Darren Williams

Here's a link to a short video I've made showing how RAG can be used to improve ChatGPT/GPT-4o translation output: https://lnkd.in/ed5cHXX3.

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I'm thrilled to share fantastic feedback we've received from our potential partners. It highlights how Agilebase is making an impact SMEs Andy Garner is the co-founder of Elastic Mint, a Bristol-based software development consultancy. He raved about Agilebase. “Agilebase listened to us and never rushed us into doing things. They were responsive, looking for a long-term relationship, not just quick money. Their approach makes them perfect for SMEs," he said. Andy first encountered Agilebase at an AI event in Bristol. He said he found our training sessions helpful. He thinks SMEs can use Agilebase to transition from spreadsheets to powerful data-driven apps. “As a tool, Agilebase is powerful. It’s amazing for SMEs for whom bespoke software isn’t an option. But with Agilebase, it becomes an option,” Andy said. Simon Sleight, Director at Dixi Data, appraised Agilebase's sophisticated architecture and robust data management capabilities. “It’s more sophisticated than we expected, yet transparent to the user,” said Simon. He valued the support offered by Agilebase during initial implementations. He said Agilebase stays with you every step of the way. Both Andy and Simon appreciate Agilebase’s partnership-oriented approach. Agilebase focuses on long-term success and strong support. At Agilebase, we're proud to offer bespoke software within reach for SMEs and help them smoothly undergo digital transformation. #Agilebase #SMEs #DigitalTransformation #BespokeSoftware #NoCodePlatform #CustomerSuccess #PartnershipApproach #DataManagement https://lnkd.in/gmnn5WYa

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🚀 Hatchet is finally open-access! For the past 6 months, Gabe and I have been working hard on our open-source task queue, and working with a few select companies on our hosted version. Hatchet Cloud is now available for anyone to try - including a free tier which lets you run 10k task executions per day! ⬇️ Link in comments - we’d love to hear what you think! --- The backstory → Hatchet started as an idea to build a developer-friendly version of Temporal. This was based on my previous experience of running millions of Temporal workflows/month at Oneleet (YC S22) as well as managing task queueing infra on behalf of users as CTO at Porter. For the initial YC application, we pitched it as a “Workflow management system for developers” (It turns out this is a terrible one-liner, as we quickly learned that “workflow” is one of the most overloaded terms in software. And “Workflow management system” makes it sound like an enterprise tool.) We also built a version of Hatchet over a weekend and posted it on Reddit the next day. Despite the questionable one-liner, we were accepted into the YC W24 batch, and went into the batch trying to sell our product as a workflow engine which enables durable execution. But after chatting with a bunch of technical founders, we learned a few things: 1. “Workflow engine” isn’t something that busy technical founders or startup engineering teams are thinking about. Most people that we talked to had solved background task orchestration with tools like Celery for Python, BullMQ for Node, or perhaps a home-brewed Postgres task queue. 2. People building on top of LLMs tend to adopt a distributed queue much earlier than a traditional web app that primarily reads/writes from a database. LLM apps are much “heavier” from a processing perspective due to slower API calls and a heavy need for ingesting/indexing external sources of information, like documents or codebases. Because of this, many LLM apps have a usability/latency problem with time-to-first-token and incremental result streaming becoming a high priority. 3. Most people don’t need durable execution, at least not early on. 90% of use-cases are solved with a caching layer and idempotency. The tradeoff of needing to work in a deterministic context generally isn’t worth the higher learning curve and non-intuitive programming paradigm. After several iterations of re-positioning — including an attempt at wrapping Hatchet with an LLM prompt playground — it started to click when we started talking to users about the need for a task queue, instead of a workflow engine with durable execution. We started to see adoption, first from other YC companies in the batch, and then on Hacker News, where we reached number 1 and stayed there for the better part of a day. --- Since our HN post, we've built a ton of features - child workflows, support for global rate limiting, event streaming, and more. Try it out and let us know what you think!

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What I learnt from @londontechweek and @foundersforum TLDR : anxiety about election result and any shift in policies that might derail the sector, software exists for everyting and those deploying it well will be more likely to survive, autonomous tanks are big business and movies are about to change even more.. https://lnkd.in/gB2M2FpJ

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#ElonMusk has now completely caged the #Twitter bird Apart from a sole embed-sharing page, the iconic bird (or even the blue colourway) is nowhere to be seen anymore. I reached out to some seasoned users of Twitter, trying to find out if Musk's #X has any charm left at all, nearly two years after the hostile $44bn takover. Some of the responses: "It is not as welcoming as the blue bird was, and heck, it is a pain to find on the phone app menu if you have dark theme on, but one gets used to it." "With the name and bird gone, [X] just looks like some ultra-rich technocrat's fantasy and a former shell of what meant something to the rest of us" and even, "People die and the world moves on. What is an online brand?" Light-heartedness aside, almost everyone admitted how X is now chock-a-block with #spam and #bots and how there has been a visible dip in #traffic if you aren't ready to loosen your purse strings. Most have moved on to #Instagram for some joy, or to #LinkedIn for some better traffic. I had fun writing this one (trashing #Musk is now my new favourite pastime), and I hope you enjoy my latest edition of #DigitalDisconnect: https://bit.ly/3WS4nBn For more interesting long-forms and thought provokers, check out ABP Live

