🇺🇦 Alex Shteinikov

After 11 years of running a software engineering company, particularly collaborating with clients who had their own engineering teams, I realized that clearly defining how you add value and how the client perceives that value is crucial—especially when that value drives the growth of both companies. In March 2013, we began working with an Australian client that had its own internal engineering team, which we needed to collaborate with. At the time, we were two years into our operations—young, Black, fresh university graduates given a big opportunity. Since then, we've worked with large telecom companies, banks, startups, and Fortune 100+ companies. At this stage of our business, doing things just for the sake of revenue without delivering clear value no longer works. For example, one way we add value is by being equally invested in the client's product because we see a commercially viable opportunity for both of us. Another example is helping to significantly reduce the client's overall capital expenditure. We've put together a list of strategies that can assist engineering teams from different firms. You can find the link in my first comment. Please feel free to share your experiences to help us or others in the community.

34

1 Comment

Thanks to everyone that came to see my talk at ServerlessDays ANZ yesterday! Here are the slides. For those that missed it, here are the main lessons I shared: ✨ LLMs are not magic, they're just another useful tool in a builder's toolkit ✨If you want to be build with LLMs quickly and cheaply, see how far you can go with prompts and RAG. ✨If you need more control than you can achieve with those, you'll likely need to do fine-tuning, tuning or even training, all of which are much more expensive comparably. ✨Plan for your models to change all the time - use Artificial Analysis to navigate the changes ✨Plan for your prompts - version your prompts and construct them independently of inference ✨Getting LLMs to behave consistently for your use case is super challenging, but there are tools like the Seed and Temperature features to help ✨Hacking LLMs to behave outside the intended behaviour is easy, but you can architect around this using techniques like prompt proxies (thanks to Tomasz Tunguz for sharing great design patterns) If you have any questions about building using these tools, feel free to reach out!

31

3 Comments

Since John Allsopp mentioned the View Transitions API at Web Directions Code 2023 in Melbourne, I've been closely tracking its progress. Experimenting with it in Angular Spotify has been a joy. While my PR is still a work in progress for a single-page app like Angular Spotify (https://lnkd.in/gY6zQnBi)), it's exciting to see the View Transitions API advancing to a W3C Candidate Recommendation. Moreover, it now supports multi-page apps (MPAs), with the draft for cross-document navigation currently in public working draft status. This breakthrough means transitioning between pages in traditional multi-page apps, including those built with server-side rendering frameworks like ASP.NET MVC, PHP, Ruby, or static site generators such as Jekyll or Hugo, feels incredible with just @view-transition and view-transition-name in CSS! I've detailed my experiments with the View Transitions API for cross-documents. Check it out 👉 https://lnkd.in/gkRprFxt

33

An interesting article that popped on my LinkedIn feed this morning. My business unit just went through a salary revision exercise and so this one stopped my scrolling finger. According to this article, employees are comfortable with vertical inequality but dislike horizontal inequality in their paychecks. Finding out that their managers got paid more seemed to make employees work harder. But learning that their peers get paid more had a negative effect on their effort and performance Its advice to organizations? Keep salaries compressed among employees in the same position but offer them large raises when they get promoted to a higher position. The authors encourage companies to experiment with pay transparencies after figuring out what their employees want. My take from an employee point of view: I believe in what I call the "Golf model". Compete with yourself and compare against your 'last round' and what you want as your personal best for yourself. If you are close enough to your personal targets, focus on other things that matter for your next. Else, replan and take action. Don't let every new bit of information or rumor about the next person's salary decide if you should be happy today or how much effort you will put into your work that day. Play your own game, improve your own score, and ultimately, seek satisfaction in your own journey. What do you feel about pay transparencies?

26

11 Comments

High-Performance Teams Fail Without This One System I saw this when a startup lost two 2 senior engineers in 6 months. These engineers were part of the core team and were good at what they did. But when they left, so did critical knowledge and framework that took years to develop. It almost felt like their engineering team was starting from scratch again So, if you have(or are building) a talent dense team, ensure you also focus on high-performance systems that compound/sustain output. These 3 steps are a good starting point: 1/ Treat decisions like assets The best teams log every major decision: what they did, why, and the trade-offs. This prevents repetitive debates and accelerates onboarding for new members. 2/ Codify workflows into playbooks 3/ Building a rhythm for knowledge-sharing This is something that most teams overlook. From post-mortems to team debriefs, the goal is to keep insights flowing. Don't let this be sporadic.

