Kayla Hanson

In honor of mental health awareness month, I wanted to shed light on remote work struggles I don’t often see discussed but see the impacts of. As I was writing this, I realized a lot of this also applies to those who have been laid off and are struggling each day to keep moving forward. For those who don’t have time to read the full article it can really be boiled down to: - Remote work is an amazing privilege but requires lifestyle and mindset changes to thrive. - The longer you go without discomfort and challenging yourself, the harder it becomes to do so. - We need to be way more intentional than we used to be working in an office.

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Since I've had to update my game Auto Jump recently for mobile. I've started playing with getting it ready to run on consoles. Adding controller support has been fun so far. Current gamedev tools I use are Visual Studio 2022, Graphics Gale, Unity, Unreal Engine, Onenote, and Azure Devops. #gamedev #gamedeveloper #unity3d

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I’d love to know if anybody has a go-to resource/strategy for mocking technical interviews? I’ve always been a fan of Pramp, and it’s been great for behavioral interviews. But more recently, I’ve been trying it for front-end interviews, and my experience has varied wildly. The worst being, I had to leave a mock interview because my peer just started coding silently for almost thirty minutes and would shrug off any questions I asked 😮   I mostly just need that practice with a real human being. My biggest struggle right now is that my brain acts a bit differently once I’m in a real interview. I overthink things; I try, and usually stumble, to come up with the best solution off the bat, which I recognize is not what you're supposed to do. I think I just need to slowly break down that barrier through consistent practice. Anyway, I hope your having a great Monday, and I wish you all luck in your interviews 💪 #interviewing #pramp

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Using HeyGen you can create very realistic avatar of yourself (or use their avatars) and provide scripts for the avatar to read. Additionally, you can choose other voices along with translations to other languages. In this particular use case, I used an OpenAI assistant with a vector store to create a script and then sent the script to HeyGen to animate an avatar of myself. https://lnkd.in/gRx3Dd9H

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I suppose it is safe to say now without jinxing it, because the official internal org chart has been updated. This past week was my first in a new role at Microsoft. I joined a group of folks working on the personal version of Microsoft Teams, aka "Teams for Home." Everyone has been warm and inviting. I even got to jump into the deep end via a forwarded meeting about craft and quality. https://lnkd.in/gwmyx3bv Practically speaking, this means at any given time I will probably have four versions of Teams running. – Teams for Home: desktop app – Teams for Home: web app – Teams for Work: desktop app – Teams for Work: web app [Insert joke about meeting fatigue here.] I will miss working with SolidJS, and having front-end discussions (arguments?) with Cody Lindley. Thankfully, we both landed under the same overarching umbrella of consumer facing chat products, so he is still just a DM away. #microsoft #msteams #newjob

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I just added hires fix for SDXL to yet-to-be-released new version of Cremage. Hires fix significantly improves image quality by scaling the image after the txt2img stage either in latent space or pixel space, and processing it in the img2img stage. VAE was throwing OOM when batch size > 1, so I switched to processing samples one by one just in VAE. I started using SDXL heavily when I started using Fooocus quite a while ago. Image quality is so much better than SD1.5, so it's hard to go back to SD1.5. I think I'm getting real close to releasing this new version of Cremage. The new version has many improvements not just SDXL, especially if you have switched to a recent type of higher-quality SDXL models that require you to enter "score_9, score_8_up", etc.

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I've been hard at work, getting ready to stand up Pixel Valley! Got a lot done on the conversation engine and created a quick StreamLit app to test it. Doesn't look like much, but I feel this is a big deal because it is "not just another chatbot". As you can see here, I am having a coherent conversation with an entire group of agents, that are each responding or not responding as appropriate. This was created with off-the-shelf gpt-3.5-turbo. Instead of using expensive fine tuning, it is accomplished using a combination of clever prompt engineering, RAG, and AI function calling. It's getting close!

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I've always been interested in big projects, and I've spent my career in what's now called "deep tech" or "hard tech" so far. I've worked on projects varying in size and scope, but they all have one thing in common: they never work out as we expect, hope, or plan. How do big things get done? How do projects succeed without exceeding schedule and budget? I'm still learning by trial and error, but this book has provided me with lots of food for thought. If you've read it, I'd love to hear about how this applies to your work! #engineering #hardtech #deeptech #projectmanagement

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If you are a developer laid off during the #Techpocalypse and are grinding through a job search right now, remember to take time to nurture the creative part of you that drew you to software development in the first place. Find a personal project and spend some time on that every day. Here's mine: I'm building my own browser extension to pull data from my application spreadsheet and highlight the LinkedIn listings for jobs I've already applied to (often discovered through other platforms). It's not spectacularly complex or anything, but it's useful to me and it's keeping me sane. (Frontend colleagues and former employees: please excuse the backend-engineer-uses-css asthetic)

