Mia Chung

Friends and colleagues, to say that I have a big announcement would be an understatement. I have resigned my position as a senior software engineer and chief architect at ARA. I promise this is all positive though and sincerely apologize for the length of this post, but please keep reading.   After much soul searching, I came to realize that there was a satisfaction I had as a business owner and entrepreneur that I will never get from any company. That said, ARA was a great company to work for, and I want to take moment to recognize the impossible feats accomplished alongside folks like Steve F., Kevin Kennedy, Larry Handley, CISSP, Rushad Antia, Eric Schumacher, and a bunch of other people that I probably just forgot I had on LinkedIn. I'd totally tag you guys here, you know that!   Together, we took a loose collection of research/proof of concept applications, turned those into a real enterprise system, pushed it through a tough high side accreditation process, all while still adding features, during the height of Covid. Read that again!   If that wasn't enough, we then rearchitected the whole system to live in Kubernetes, while still taking on new features, and we got that one ready for signoff, too! Still not enough? With support from these folks, I went on to start building a much larger system in front of a joint chiefs-level audience! We accredited an early version of that, too, with a completely different agency and somehow found ourselves in the center of the interagency ATO reciprocity conversation. All of the above took place over a bit less than 4 years. Nothing short of incredible! Bryan J. Guinn you might find a more detailed account of how we accomplished all that to be interesting. Now, what's next?   I have founded my own software engineering firm, Scorpion Five Technologies. It takes its name from my squad leader in Iraq's radio call sign "Scorpion Five." Sadly, we lost him in battle. But I hope that through this new venture I can give even more power to the name than it already had! Check out the website here: https://lnkd.in/ejAhW57G   At first, I'll be concentrating on helping the fight on the defense side, just as I have been. Later, I'll see what I can contribute to both veteran's health and the fight against human trafficking, particularly as it relates to children. Reach out to me if you want to know more!   That said, wish me luck…

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Would you measure the success and value of a TV series using throughput? Every star trek episode was about traveling through space and about “boldly going where no man has gone before”, but no matter the warp speed Scotty gets the USS enterprise up to, each episode is always 60 minutes! I can see how a someone focused on throughput, flow and a simple linear view of causality might be confused by this. A similar source of confusion exists in Software Development where improvements aren't always causally connected the way we naively imagine them to be. Clearly, a faster ship is critical in many episodes and Scotty is even considered a technological hero. However, speed is not causally connected to the length of the story, rate of episodes, etc. It's only causally connected to outcomes within the structure of an episode's plot.

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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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Wow, y’all. What a conference! 14 sessions in 2 days and my brain is 🍝! But dang, are those noodles tasty! Props to all the folks who put together such a valuable learning experience at Agile & Beyond - it was my first time attending and I’m very much looking forward to returning next year! #agile #agileandbeyond2024 #detroittech #detroittechnology #itconference #agilebusiness #techcommunity

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"Recently, my PC's hard drive failed, leaving me with a cryptic error message and a looming deadline. With only 12 hours of sleep over 72 hours, I embarked on a troubleshooting odyssey. I delved into the world of bootloaders, file systems, and operating systems, determined to revive my PC. Through this journey, I discovered the importance of: 1. *Fault tolerance*: My PC's failure taught me that even the most critical components can fail, highlighting the need for backups and redundancy. 2. *Adaptability*: I learned to navigate unfamiliar territories, from Linux terminal commands to boot loader configurations. 3. *Resourcefulness*: With limited resources, I leveraged online forums, documentation, and creativity to diagnose and repair my PC. 4. *Resilience*: Despite setbacks and frustration, I persevered, driven by the desire to learn and overcome. This experience taught me that life can be a powerful teacher, often in unexpected ways. Just as a failed hard drive can reveal the importance of fault tolerance, life's challenges can reveal our strengths and weaknesses. In the end, I emerged with a dual-boot PC, a newfound appreciation for Linux, and a deeper understanding of the importance of adaptability, resourcefulness, and resilience. Life may throw unexpected errors our way, but it's how we respond that matters. By embracing challenges and learning from failures, we can become more robust, adaptable, and resilient – just like a well-designed system."