19

1 Comment

I’ve been eyeing Appsmith as a replacement for Flutterflow. Does anyone have any experience with both these platforms? How do they compare? I’m curious about Appsmith because it’s open source. My backend is now completely built on open source solutions - Supabase, n8n, Mautic etc. If my front end is also open sourced then I’ll be truly unstoppable. #lowcode #startup

16

7 Comments

# Melbourne Compose - will it prove a worthy successor to Melbourne Scala? Many of you will know that I organised Melbourne Scala User Group meetings for about 12 years. We had some great times! This post is about Melbourne Compose, a successor group to Melbourne Scala that I have started with John Walker, who runs the Melbourne Haskell meetup [https://lnkd.in/gzAmbsH7]. Join the group at https://lnkd.in/gFmDh-nz I believe Melbourne Scala expired due to a combination of - Covid and the post-covid rise of WFH work culture which greatly reduced in-person meetup activity across the city - The lack of a sponsor to cover the steadily rising fees charged by Meetup.com. If you don't payup $300+ a year, they don't just disable new events, they delete the entire group! (er.. no thanks, we'll take our business elsewhere) - A decline in activity around Scala, and functional programming generally, in Australia, (eg the loss of Lambdajam conference :cry:). People asked me afterward whether there would be a future Melbourne Scala, and then John and I got into a fruitful conversation about merging our efforts. We talked about what motivated us to run a meetup/user group in the first place. And we looked at what has been working elsewhere, such as Brisbane's BFPG [https://lnkd.in/gWErd4di] and Sydney's SydFP [https://lnkd.in/gdwn4dqB]. And formed some opinions.. Firstly, the world has a surplus of online content. So much community and content have gone online that there's little demand for more. And do people really want to be on zoom after hours when they already spent the workday online? However, the online experience is not the same as in person (IRL). While online is convenient, it is also lacking the spontaneity and social connection that physical company offers. I find communication via zoom etc plain exhausting, even after much practice. It is suited to broadcast model where one presents and others listen. But spontaneous conversation & collaboration feels stunted. Secondly, it seems that multi -language and-technology user-groups prove more resilient than narrower, focused groups. As well as drawing from a wider base, they can better adapt to evolving technology trends. And so, John and I decided we wanted to focus on a group whose charter spanned the breadth of "Typed Functional Programming" and which includes regular in-person gatherings. We realise that in this post-Covid world, IRL gatherings will likely be small. It's more effort to head out from home, than coming on to a city meetup after the office. But when I think back to some of the early meetings of Melbourne Scala, how awesome they were, and how much I learned and grew from those experiences, I do hope "Small is beautiful". (Cut due to word limit. Continued in Part 2)

18

2 Comments

Building a product for the 1st time has been a 🎢 , but here’s 4 key Aria updates: ↪️ Domain secured & waitlist page soon to be launched ↪️ We’re adding another staff/principal FS engineer to the team (DM me if you want to join an engineering 1st culture, cause GTM without an excellent product is nada) ↪️ We’re building the product alongside our pilot customers & appreciate everyone’s support here (DM if you want to 6.5x your recruitment productivity) ↪️ Have spoken to VC’s & seed investors these past months, and I’m open to this pathway (DM me if you’d like to learn about investing with us). We’re bootstrapping till now. Btw, I’m all in: nearing the end of cash reserves, selling stocks next (even my Nvidia 🫣), selling 🏠 after if needed (homelessness here I come haha). Beyond excited, Abdullah

