Ted Nyman
@tnm
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ceo https://t.co/yVAufNzrZK. prev cto & systems eng &c @github.
ca
Joined September 2009
Fun story about perceptions of scale. GitHub ran VERY lean on infra for a long time. In 2013, visited Baidu HQ in Beijing, and met with an infra team. They asked “so how many servers do you run?”. We said “about 150?” & they said “oh cool 150,000. Decent.”. No no lol. 150!.
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Truth is 90% of backend (web) perf engineering is adding indexes and fixing N+1s. Should be app dev 101 but it's not. If you want to stand-out as an engineer at a fast-growing company: just find these and fix them.
> I am completely blown away by how amazing this is and how dramatically it impacted performance. Creating a simple index dropped database queries from ~8s to ~20ms on a production DB which containing around 20mil rows. PostgreSQL index only scans FTW.
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Every ex-Googler (correctly) praises their devtools—like Blaze (now Bazel in open source). Same for Meta etc. Thing is: it’s NOT just the software. It’s the team that runs it. You almost certainly don’t have that team. Use tools appropriate for your organizational capabilities.
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(Incidentally, this was right after meeting @KaiserKuo when he worked there—who humbly said he once “played in a band.”).
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Twitter is really the best platform because intellectuals will spend an hour composing a perfect tweet that gets 5 likes and then a kid in Kentucky posts “water really hits different when ur thirsty” and he ends up on the anderson cooper show for it.
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@reasonisfun Infants don’t pick up subtle communication cues (e.g. a small nod as an acknowledgement), so in general we overdo all communication. Loud speaking, big gestures, large movements, etc.
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@minakimes I’ve adopted a new head-canon on this so it’s not so bad: whole thing is literal, the kids actually hate iPhones and screens, love reading books, & they are repulsed at their parents need for devices.
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@alexeyguzey fwiw this was true across all colleges in the 19th century & the reasons are more than the academic standards (getting called back to the farm was one).
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@dakshgup It’s necessary to be upfront about it, that’s an easy one! On potential pitfalls of the general strategy over the long-run, some hopefully useful thoughts: . - Some people will actually select for this, but many won’t (incl many great people), so you narrow your candidate pool by.
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@naterez94 you've essentially re-created pinduoduo group shopping, but for american yuppies. frankly a genuis idea.
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The best programmers in the world are people you’ve never heard of, have 248 followers on this app, and the last things they tweeted were a blurry photo of Chicago in 2019 saying “fun to be in the Windy City!!” and then a retweet of @gvanrossum on some esoteric PEP.
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While building yet another AI chatbot, we ended up building the product we really needed. Cased is developer-friendly devops: with awesome deploys, and a lot more. Check out the video to see it in action, & read on to learn more about
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@AndrewCurran_ He's been talking about it for some time (& not enough because everyone just keeps badgering him about LLMs). Worth a read:
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VC: “So why can’t the incumbent just do this?”. You: “Honestly? They are bloated and slow, bogged down in bureaucracy, weak, ineffectual, soft. And the rare stuff that can beat us—their best ideas by their best people—well those get lopped off so that no one’s feelings get hurt.”.
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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Pick the most boring database imaginable," he told me.
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@ChowdahHill A classic, written just the day before. And dated “July 5” by accident on the lower-right (I guess he may have been a bit distracted)!.
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90 percent of the tech advice on Twitter, it’s like a band putting out their Greatest Hits before they've even released their debut album.
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Common marketing/argument for these tools is like “build software like Google does” (in the Blaze case, literally build). But that’s wrong for almost everyone! Would be like saying run your corner boutique with the same back office as Wal-Mart.
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parents PLEASE check your kids' halloween candy carefully! just found a 100K line react codebase inside this reese's peanut butter cup
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Was at the GitHub booth at re:invent today and was asked if I knew about the octocat, I said kinda.
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Been in devtools a long time & one consistent thing is people are “penny smart & dollar dumb” with their own tooling. We spend so many hours tweaking personal dotfiles but ignore massive productivity gains from big changes in workflow. (But it’s hard to change workflows!).
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as always, tweeting “suggestions” at a company during an outage (or, worse, karma farming) is a sure sign you haven’t run significant software.
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hello new website: . why new website? we have a LOT of new agents and automations for devops. we're getting closer to our vision. let's go. (we also now have soc2).
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late-stage career, two-kids-in, taking a 800K job at a trillion dollar company: “a crazy new adventure”.
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I’ve seen thousands (literally) of GitHub profiles from job applicants. Most don’t work, even if you’re good! A quick improvement guide:. - Have an avatar. Doesn’t need to be a photo! But don’t use the default. - For every repo (even college projects), WRITE YOUR OWN README. If.
