Jeff LaBarge

AI is innovating a variety of industries across the US and Agriculture is no exception. 🐄 My new friend, Catie McVey, has created a new "Agtech" startup that uses patented 3D Modeling and Machine Learning algorithms to evaluate the health of cows by looking at specific characteristics such as hoof morphology and facial characteristics. Working with her to architect how to get source data from "The Stockyards" to "The Cloud" has been a lot of fun. I am constantly discovering new ways AI can make an impact in industries from legal, to healthcare and now agriculture! Read more about Catie's journey on RIoT - Internet of Things' blog #AI #software #agtech

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I spoke with Eric Ignasik and Michael Sols from The Software House about dealing with silos at work. 🎙️ We discussed how Technology Managers can help their engineers gain deep operational expertise and take full responsibility for product/feature delivery. The best practices I described in this interview come straight from Payhawk. It doesn’t mean they can simply be copied — but they might be inspiring to some. Happy reading 👋🏼 ➡️ hubs.ly/Q02xn9j-0 #softwaredevelopment #cto #softwaredelivery

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This is a quick way (Bill came in below his 4 minute limit!) to learn more about what we're building with Prak.

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At Speakeasy we love working with devex leaders like Michael Heap to continuously raise the bar for what is "best in class" 🔥 We've been super lucky to work with him on what makes a great developer experience for iac and terraform. Come hear him and Thomas Rooney talk through how you can leverage OpenAPI and your API supply chain to build a provider and unlock the Terraform ecosystem. Link to the livestream in the comments 👇 #terraform #codegeneration #openapi

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If you're running a data or AI-focused startup, connect with Stephan Goupille and his team! When three of the industry's brightest data minds join forces to back your venture, you get more than just funding – you gain invaluable operator expertise. They understand the challenges and opportunities you face because they've been there themselves.

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We've had an EM role open on our team for several months. This is a post about everything we learned from why we haven't filled it yet. I'd love to get your help in filling it! 🤝 The role: - EM for our 0-to-1 team within Postman, with the goal of defining and winning our category for a new kind of API-level monitoring/observability tool. Our team came into Postman through an acquisition and we're now building the Postman version of our product, using the same tech. - Help scale our product and team from alpha into beta. We are a department with six engineers and approved headcount to grow a lot more in the next year. - The role is 60% prioritization/roadmap management, 40% building the team. The current team members are high-ownership, independent, founding engineer types. 🤔 Misconceptions, miscalibrations, and lessons: - Initially, the role was called "Senior Engineering Manager, Observability." Instead of getting the product engineering managers we were looking for, we primarily got interest from platform/infra EMs. We got thousands of inbound applications and spent months zeroing that out. 🙀 - Previously, our recruiters were sourcing a lot of folks with observability backgrounds. We've learned that since we're actually building a new kind of observability product, much more focused on UX, the profile we're looking for is product-focused rather than tech-focused. No observability experience required. - When people think Postman, they often think of our core product: the API client. So we were getting more interest from folks looking to scale a product, rather than 0-to-1 "I want to build a team and product" types. Postman actually has several other products, for instance testing and Flows, our no-code tool. There is a lot of interesting 0-to-1 work on our way to growing as a multi-product platform! - Some people have the perception that Postman isn't one of the high-growth companies because they're not seeing lots of their friends joining Postman. Postman has quadrupled since 2020, BUT a lot of the engineering growth has been in India. (Postman is the biggest SaaS company to come out of India!) Our team is part of a recent change to grow our US engineering presence. Many of us leaders across the company are looking for folks to join early cohorts of US-based product engineering and platform teams. 💡 What we've changed on our end: - We've deemphasized the "observability" part of the job and emphasized the "new product" and "product engineering" parts of the job. - We've also switched our own reachouts to look for people with product engineering experience at SaaS companies with product-led growth. 👩‍🚀 Help us find our EM! We now have a solid pipeline, but haven't yet made a hire. We'd love to hear from you if: - You have thoughts about how to improve our EM search. - You know someone we should meet. - You're a scrappy EM looking for an opportunity to build a new product while growing a team. Look forward to hearing from you!