15

4 Comments

For companies that are pre Series A, you don’t need to hire a CTO. Hiring a CTO too early can cause a number of problems later down the line. The "hands-on" CTO you bring in to lead a five-person team is probably not going to be the right person to scale that team to 30–60 engineers after Series A and B rounds. I've seen startups hire a CTO too soon, hold onto them for too long, and then struggle with scaling issues. In other cases, companies bring in a new CTO post-Series A or B and demote the original CTO, which can disrupt team morale. If you don’t have a technical co-founder, think about adding a technical advisor or a fractional CTO. Ideally someone that can help you hire a CTO once the company is ready

50

13 Comments

There are so many compelling reasons for exercising restraint when scoping what to do, yet because the benefits (and rewards) of not doing are less tangible than the perceived, though presumptive benefits of doing something, the action bias force field can be strong! So here’s a great list of easily overlooked costs to add more heft to the decision

5

18% of all folks who engaged with the Supabase project, made a contribution somewhere in open source. On top of that, they average about 32 unique open-source contributors weekly. We are standing on some business at OpenSauced, shipping faster than we are announcing publicly (we will fix that announcement cadence soon). In this video, I walk through some new insight features of the project. Let me know if you find it useful. #opensource #insights

62

4 Comments

The moment I have waited a long time for has finally happened. They released Age of Empires on Mobile, too bad it was a botched attempt. It’s an AoE skinned city builder game. No unit management for economy. They tease an almost like AoE campaign mode just dumbed down enough to build the nastalgia. Then dump you into the same city builder grind. Just build buildings, and upgrade ad infinitum. They make money the same way all these games do. Selling you chances to get more heros, or guaranteed legendary heros, speedups for upgrades, repairs, protection from other players. Their battle system is a “tactical style” battle like most of these games, there’s limited units on your side, and theirs. You pick the starting location, and the simulation executes. I could almost forgive the city building, if they gave me a true AoE battle experience. Alas, they did not. It’s pretty, I’ll give them that. It has lots of AoE feel astetically, and they have AoE videos and transitions. Some of the transitions suffer from technical problems which are so jarring it actually takes away from the experience. I’m sure they’ll fix it, but disappointed that the FTUE wasn’t polished to perfection. Once I got far enough into the game I was exposed to their news system. They broke the 4th wall and touted that AoE Mobilr was featured on the app stores, and topped the download charts… it’s almost as if there’s a market with femand for an RTS AoE game… so why the hell didn’t they give us it? Overall. Would not recommend. More of the same. It’s lipstick on a pig. The city builder free to play game model is not what old timers like myself who want an AoE experience are looking for. We want the original experience, made accessible on our phones. We’re even willing to pay flat fees out of pocket for it, and for upgrades. But by today’s Mobile game standards this amounts to “leaving money on the table”, as fixed revenue per player is not as appealing as the potential for infinite revenue per player. That said, some companies do this, some recent successes here include Baulder’s Gate, KoTOR, and some of the Final Fantasy remakes.

9

2 Comments

I wouldn't want to managing engineering teams at Atlassian, Canva or Xero right now... Easygo are doing something I've never seen before & offering $100,000 SIGNING ON BONUS for any Tech professional who is working at the above companies to jump ship and join them. They also pay 20% above market on salaries... The majority of briefs I take from scaleups usually ask us to headhunt from these sorts of companies on the sly - but this is the first outward marketing/incentive and blatant talent grab I've ever seen. Anyone managing teams at the above, my terms of business are in your inbox, along with 10,000 floated CV's I've sent in the last 10 years... Engineers head over to: https://lnkd.in/g7eseqjW to claim your sign on bonus! #Wow #EasyGo #Recruitment #SigningBonus #Atlassian #Canva #Xero

39

6 Comments

If you've built with low-latency data in the past, it may have come at the expense of weak consistency guarantees. But some real-life use cases require always-correct results: ❌ You don't want your auth service intermittently giving access to the wrong users. ❌ You don't want to shut down a user's credit card unless you're sure they're the target of an account takeover attack. ❌ And, you don't want to tell users a package has been delivered when it's still on its way. The ✨ good news ✨ is that there are stronger consistency models that we can layer over streaming systems. If you're trying to build real-time applications that need always-correct data, check out my talk at Current this September: "Consistency and Streaming: Why You Care Should About It." For more details, see: https://lnkd.in/gvBMRHSW

24