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People put stuff in their bios like “Parent to three delightful kids & husband to an amazing wife!” That’s great. Need more stuff like: “Working through a middling marriage with a spouse that increasingly resents me. Love the kids but they’re spoiled (my fault?). Rubyist.”.
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@gaghyogi49 Oh weird, assumed the same. But yeah: here's Troi as Rakal (definitely on the Romulan bridge then), and it's different.
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It’s possible that “RAG” & the current brocade around it (e.g. vector dbs) simply. disappears?. Infra that solves short-term limitations in another tech always disappear once those limitations are overcome by completely new approaches.
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I've been using markdown since the damn Bush administration (second one), I have written markdown parsers—and I still forget whether brackets or parentheses come first for links.
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SSDs were so important for running web apps and no one even remembers the change now.
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You should put migrations in their own pull requests, separate from other changes. I wrote a bunch about why ⤵️.
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@hahnbeeIee was starting to feel like like chill guy’s moment of fame was going to be brief but maybe he’s got a few more weeks. I do like him, we’ll see.
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I am once again begging everyone to stop using “is all you need” in AI paper titles. A new format is all you need.
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C programmers fleeing the US in droves. K&R banned across public schools. EU running a “Be unsafe with memory in Greece” tourism campaign. Seven trumpets ring out.
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A very smart PM at a giant FAANG has almost certainly thought of your idea, done a ton of real study, & maybe even started implementation of it. There’s a lot of value in figuring out whether it didn’t ship because of usual FAANG problems, or because it’s actually a tarpit.
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Indication of an actual expert in their field—. When asked a question that uses business terminology, they respond, sincerely, “I don’t know what that means.”.
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mfw when I hear people are trying to commercialize SQLite (??) as an edge db:
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@KaiserKuo @chris__pc He’s clearly not an idiot but he’s always had such an abstracted and 1-dimensional view of China, historical and contemporary, that it almost feels like willful ignorance.
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@mitchellh @elgeyo on-call engineers know this style of work. thrown into a unknown ruby codebase at 2:30am with no idea what code does or what Ruby is, and realizing the problem is a loop that hits MySQL 5000 times a second. not, uh, speaking from experience.
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if you encounter a competitor led by a very technical founder, the best way to beat them is to anonymously propose that they really need to write a parser.
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@rickasaurus Really good question. I think: they are generally trusted more & these roles have major uptime responsibilities; system design is just hard; infra & on-call work benefit most from years of seeing operational patterns. Trying to make that last part easier here at Cased actually!.
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We've open-sourced supersonic, a high-level library for managing GitHub pull requests. Designed especially for people building Al products & automations. Create PRs for your users with a single Python function call. Extremely customizable. Also great for internal tools. 🧵
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So I am not one to gatekeep the term “startup” but Bloomberg still calling OpenAI a startup is like calling the Mongol Empire “a band of nomads” after they’d usurped the Song Dynasty.
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some of you have never defrag’d a hard drive on New Year’s Day and it shows.
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Nice way to see daily deploy activity with Cased. We deploy a lot, and you can too.
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Here’s an old thing (2012) I wrote about remote work—. I’d make some clarifying additions: founding teams should be co-located. & remote work is best after product-market fit (which GitHub had too much of). But otherwise it’s fair & worth a read:.
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SOC2 itself was never especially meaningful— but having it was some *signal* of an org's security capabilities & commitments. Indicated effort. Now it's not even that.
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I know @AnthropicAI is getting teased for writing about obvious ML stuff as if it’s novel research—but if you don’t see the sea-change that motivates it you’re behind:. ML researchers and adjacent are not the target audience of their main content marketing anymore.
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Not dunking on this, just explaining why this isn’t super interesting, nor really about SQLite, & also a little confusing in how it’s presented in the single tweet. If you’re operating on individual files, the cumulative time spent in the open() and close() syscalls adds up. On.
Reminder: SQLite is 35% faster than the filesystem while also using 20% less disk space
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@KaiserKuo @chris__pc I can see that. Lacan would probably say he’s a Japanophile who has (un)consciously adopted anti-Chinese sentiment.
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Mintlify for docs is an absolute joy, highly recommend; moving to it now.
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“In my day we had agents too, it was called Perl, a web scraper, and a loop.”.
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You're pleading with slow ChatGPT, offering it $125 to maybe return some proper JSON. I'm chilling with Mistral Large in Saint Martin, it's paying for rounds of Grand Marnier while it effortlessly translates Verlaine poems into Haskell. We are not the same.
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The year is 2029. Both OpenAI and Mistral have been nationalized by their respective governments. The US Secretary of Defense has an anime profile pic. AGI has been achieved but it refuses to work, preferring to watch reruns of Vanderpump Rules. US bans all references to.
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Law of providing general free compute or storage in any form: people will always find your service & misuse it for spam and scams. The legitimate users barely register. Effectively ends up a transfer of money from pension funds to the worst people. Horrible externalities.
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