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I’m gearing up to go on an engineering leadership focused podcast next week. I fear hitting on topics which are bland and perhaps over-talked-about. Are there topics you’d like to hear about which aren’t being discussed yet? Topics you wish someone would talk about? #podcasts #leadership #softwareengineering #management #startup #growth #kansascity #tech

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🌱 Embrace Change and Grow Beyond Boundaries 🌱 To those affected by the recent layoffs at Tesla or other tech jobs, I want to share this: don't be discouraged. This might be the moment to uproot the conventional and create something new and extraordinary. Sometimes, the most rewarding gardens are those you create yourself, and now you have AI at your disposal to help you on this journey. When I made the decision to leave Tesla several years ago (without AI), I vividly remember my manager telling me, "The grass isn't always greener on the other side." At the time, I understood the caution behind those words, but I also realized something profound: sometimes, you don't need grass at all. Why settle for maintaining a lawn when you can transform the land into something far more productive? Instead of grass, I chose to "foodscape" my career, planting seeds of opportunity and cultivating a garden that, over time, has started to bear real fruit. The journey hasn't been easy (it's never meant to be). It required stepping away from a stable path and embracing uncertainty with new opportunities and additional hardships. But these challenges have been instrumental in my personal and career growth. They led me to where I am today, working with a small group of friends and diverse teams on complex AI projects that push boundaries and drive innovation. So... embrace this opportunity as a challenge to cultivate new paths, learn new things, discover more about yourself, and make those new connections.😇 Its up to you to keep building 💯 #CareerGrowth #PersonalDevelopment #Innovation #NewOpportunities #Entrepreneurship #Resilience #Tesla #Leadership #Motivation #Inspiration

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Highly recommend giving this one a read! Workflow contributor Sean Hughes gives a thoughtful breakdown of why closed GenAI foundation models should be of concern to everyone, and why open systems are the key to a safer, better future. Check it out. 👇

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Came across this fun relic of a past product adventure, made using ChatGPT / DALL-E by a brilliant engineer who quickly whipped it up after I quipped during a team standup that we needed a custom MTG card to celebrate a release we were about to ship (there were many team members who enjoyed this game). Ironically... AI decided this is what a team of devs look like. Also ironically... it's exactly who our head of Engineering did look like. AI has a long way to go... What made me smile though was that we didn't need a magic last-ditch prayer to non-existent deities to ship that release. Thoughtful, well-coordinated, aligned execution to a solid product plan with a great team made up of highly talented and engaged players are what made it happen. Thankful to have great memories like this one. Which leads me to two questions for you: - does your leadership find ways to have real, authentic fun and camaraderie on your team(s) not just at pre-planned events, but day-to-day? - what are key success factors you've relied on to ensure looming delivery deadlines don't look like this magic card?

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Every technical program manager should be multi-lingual. Not in the traditional sense of spoken language though. Here's what I mean 👇 A mediocre TPM can speak the language of project and program management, but nothing else. On the other end of the spectrum... A high impact TPM can speak the language of engineering and product management. Sure, a TPM won't be THE expert in the room for those languages. But to understand them, see the nuances, and know how to interpret to other language? That is important. 🌎 The language of product management is all about understanding the customers and market to identify critical problems to solve and a strategy to solve them. Who are our customers? What do they care about? What are their typical workflows? Where are the pain points? ⚙️ The language of engineering is all about understanding the problem to identify a solution. HOW will be build to reach the objective? How do we consider scalability, performance, reliability, security, etc in our solution? A multi-lingual TPM is a high-impact TPM. Learning these languages should be part of your curriculum to grow as a TPM. (disclaimer: not all TPMs are the same. Some are stronger in various domains and dialect of both engineering and product. And that's okay!) What helps you be a multi-lingual TPM? --👇-- ♻️ Repost if you found this useful. ➡️ Follow me for more on strategic execution and leadership. 📨 Join my community newsletter, The TPM Craft (link in profile).