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Hyperoptimisation from a product that works perfectly well seems to be incredibly value destructive for all concerned. Not sure why it happens so much in tech I learned today that something coming up imminently on our engineering road map is updating all our lambdas to be compatible with new AWS standards. Apparently this is something that will happen every 18 months or so forever and GCP is apparently even worse. If we don’t do this by the time AWS deprecates this functionality Spot Ship will stop working. However doing it will lead to zero improvement in functionality for us. AWS has literally spent money on engineering that has had no effect but to waste our engineers time and subsequently p*ss me off. They are not alone. There comes a time in a product life cycle where it feels engineering dollars are being spent for the sake of it. Why not either downsize workforce, or give the guys and girls a very long very well paid holiday (if trying to keep them out of competitor hands)??? While our product has got so much better over the last year (primarily by ticking off the most crucial of existing paying customer asks), I want to stay aware that at some point it will be essentially “done”. Any further “improvement” will just annoy clients. Engineers love to say SAAS is alive and never “done”…but I think this may be largely talking their book I’ve seen it a lot in consumer (e.g. having to update the Uber app when you just want to get a car back from the pub once every two weeks…despite them having added no noticeable new functionality for 10 years). This is the first time I’ve noticed it so clearly in B2B. #shipsandshipping #maritime #founder #vc

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One of the narratives coming out of this weeks UK General Election is a question around the 'first past the post' voting system, and the games of which seats to contest for the party; and if and how to tactical vote for the voter. A quick look at the numbers show that there is a significant variation in how many votes it took to secure each Member of Parliament. From 23,605 for Labour to 485,305 for Green and 820,745 for Reform. A 2011 referendum rejected a change in the voting system, but this came after the 2010 General Election in which the top 3 parties by seats secured 88.1% of the vote. This week the top 3 parties by seats secured just 69.7% of the votes - 7 parties would need to reach 90.1% of the vote share. Rory Stewart discussed the need for innovation in our electoral system on election night. Will these numbers change the narrative on that subject? Worth a look through https://lnkd.in/eeieAfC3 who are campaigning on this. Source: https://lnkd.in/eqNHD4Zi

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AI can be a force for good. Here is an excellent website my friend Tim Browne has produced which uses ChatGPT to analyse prospective government manifestos to give you a summary of what they are promising on various subjects you maybe interested in. Takes a lot of tedium away from reading glossy manifestos and allows you to compare policies. A good way of increasing democracy I feel. Well done Tim! https://lnkd.in/euKEh7e5

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❓ Is the UK Primed to Birth the Next Generation of Tech Decacorns, and if Yes, What's the Blueprint? Jody Ford, CEO of Trainline, drew attention to the UK's illustrious past in industries such as steel, oil, and banking, followed by successes in pharmaceuticals and consumer goods. However, he pointed out a glaring gap: the tech sector's underperformance compared to the US counterparts. Ford stressed the urgent need for the UK to foster an environment where tech companies get easy access to capital, a fair regulatory framework that companies can flourish, expand, and compete worldwide. But here's the exciting part: We have the potential to birth tech giants not only in traditional sectors but also in innovative areas like oral health. Take Presto Dental, for instance—a pioneering startup poised to revolutionize oral healthcare globally. Let's seize this opportunity to propel the UK's tech scene to new heights. Time to make it happen! #techEntrepreneurs #companybuilders #UKTechRevolution #Innovation #PrestoDental #Oralhealth #Dentaltech #preseed #funding

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Automated Personalised Outbound - Part 3: Personalising Messages A quick run through on the best way to use AI when generating messages. I take the data I have on each lead and use it to inform the LLM. With good prompting techniques I can get the outputs sounding human and conversational. Here I personalise components of the message, but leave other repeatable portions of the message fixed.

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🚀 An opportunity is on the horizon from Goblin Rocket Engineering 🚀 They say having 10,000 hours makes you an expert in something, well I'm bringing 🕰️ 30,000 hours to the table. This is a unique opportunity to work with one of the most experienced Solutions Architects in the Sitecore space. Let me answer some of the questions you might have as to why we'd make a great team. ⏳ That's a lot of hours, what have you been doing? I've been busy helping my clients deliver their products and projects using the latest technologies, here's a few headliners for you. 💠 Composable Architecture 💠 Headless Development 💠 DevOps & Automation 💠 Cloud Engineering 💠 Containerisation 💠 Sitecore (of course) It isn't just about clients though, I love giving back to the community, it helps us progress together. Without those who shared before me, I wouldn't be the experienced and knowledgeable person I am today. Through writing blogs, creating open source libraries to presenting what I know at conferences, my contributions have helped hundreds of developers and projects. Leading me to be awarded 🏅 Sitecore MVP 5 times in a row, something I'm very proud of! 📣 I need someone to lead the charge, is that you? Yes! Whether it's a small laser focused or big broadly reaching team, my goal is always to empower those I work with so that the team grows together. With my experience I'm able to help directly engage with key stakeholders, translating their requirements into clear plans and processes to be executed by the team and budgeted accordingly. 🎛️ So you're just a Sitecore person? Absolutely not, sure I've been independently helping clients deliver amazing Sitecore solutions for the past 10 years, but it's a big ecosystem with many external facets! Being a Solutions Architect means you need to be agnostic to the technologies you work with. The same paradigms you use in one stack can be transferred over to another, just like translating a language. I'm ready to help launch your next project into the thermosphere and make sure it lands safely back to Earth like a SpaceX rocket 🚀 (most of the time). Contact me direct or check out my site to learn more https://lnkd.in/ehFGyv9p. #SolutionsArchitect #SitecoreExpert #Sitecore #DevOps #CloudInfrastructure #AzureDevOps #Azure #SoftwareEngineer