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🔍 We're hiring again at Centaur Labs which means I'm reviewing lots of applications... a process I actually enjoy! One thing I'm noticing is most cover letters don't mention anything about the company and what we're working on, E.g.: "Dear sir, I'm excited to apply to the React Engineer position. I have X years of experience as a front-end developer and I'm an expert in Typescript. I'm looking forward to learning more!" 💌 My advice is to do some research on the company you're applying for, then write a blurb on why your unique blend of skills, experience, and attitude is a great fit for THIS role at THIS company. A thoughtful cover letter is an easy way to get the hiring manager's attention and increase your odds at an interview. *Edited to add: this advice is very specific to startups, where mission is so important! #interviewingtips #developerjobs

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Just finished reading this article: https://lnkd.in/gZBdw89Y It was great, and I've got some thoughts I wanted to write down. So LinkedIn, you get to see my ramblings. 1) Netflix can and probably will win the live-streaming competition in the long term. Live streaming is begging for some new life and as someone who watches many streams, the encoding is a big issue. I'd love to be a fly on the wall as they work on these problems. 2) Imagine if Netflix had never invested in this work. There is a potential that Netflix is not the powerhouse we see today. The article talks about how users didn't notice a change to the encoding even if there were some flaws. I've been in quite a few meeting rooms where the investment into things the customer wouldn't see is often overlooked. The investment into things behind the scenes makes successful technology companies different. Anyone can throw stuff on a web page, what are you doing to differentiate and come up with new ways of doing things? 3) This is a great way to look at and utilize AI. Too often you see companies trying to use AI on the surface. We see it introduced as chatbots, workflow consultants, and personal assistants. The future is more about how we utilize AI to test things at scale and with some personal touches. 4) Lastly, what an interesting use of testing to help improve the product. Testing is generally looked at as a way of ensuring code quality or trying to reduce bugs. I love the idea of using testing as a way for working through the development process. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

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Backstage from Spotify hosted a "Roadmap webinar" today. Spotify Portal for Backstage was the clear 💫 superstar 💫 of the presentation. I talked to several teams using Backstage recently, to varying degrees of success. All have struggled to get over the initial hurdle of adding catalog-info.yaml files to each of their repos. It's clear that Backstage's evolution is hitting the right notes here. That said, I'm still skeptical. Will opening PRs and providing simple context be enough to help these teams actually get the benefits Backstage? Backstage comes with massive amounts of ongoing maintenance that Portal doesn't tackle, and legacy setups and monorepos that probably every team has somewhere in their infrastructure don't quite fit into Backstage's perfect world one-click setup model. Spotify is walking the line between: - Full extensibility with massive effort to setup and maintain - Highly opinionated, easier to setup, but fewer capabilities Clearly I think Backstage is on the right track, but I'm not sure how they're going to pull it all together. How will they make the ingested data more meaningful? How will they make their product more accessible, especially those who don't have large DevEx or Platform teams? Do you have your own thoughts about Platforms, Portals, or developer enablement? The last few weeks talking with engineering, platform, and DevEx leaders have been some of the most fun of my career. I'd love to hear from you.

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Ok, curious to get your takes on this: besides LLMs/AI/ML, what do you think are some of the key technical areas for a platform-focused engineering leader to be paying attention to in the near future? Top of my list is primarily three things: Rust, TypeScript, and Serverless. And WASM is somewhat of an emergent focus if we look at the intersection of those three. In fact, from a purely personal interest, it's probably at the top of my list. But slightly lower in a practical, immediate sense.

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I started writing regularly about AI. If you're an innovators or product developer eager to apply the latest in AI, whether you're in a startup or a big company, consider checking https://lnkd.in/gGdW8PYe I won't teach you ML, but I share real-world insights from launching - and sometimes failing at - numerous ML features on a large scale.

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AI recruitment is evolving rapidly, particularly with voice bots. Take a look at our Sam bot conducting a live interview! 🤖 Talkpush #recruitment #AI

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Just submitted a PR that was 95% generated by AI (via Cursor). I visited the file, hit cmd+k, asked cursor to make the change I needed, it wrote the code, and I tweaked it for my need. Repeated in 3 other files. Submitted PR. BOOM.

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I'm seeing a lot of these "expert answers" about frontend development and what does HTML, CSS, and Javascript do. So many of them over complicate it: HTML is content authoring. You are writing a document and should use the tools and formatting available to make it as clearly understood as possible. Most people should be able to write some HTML much like most people can post dross on social networks. However there is a big difference between a coherent, semantically correct HTML doc and some div/span catastrophe. The latter is more like the local racists latest rant with no punctuation, swimming with spelling mistakes, and they've tied themselves in knots over the fact there was once a rainbow flag in Morrisons. CSS is not just about making things "look nice". Yeah it'll make things look better but it's main purpose should be to improve usability, legibility and make your content more understandable. Finally Javascript - Javascript is usually unnecessary and I reckon 90% of the internet could do without it. A lot of the things that Javascript has introduced has made the internet worse, less stable, and less accessible. It's main purpose has been to make frontend development more like a programming discipline, rather than the design discipline it originally was. This is coming from someone who has built their career around frontend development 🤷‍♂️

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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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