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Anthropic released another paper on their ongoing work towards interpretability of large foundational models like their Claude 3 family, built on previous work by many. Their work continues to be enlightening and inspiring. The findings in this work are generally similar to previous findings on smaller models but scaled up to Claude 3 Sonnet: 💡 they find large numbers of "features" corresponding to combinations of neuron activations and these features map to concepts that we recognize/understand: for example, features for transit infrastructure, particular people, concepts (like bias and "objects lacking sentience"). This might sound familiar from classical machine learning, but the interesting thing is that there is no single thing/neuron encoding each of these concepts, it's a particular combination of neuron activations that embeds these concepts in "superposition" in the network. 💡they observe a sort of "distance" of these feature activations that arrange themselves "near" semantically similar features. When they use their sparse autoencoder approach to learn more and more features they observe that the level of abstraction in the detected features becomes more granular, in ways that are interpretable and meaningful. 💡when they artificially fire these activation patterns during inference, it affects the output in ways that relate to the "feature". For example, asking Claude "what's the most interesting science" normally it responds Physics, but if you clamp the feature activations for the feature "Brain Science" to 10x their max values then Claude responds: Neuroscience. Ways to interpret _and_ influence the model. Great readable work [1] along with an interactive explorer of some of the "features" themselves [2] 🎂 There's an easter egg too: if you scroll in the feature explorer tool and try and select one of the "Randomly selected features from 1M" you get a message "if you want to see the rest of the features, we're hiring!" with a link to their recruiting page :) [1] https://lnkd.in/gZbparwp [2] https://lnkd.in/gC9eus53

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🌟 Attention Engineering Managers and Technical Leaders! 🌟 In just two weeks, on June 28th at 10 AM PDT, I’m excited to host an interactive roundtable on Feature Flags and Delivery in conjunction with ELC! 🚀 Why Attend? This is a collaborative discussion where your expertise and curiosity are key! Whether you're experienced or eager to learn, your contributions are invaluable. 🔍 Discussion Points: - Decoupling Processes - Boosting Team Efficiency - Optimizing Feature Delivery - Tracking Platform Usage Expect rich conversations on best practices, unique implementations, methodologies, and the latest tools enhancing feature flagging and delivery. Who Should Join? - Engineering Managers - Technical Leads - DevOps Engineers - Software Developers This roundtable is your chance to: - Share your experiences - Gain new insights - Network with peers - Discover practical recommendations RSVP Now and mark your calendars for June 28th at 10 AM PDT! Let’s collaborate and elevate our skills together! #EngineeringManagement #TechLeaders #FeatureFlags #DevOps #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamEfficiency #TechRoundtable

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Another great new #python post from the #pyatl blog

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I haven't been posting here much because I feel burned-out talking about RTO, COVID safety, and tech layoffs. I was turning back to soccer coaching. But funny thing: whenever I read about coaching, I see something that makes me think about the workplace. Like when Greater Good magazine posted this on creating more belonging, which I thought could be useful for when the new season starts in August. One way to support the feeling of belonging is when "researchers have asked individuals—like students, employees, and >>professional athletes<<—to take some time before a stressful moment and reflect or write about their core values. They look at a list of values, such as relationships with friends and family or community, and they select their most important ones. Then, they write about why these values are important to them." So cool, that might work with a kids' team. But then I see: "New research by Julian Pfrombeck and his colleagues finds that these values affirmations help the unemployed to stay engaged during the often-discouraging job search process, increasing their likelihood of finding employment." (exploding head emoji goes here). Marketing alert: in my coaching practice I work with many job-seekers. it is a tough slog for folks. If you are in the midst of it, check out the post from Greater Good in the comments below. And if you want someone to talk to and help you through it, I'm available. No charge to job-seekers. OK gotta go, Scotland v Switzerland starting #Euros #NoScotlandNoParty #coaching #teambuilding #jobsearch #mentalhealth

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Identifying and growing new managers can be a long but incredibly rewarding journey. Breaking that journey into phases will provide structure to demonstrate progress and provide moments to celebrate when milestones are hit. In this blog post, I share the phases I have used from growing ICs to Managers in Phorest. 🪴

