This paragraph means a lot to me, because it means that I am on the right track.

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How many of your supposedly internal-only backends are serving critical end-user traffic? Probably more than you think! Most frontend services have many transitive dependencies, and understanding these dependencies becomes increasingly difficult as your system grows in scale and complexity. As a result, it becomes exceptionally tricky to ensure that internal-only backends are fully isolated from end users. Google uses a common infrastructure platform for almost all of its services, internal and external; this provides for a message-passing mechanism common to all of these services. One outcome is that systems engineers can build accurate dependency maps of services; and that we can ensure new services only depend on other services at the same level or higher in the dependency stack. Risky dependencies — in this case, dependencies which place internal-only backends on the critical path for end users — can be a source of major production outages, because the internal-only backends do not generally have necessary reliability or safety guarantees. For example, you might have an externally-visible service that requires high levels of availability and performance, and this system has an indirect dependency on a backend with no availability or performance SLOs. At Google, we found success preventing major and huge outages by clustering services into categories with distinct properties, clear perimeters, and limited blast surfaces. The properties will depend on the guarantees we want to enforce. In this article, we use Google Maps to demonstrate how risky dependencies proliferate in complex systems, and then showcase how clustering Google Maps services into just two categories ("Internal" and "External") can prevent major and huge serving outages. We also outline how OpenTelemetry is used to identify violations of this clustering, which can be fixed before the violations cause a major serving outage. This article is based on a talk at SREcon EMEA, which you can see here: https://lnkd.in/e54b6G6p.

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An insightful talk about platform engineering and the challenges of building and delivering value!

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.NET Developers - In the Event Sourcing pattern, data is stored as a series of events, providing context for app state. In this video, AWS Community Builder Nick Chapsas explains how to get started with event sourcing in .NET with an Amazon DynamoDB example. #dotnet #AWS https://lnkd.in/gVKQ9QCb

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Minimal API is... SPEED & POWER :) DevNetwork thx so much for having me as a speaker SoftwareHut thx for the support

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TL;DR - come work with me! A few weeks ago I started a new adventure as an Engineering Manager at Forter, and I’m already recruiting! Usually in those posts people are “selling” the “Hi-techs” - I can talk about the happy hours, I can talk about the appreciation Sundays and about some other cool stuff, but what I really was excited about was the product, and specifically the data behind it. Forter is all about trust - In every point along the eCommerce journey, businesses must make a critical decision - Can I trust this customer? My new team, Identity Corpus (As part of the Identity group), is helping doing exactly this - how can we take all the data we have (billions of entities) and in less then a second understand who is doing the transaction and should we trust him? I’m looking for a software engineer, with data orientation, that is willing to face the challenge of massive data and its problems - every day we need to improve our platform so it can both scale up and keep the latency as is [Forter grew from 50K transactions / day in 2016 into more than 10M transactions / day today!] We are working with AWS, Elasticsearch, Aerospike, Kafka, RocksDB, and many other technologies that are state of the art. If I made you a bit curious, and you want to hear some more, ping me or apply here - https://lnkd.in/djCWMJ9R Looking for other roles in Forter? https://lnkd.in/dTB-6H2N #forter #elasticsearch #aerospike #bigdata #jobopportunities #hiring

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Very interesting webinar just started - How LLMs will impact different industries

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.NET Developers - Your on-premises .NET Framework and SQL Server app has served you well over the years... but it is also a prisoner. In this video, learn how your app is imprisoned, and how you can free it on AWS. Understand modernization approaches, tools, and benefits. Then test your knowledge with .NET Jail Break, a learning game that teaches AWS modernization approaches and tools in 5 minutes. #dotnet #AWS

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Ok, leaving aside all the news from Open AI from earlier today which pushes technology even further that we could have imagined, I would highlight that in the end all products are created by people. With that I would like to recommend this latest book that I managed to finish earlier today, it took me a lot to read as it has a lot of content and it is rather useful. Going through a lot of examples from both Stripe and Google, on how to properly scale organisations with processes and tools at the right level for the right size, where many companies fail in today's fast paced world rushing into changes way too early in their lifespan. https://amzn.eu/d/0gtV54E