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Today we're launching our newest candidate quality-of-life feature on Ropes - IDE themes. There's a universal dislike for the rigid IDEs that assessment co's force on candidates. These code editors are slow, clunky, and missing the styes/shortcuts that developers enjoy. Developers are unique, and we work in unique ways. Ropes offers two new options to let candidates keep their style: (1) First, many employers on Ropes allow candidates to work in their own IDEs entirely. We've developed a way to gather insights like you were in the room, while allowing developers to use their daily environments. (2) For cases that need a browser-based IDE - we're giving the ability for candidates to choose their style/editor setup before the assessment starts - so they're comfortable when it begins. --- My bet is that if we build a great experience for candidates, we'll be building a great platform for evaluators, too. I hope you'll follow along as we pursue that mission - and we need help! We're hiring founding engineers in NYC - if you're interested, I'd love to talk to you.

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New on the Review: Conventional wisdom teaches managers to avoid “anti-patterns,” general practices that are deemed unproductive, like micromanaging. But Will Larson, a veteran engineering leader and CTO at Carta, argues that not every anti-pattern is bad, and makes a case for the three that eng execs should explore: 🔍 1) Shying away from micromanaging. “New engineering managers are often advised to ‘step away from the code.’ But an extremely high-functioning exec understands the domain they are operating in at some level of detail,” he says. “As you get too far out of the details, you just become a bureaucrat. Too many well-meaning engineering managers end up as bureaucrats.” 📏 2) Pushing back on flawed metrics. “Often when people start measuring, there's always a concern that their measurement is flawed. And that's true for all functions,” he says. “But I’m a believer in measuring something imperfect, but useful, versus holding out for the perfect metric while measuring nothing in the interim.” ☔ 3) Serving as the umbrella for your team. “In the past, I used to think I was energizing my team by sparing them the details. But now it feels like lying to them,” he says. On a tactical level, Larson adjusted this habit by buffering less information. “That means even if it’s disappointing for folks, I’d rather them process news bit by bit, rather than deal with a huge ocean of mess all in one moment.” Link to the full article in the comments.

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If you have a YC interview coming up - reach out and our team of YC Alumni can help set up some mock interviews

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Does anyone out there know of a service that makes managing localized pricing for IAP on the App Store and Google Play easier? Ideally a tool that would handle bulk changes, make recommendations for rounding to user-friendly numbers, and make it easy to implement those changes. Something like Corrily, but for IAP?

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Check out my new teaser on Control Plane's immutable audit trail! Control Plane's audit trail service provides an immutable record of all resource mutations, whether initiated by the API, CLI, UI, Terraform, or other means. Users can leverage a user-friendly interface to search, filter, and review these actions, gaining visibility into timestamps, resource details, user information, and raw event data. Apply filters to refine the displayed actions based on resource type, audit context, resource name or ID, subject name, and date range, streamlining the audit review process and ensuring compliance with ease. #cloudsecurity #audittrail #devops #multicloud #cloud #SRE #devsecops

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Have you ever thought about how compliance laws are a lot like design systems? I recently spoke with Joe Toscano, founder of DataGrade, and he made a fascinating comparison. Joe explained how Brad Frost's atomic design methodology took an engineering approach to design: → Creating standardized elements → Templatizing them → Scaling them across a system This led to the rise of human interface guidelines (HIGs) from tech giants like Google, Apple, and IBM. But here's where it gets really interesting: Joe argued that privacy laws and regulations are like the ultimate HIG for product design. Just like how HIGs provide rules and constraints for design systems... Compliance laws set guardrails for what we can and can't do with user data. If we design something that isn't compliant, it doesn't matter how sleek the UI is. Legal requirements become the top-level framework we have to design within. That's what got Joe into studying laws - to understand this new "design system" for building products. So next time you're cursing a lengthy legal doc or trying to make sense of GDPR... Remember, it's all just part of the atomic design of compliance. — Do you agree with the analogy of compliance laws as the ultimate design system? Why or why not? Hear more of Joe's unique perspectives on the intersection of product, privacy, and law on the latest episode of The Minimum Viable Podcast.