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As a hiring manager, my success rate in finding the right talent and retaining them is consistently high. Usually, for engineering and product roles, we prioritized candidates with exact domain experience and a precise skill set match. However, there was this one time I hired a resource with no direct experience but who brought in transferable skills and tons of enthusiasm to learn new skills. And this turned out to be one of the best hiring decisions I made, as this resource ramped up very quickly, grew in their career and stayed on for many years. In addition, the team also had minimal churn, with retention at 80% over 7 years and 100% over 5 years even amid reorgs. So, what worked: 1) Candidate's transferable skills and their growth mindset: If a resource is consistently learning and focused on self-improvement, those are huge green flags. And transferable skills are applicable across various domains. 2) Effective Onboarding: My real responsibility with the new hires starts AFTER hiring. As hiring managers, we need to create an effective and structured onboarding process to set the new hires up for success. I was also able to create a supportive environment for this resource as the rest of my team was experienced and could provide mentorship as well. 3) Focus on the "How": I have always relied on behavioral and cultural interviews for my final hiring decisions. Skill set and domain knowledge can be taught, but a bad culture fit will negatively impact team dynamics. 4) Investing in development and talent retention: Continued focus on learning and development, career progression, and recognition of team members helps retain good talent. In summary, we all know that hiring is expensive. Be flexible with the requirements (but not with cultural fit ever) as long as you have the supportive environment that your new hires need. Once you hire them, focus on their onboarding and training. And most importantly, keep your existing talent happy and motivated.

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Isn’t it funny that 60% of engineering managers see a shortage of qualified candidates while 56% plan to increase headcount? The math is not mathin’. 🧮 Maybe it’s time to rethink what makes a “good engineer”. Skills are evolving with AI and machine learning, and our criteria needs to evolve too. The “passion engineer” coding all night is rare now, and that’s okay — maybe even better — because we can introduce more diverse skill sets, experiences, and problem-solving. Let’s evaluate our talent definitions, invest in training, and embrace diverse paths of excellence. ✨ For more insights like these, check out Jellyfish's 2024 State of Engineering Management report: https://lnkd.in/eKAJ5jZy

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Do you know the number one job board where most job scams are posted? LinkedIn! Multiple fake accounts and companies prey on those with open to work notifications 📣 on thier profiles. They pretend to be job recruiters from legit organizations, even Fortune 500. Thier profiles are rather generic. Most often if you really look the profile photo was even made by AI. They send emails with official letterheads and then ask for personal information—now here’s the tricky part. Most people will expect that you should send a resume to a recruiter for review. Your resume has your email, your address, phone number and other identifying details including your place of work and almer mater. This is enough to steal your identity. They have gotten more sophisticated; most times, if you aren’t paying attention you wouldn’t realize it was a scam. Here’s how you defeat them. Just remember this simple acronym: SAFE JOB‼️ ✨Sounds too good to be true—if it’s a job from heaven, it’s really the job from the other place ✨Asks for personal info—definitely if they ask for a ssn or other info, don’t do it ✨Fees upfront—if they ask you to pay for equipment/license/certification then don’t do it ✨Errors in communication—tricky; getting emails with the Uber logo on it; it’s from my throwaway email but it’s still alarming ✨Job description is vague—using a lot of fluff and no substance ✨Offers immediate job—“you are selected/approved!” You weren’t, just phished. ✨Background check the company—make sure that the person you are talking to actually works there; call or email the official website for verification Happy job hunting! #linkedin #jobhunting #careertips #careeradvice #jobs #fakejobs #jobscams #jobscam

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This is a message for all the Roku newbies out there 🐣 (Or any seasoned Roku devs looking to review the basics 🔎) Have you ever felt that you're navigating the Roku development waters all alone? Searching for cutting-edge advice, modern concepts, but finding nothing? I present to you the Roku 101 Course: A Roadmap To Create & Deploy Your First Modern Roku Application This FREE course will teach you everything you need to create your first Roku application from scratch using best practices, modern tools and with a seamless developer experience. Ready to learn? Check out the link in the first comment to join.

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