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So, I'm actively looking for a new job (two weeks left before my layoff), and I just found an interesting method for generating cover letters. I've been using ChatGPT for a little while, by simply prompting it with: "Please generate a cover letter for me for the following job posting:" and then pasting the post. That worked pretty well, but I still had to do a decent amount of rewriting. I've tweaked this method a little bit, and am now getting much better results. I started a new chat, and began it with: > For the remaining conversation, I'm going to ask for cover letters for various job postings. Here, I'll give you my resume, and would like you to base the cover letters off the experience listed in this resume. Here is my resume: I pasted a plain text version of my resume after that. It responded with: > Based on your extensive experience, here's a tailored cover letter And then gave me a generic cover letter. But, after that, in the same conversation, I do something like: > Please create a cover letter for me for the following job posting, based on my experience: And I paste in the job posting after that. Now, the cover letters I get include mentions of my previous work. It's not perfect, by any means. I still have to check it for inaccuracies, and weird word usage (it really likes the word "enthusiasms"), but now I can get job-specific cover letters, with my experience included, with very little effort. #JobSearch #OpenToWork #AI

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Wanted to thank Patrick Gallagher again not only for the great suggestion but for kindly gifting me a copy of the book: Conscious Business, by Fred Kofman. It's a great book that I'd recommend for everyone. It covers several great insights around bringing more efficiency to work (but life in general) by actually leaning in and diving deeper on what makes us human, including our feelings, our bodies, how we relate with others, how we relate with ourselves, what gives us purpose, etc (paradoxically, things usually shunned or silenced at work). In short, the title hides it all: how can we do better "Business" by being more "Conscious". Looking forward to read Fred's other book: "The meaning revolution"

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The best is the enemy of the good It is a Russian saying that basically means that sometimes, when something's done well, trying to make it perfect doesn't add much value. There's also the 80/20 rule: 20% of effort brings 80% of the result. Both of these ideas point to the concept of Good Enough Solutions: they might not be perfect, but they get the job done and deliver value to customers. For Senior+ Engineers, knowing when to stop tweaking and accept a good solution can save a lot of time and money for a company. It's not about settling for mediocrity, but rather being smart about where to focus efforts. While we all want to aim for the best, recognizing when good is good enough helps us move faster, achieve results sooner, and adapt more quickly. 🤩 #mondaynotes #sdexperience #agile

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Breaking down enterprise data silos requires a number of components including infrastructure management. Tonic's engineer Trey Briccetti explains how much faster your CI/CD pipeline becomes when you streamline your database management. #infrastructure #devops #database

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How #PlatoElevate differentiates itself from other conferences is that it focuses on a series of "How do we do X at company Y" presented by very experienced leaders in the domain. In addition, there are Workshops and Roundtables focused on specific topics of interest. I will be hosting one as well: "Topic: Decision Making through Meeting, Decision Making tools. How to take effective decisions for a Platform team with multiple Stakeholders/Customers" If you are interested in joining the conference, there are coupons available. (https://lnkd.in/gUeH4M4C)

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This is really great and resonates - thanks Bryan Solar for the link! Couldnt align more to this - why add YAF (Yet Another Feature) when you can refine, prune, and streamline a feature in your existing product offering... On the engineering side this is also beneficial as it is less Cognitive Load and more time to cover Engineering PASS (Performance, Availability, Security, & Scalability)

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Velt (YC W22)'s engineering team has been very hard at work. They created so many features this week and as a result our weekly release notes video is going to be a bit longer than usual! Features we added this week include: - option to disable ShadowDOM - method to unsubscribe from subscriptions - notifications for users joining and creating Huddles - validation checks for audio and video permissions on Huddles - option to disable chat feature on Huddles - option to disable flock mode feature on Huddles - support to set the order of locations in the sidebar filter - configurations for the unread comments indicator - new React hook for unsetting the document ID - an option to use a specific version of the React SDK #buildinpublic #releasenotes #sdk

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Those of you out there using Claude, make sure to enable the new artifacts feature (still in preview). It's super useful, it can even under certain circumstances run code it generates so you can preview the results. Try it!

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Last night I helped co-host Building AI Agents Wine Night at Tala Wine. This was the first AI meetup that Tala Drzewiecki and I hosted, and it was an excellent success. The energy and creativity in the AI space, especially around AI agents, is amazing! There are so many ideas and architectures being explored. Two great takeaways I learned: 1. We can’t always scale AI model context “vertically” (single model), but we can scale AI model context “horizontally” (many agents working together). 2. Knowledge graph databases with vector search could be a huge boon to AI agents trying to navigate dense and multi tiered context! Huge thank you to Hari Masoor, Ravi Ramachandran, Rahul Parundekar, and Luis Laffitte for bringing their event series to Tala Wine 🍷!

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Graph-Vectors are now GA! It's been great seeing the tailwind of Graph RAG. (cc: LangChain). We're seeing more and more teams adopt a lightweight graph-vector store to augment their AI workloads. There's no faster way to get started than with Dgraph + GraphQL.

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