Sahn Lam

At the core of effective engineering leadership is the ability to stay connected with your team. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect because retaining the respect of your people is difficult unless you remain technically involved yourself. In my journey as an engineering leader, staying true to the individual contributor role that originally earned their respect has kept me close. This approach extends beyond technical expertise; it's about maintaining a deep connection with the core activities that propel product development forward at Gearflow. One of my biggest professional fears is becoming irrelevant or disconnected from my team and our work. This fear motivates me to continually reinvent and retool in response to market demands. Next month, I'll be sharing about my adventures generating synthetic data recently. And while I'm no expert when I start preparing for these talks, the process is incredibly valuable. It's less about delivering a perfect talk and more about how the preparation expands my thinking and exposes me to new capabilities. This helps me connect the dots to opportunities at Gearflow that bring real innovation to our customers. Speaking regularly holds me accountable and pushes me to learn ahead of the curve, ensuring I remain relevant and impactful day-to-day. Every talk is a journey of discovery, helping me to lead with humility, communicate clearly, and inspire a culture of innovation through a deep, technical understanding of our work.

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Stop playing Tetris with your teams and projects. Investing heavily in meticulous planning to try and achieve the fantasy outcome of multiple teams, schedules, budgets, people, and projects aligning perfectly to meet your overly ambitious and tightly packed agenda is doomed to fail. The odds of that succeeding are slim-to-none yet, it's what we default to when there's so much we want to do. Do more by doing less! 1) Reduce WIP: Work on less things in parallel, not more. 2) Prioritize: Work on only the thing(s) that will deliver the most value the soonest. Will this guarantee success? No. But, the odds of success are orders of magnitude higher than trying to plan for a perfect game of Tetris. John Cutler's latest installment of The Beautiful Mess, "The Failure Threshold" explains this beautifully. How many of you have been in the following situation (pulled from his post): "If George and Ina each allocate 50% time to Project Thunder, and then Lenny does 10% time combined with moving the two open reqs to Team Apollo and hiring those roles in the next two months, we should—if we sort of combine Project Thunder and Project Inferno—be able to finish Thunder, Inferno, and chip away at Homestead so that when The Hex Pistols are done with the event streaming re-architecture and Project Kafka-esque, assuming Xenia approves the design document, we should be able to hit the deadline for Project Sycamore as promised in the 2023 annual plan."

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Now we have two first class data catalogs integrated with MS Fabric now available in Azure. Of course DataBricks is the heavy heavy favorite in the enterprise lakehouses as well as AI (as of the conference that just finished 🤓)

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It's been very cool watching this go from idea to reality. I'm glad to see this new tool making its way to customers! Check out the blog to see how you can use it to experiment with #RAG applications using #Elasticsearch

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Worth the time to read in depth. https://lnkd.in/edtPp7RE

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New blog post: The little things that got me into stream processing (https://lnkd.in/gU7Ba5Ym)

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Join us in Irvine on July 17th at 6:30 PM for our latest OC ACM talk, "Systems and Software for Averting an Energy Crisis" presented by Bill Gervasi, a Principal Systems Architect for Wolley Inc. For more info or to RSVP click here: https://lnkd.in/gquYQ2z9 According to a recent Forbes article, "The rise of generative AI and surging GPU shipments is causing data centers to scale from tens of thousands to 100,000-plus accelerators, shifting the emphasis to power as a mission-critical problem to solve." making this talk particularly relevant. #acm #techtalk #gpu #ai #generativeai #nvidia #energy #energycrisis

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Excited to share that we just launched Bufstream today! It is a drop-in replacement for Kafka that is 10x cheaper (and simpler) to operate. It deploys into your own cloud without sending anything to Buf. When paired with the Buf Schema Registry (optional, and you can also deploy in your cloud), you get the advantages of end-to-end type safety with Protobuf. Save money and eliminate crap data in your data pipelines! Lots of great engineering work went into this and there are even more exciting things we can build on top of this powerful primitive. We plan on making it easy for Bufstream to write directly to Apache Iceberg tables so that data in your topics are directly queryable without needing to be reprocessed or stored in another system (further saving costs and operational complexity). Check out the blog for more details! https://lnkd.in/gRx5suvY

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Posting this for John Skender and others who weren't able to make it to K24 or at least this presentation at K24. Much of the presentation was a live demo explaining how to use now-sdk but you can also check out the list of features expected for Xanadu+ release which were announced at the show including Sandboxes (controlled availability), Dev Studio Pro-Code, script level granularity (versus scope level) for modern JS features (including global) and the yet to be re-named Fluent DSL for defining ServiceNow metadata as code.