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𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆-𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰 𝘀𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀! We're conducting a benchmarking study to define success metrics specifically for vertical software companies. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀: Existing SaaS benchmarks just don't cut it for your unique industry needs. This research will provide the data-driven insights to measure and optimize your vertical software business. 𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗽? A few minutes of your time can make a big difference.

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I just posted about Ploze to Product Hunt: https://lnkd.in/ebtktneU - I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look. (Unlock and integrate your digital life using Ploze: Load your data on-device from exports from a myriad of services, and view it all in an integrated searchable timeline. There is no cloud component to Ploze - it works on your computer.)

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In 2021, Pinata launched the first productized offering of Dedicated IPFS Gateways. Before that, developers and consumers of IPFS had to use public gateways that were often slow, rate limited, and a bad reflection of what was possible with IPFS. We launched Dedicated Gateways with all of the comforts that developers had come to expect when working on web scale projects–CDN, edge network, stability, and scalability. Developers could add custom domains to their gateway, they could use multiple gateways across various projects, and they could use these gateways to help query the IPFS network for the booming NFT market. It was literally a gamechanger that we saw many others copy over the years. We've continued to experiment and innovate in the space around IPFS Gateways, and today we're excited to announce the next iteration of that innovation. We're launching Gateway Plugins soon! You can read more about Gateway Plugins and sign up on the interest lists linked in the blog post below. But the tl;dr is this: we're giving Gateways superpowers. We've quietly built our own plugins that every Pinata Dedicated Gateway benefits from today: Access Controls and Phishing Moderation. Now, we're opening up the plugin capabilities of Gateways further. Not only will we be launching three plugins of our own, we will be opening up Gateway Plugins to third party developers. If you're interested in building your own plugins, we'd love to help and enable your vision. There's an interest link in the blog post you should fill out. We saw what innovating around Gateways could do three years ago. Now, I can't wait to see how these plugins change IPFS usage and enhance creativity. https://lnkd.in/gkB8VeZX #IPFS #Web3 #Blockchain

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If you have built and operated an application or service that relies on an operational database in production, you will immediately understand the insane amount of value that these features deliver.

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API Days NYC in May 2023 -- a year ago -- was the first API conference that I attended after founding Speakeasy. After one year, what's changed and what's stayed the same? It's clear that people are increasingly recognising how important it is to invest in APIs. Sessions like Jeremy Glassenberg's on API Product Management and Max Sadlowski's on how Wise was able to overhaul and maintain their API docs illustrates this. I also heard from Michaela Halliwell about how forward-thinking companies like HCSS are devoting more and more time and resources to ensuring a great internal and external API integrations. It's exciting to see the increased focus and attention that APIs are getting. However, there's still a huge gap between where the vast majority of APIs are today (manually / poorly maintained API docs), and what is necessary to deliver on the promise of ease of integration, rapid innovation and low cost-to-serve. We're looking forward to helping companies make a dent here with what we're building at Speakeasy. #apis #devex #sdks

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In November, we released a new product for SaaS companies called Census Embedded – it lets you embed our 200+ integrations directly into your application with a world-class API. We made our battle-tested connectors accessible to any developer. Since then we've helped companies like S&P Global, Metronome & Labelbox add these integrations to ingest/export billions of records. Today, we're making it easier than ever to implement with Embeddable Components. If the v1 was like Stripe's API, this launch is Stripe Checkout/Elements. Developing integrations is challenging because each API has varying requirements – different required fields, nuanced sequences of API calls, weird combos of CRUD operations, and more. We've spent years perfecting the transfer of data between 30+ data sources and 200+ destinations. We’ve solved scalability, reliability, observability, and UI quirks too! We’ve developed a sync and data mapping UI that accounts for the quirks in all 6,000+ combinations of those sources and destinations. Embeddable Components save you the hassle of reinventing the wheel in your own app. Offer your end users full customization of their data synchronization into and out of your app (or thoughtfully constrain those options).

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AI agents represent a new kind of software that demands a new approach to development. At Sierra, we've created what we term the 'Agent Development Life Cycle'—a set of tools and methodologies for building, testing, and maintaining agents that are sophisticated and trustworthy. Read more in the article below. https://lnkd.in/gGzaZxfD

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