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Have folks experienced #GPT4o’s instruction following / structured output to be more error prone than #GPT4-turbo and #GPT4? It seems to me GPT4o not just slowed down a lot in the last couple of weeks, but it also failing with instruction following where GPT4 did much better... Still, for my usecase the latency of GPT4o is superior but i sense it came with tradeoffs in terms of instruction following.

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Yesterday I found the first grey hair in my beard, which means I’m now experienced enough to preach about how to build great software. I’ve seen first hand how software projects can fall apart. I’ve also been lucky to be part of a load of software projects which went well. Building software well boils down to 3 things: 1️⃣ Customer obsession Yes, I stole this from Amazon. How do you think they got so big? It works. Your customers/users are your top priority all day every day. Talk to them, learn from them, figure out what they want, then build it. 2️⃣ Urgency The importance of urgency hit home for me after spending time at Entrepreneur First – they’re mad about it. It’s simple: work quickly, be responsive to customers/users, and bias towards taking action. 3️⃣ Impact For us at Oxidian, our impact comes from our mission to make sure public money is well invested. Your mission will probably be different – but you’d better make sure you have one. Customer obsession is how you point yourself in the right direction. Urgency is the rocket fuel. Impact is essential for longevity. P.S. We’re hiring. React devs, Python devs, user researchers, and bid writers – we want to hear from you!

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Tech isn't just about owning code. I recently spoke with a scaling company on the hunt for a tech leader post-seed funding. They emphasised the need to develop their own code to be perceived as a 'tech' company for valuation purposes. But here's the thing: that perspective is outdated. The true value of a business lies in its product and what customers are willing to pay for. Simply having proprietary code won't necessarily increase revenue. Moreover, the notion that owning your code mitigates risk is flawed—it merely shifts the risk onto the company, requiring significant investment in maintaining and supporting the codebase. Instead, a company's true intellectual property lies in its processes, content, and algorithms that deliver value to customers. For this particular company, their focus should be on leveraging data to personalise interactions and improve content, ultimately driving retention and sales. My recommendation to them? Prioritise these value-add features over building their own code for a Learning Management System. Here's why: Focus: Trying to build both a LMS and advanced features simultaneously will dilute their efforts and likely result in neither being delivered effectively. Financials: Startups need to be strategic about where they invest their limited resources. Prioritising features that directly add value to customers will yield better returns. Skills: Developing data-driven solutions requires a different skill set than building a tech infrastructure. With budget constraints, hiring should prioritise skills that align with the company's strategic goals. Ultimately, investors should value a company's ability to deliver innovative functionality and generate revenue efficiently, rather than fixating on ownership of code. Companies should focus on areas that will genuinely grow the business, rather than adhering to outdated notions of what defines a 'tech' company. If you’re interested in finding out how and what this means for your business, comment below or send me a DM to chat. #IT #Tech #Strategy #InternationalBusiness #Scaling 

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I accidentally tuned into James Martin's Saturday Morning over the weekend (I was actually looking for Andy's Dinosaur Adventures, but that's another story). Anyway, I was very happy to see a sartorially-elegant chap on there sporting a rather fetching Bitcoin orange #hodl t-shirt - see the photo attached. Apparently, he is Merlin Griffiths, and he was the bartender on the show First Dates (I've not watched that either, sadly). Regardless, anyone who broadcasts that message to half a million people for a couple of hours is a stand-up guy in my book. The t-shirt sparked a debate about the origins of the term "hodl". One family member smugly (and incorrectly) suggested that it was an acronym ("Hold On for Dear Life"). Instead, the phrase was born on a legendary BitcoinTalk 2013 post by GameKyuubi entitled "I AM HODLING" - see link in the comments. As GameKyuubi explains in his drunken ramble, he has been imbibing whiskey (or "...whisky w/e") and the price of Bitcoin is crashing. Like most of us, he is a terrible trader. And in vino (or whisky) veritas - "You only sell in a bear market if you are a good day trader or an [dis]illusioned noob. The people inbetween [sic] hold." We are all hodlers now! #Bitcoin

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