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This tutorial video walks you through what makes ShowMIDI special and highlights some of its features. #mpe #midi #opensource #linnstrument #dataisbeautiful https://lnkd.in/eREJKyzV

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If you ever wanted a TL;DR on why Axiom prefers to store all your events rather than sample whilst enabling just in time query, all at a super low cost, then this podcast is for you! Listen to Neil Jagdish Patel as he speeds through a shorter history of Axiom and how the path we are on evolved and emerged from customer feedback. We are `tooling around` for your faster, better and cheaper event storage needs. So if you like what Neil says then please check us out, and give Axiom a whirl for your o11y and analytics use cases. And if you are attending Monitorama this year please check us out and say hi! #observability #events #eventstore #streaming #o11y #cloud #monitorama

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Clarifying how data privacy is important in the context for RAG application and the control Elastic is giving you down to the lowest data level: in Jeff Vestal's new blog post https://lnkd.in/gSAZwWJY

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CockroachDB 24.1 is here! I'm excited about this release because 241 is the older of the twin primes 239 and 241, but most importantly because we built this release for organizations who need to reduce operational complexity, enhance developer productivity, and keep their data secure and resilient. We made migrations simpler, with improved SQL compatibility as well as updates to our migration tool MOLT Fetch. If you’re still running on a legacy database and want to make the leap, CockroachDB can help support your cloud-native migration. We designed this release so you can spend less time on database management and more time building. CockroachDB 24.1 features enhanced support for UDFs, Stored Procedures, Read Committed transactions, CDC Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Azure Event Hub, and our CockroachDB Cloud Terraform Provider. We didn’t forget about resilience or security either. Cloud clusters are now officially backed by a SLA of 99.999%. You can organize roles and permissions with Folders and increase security controls with support for GCP Private Service Connect. And Self-Hosted customers can use Physical Cluster Replication with fast cutback to reduce risk from major incidents or disasters. This post is just scratching the surface of the impressive work the Cockroach Labs team has done in making this release possible, so dive into the blog below for an in-depth look at what’s new. https://lnkd.in/efwZCwr9 

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🌶🌶🌶 Hot take… Old problem: if we put more devs on the project, we can deliver it sooner. Same thinking, new manifestation: we can hire more overseas devs for less total money to produce the same result as our US staff. Flaw in that thinking: product development is not an assembly line. Devs are not “interchangeable”. Software is as much an art as it is science. It’s a team sport. The people on your team matters. #tech #staffing #management #hiring #jobs #layoffs #software #startup #teamleadership

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I'll be at #PlatformCon24 in a few weeks to moderate a panel discussion on Architecting the Future: Platform Strategies for API Adoption & Impact. I am eagerly looking forward to learning more about how API leaders from Wayfair, The New York Times and Cox Automotive have led digital transformation with Apollo GraphOS to yield tremendous impact for their users and their business! RSVP if you'd like to join in person! #ApolloFederation #Platformengineering #APIOps #GraphQL

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Over the course of each month, I spend a few moments each day or so collecting interesting links, and then, at the end of the month, I bundle them (with the help of some nifty automation scripts) into an easily digestible reading list. Here's everything that I found interesting in May 2024 about the Elixir programming ecosystem: #qfm #quantumfaxmachine #blog #elixir https://lnkd.in/eVwqy6Tf

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We now have auto-generated documentation for our #protobuf and #grpc API's at LittleHorse! For most day-to-day activities, such as building a WfSpec or executing TaskRun's, you won't actually need to use our protobuf API directly. However, at LittleHorse we believe in empowering engineers to use either high-level abstractions or low-level nuts and bolts as they please, so we expose a GRPC API which is intimately related to the internals of LittleHorse. If you're curious about it, check out the documentation! You can find it here: https://lnkd.in/gBqBqKKr And side note, below is the most tricky line of code(?) I've ever written. It's the part that generates the pretty docs for you: https://lnkd.in/gZwDMfVp

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Meta 's relentless pursuit of "compute" ... by "the end of 2024, we’re aiming to continue to grow our infrastructure ... 350,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs". Total Power Consumption = 350,000 * 700W = 245 MW For every 2W, you need 1W for HVAC so est total 370 MW. That is equivalent energy to power the whole city of San Francisco. src: https://lnkd.in/gUP49eFZ Supplemental: The average electricity customer in San Francisco, CA uses 729 kWh of electricity per month, and 8,748 kWh over the course of the year. Given that there are approximately 361,222 households in San Francisco, we can calculate the total power consumption for the city 361 Megawatts of power.

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💡Sumo Logic’s #MLOps methodology helps accelerate machine learning-based features. Read on to discover how you can adopt this framework for your production-grade features.

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