Founding a company is one of the most rewarding things you can do. There’s nothing like the feeling of a fresh start. You create a new notion workspace, and you have an empty canvas. There are no mistakes there yet; there are no downsides. You can only go up from there, which is a fantastic feeling. You start writing, prototyping, and coding with the energy you get from visualizing where you want to go from here.
You have decided you want to start a software startup. You have secured (some) funding, and now you need to build a product MVP.
Hi, I’m Sebastian! I am currently working as a Staff Engineer @ Forethought.ai.
Worked on the platform team, building services and infrastructure that power all the company’s products. I Automated Elasticsearch management, index resizing, and refreshing with zero-downtime migrations. Architected and led the execution of the service that proxies all machine learning model inference requests for all products handling more than 28M reqs/day. Led the initiative for exposing controls across all products to customers through self-serve mechanisms with authentication and authorization built-in Designed and Implemented circuit-breakers to avoid service exhaustion when downstream microservices fail. Laid out foundations for reusable components for internal tools used in various internal applications across teams, including machine learning training and deployment.
A couple of weeks ago I had an interview and the owner of the company asked me: “Are you using ES6?“. I said no. And he said “Why not?“. I couldn’t find a good reason not to use it, and lots of reasons to do it. It doesn’t matter if you are just starting out or have been developing for 10 years now. if you are developing for the web, you are using JavaScript and you should move to ES6. The new version is supported by the latest versions of all browsers, so download the latest version of your favorite browser and let’s start coding!
Note: While this might be true 99% of the time, always trust your instincts.
I am a Systems Engineer and developer with more than 6 years of experience. I started my career at a small web development studio that outsourced engineers to work at a large agency in upper NYC. I applied with zero background experience and only a few semesters in engineering; I was hired after completing a few Java programming exercises correctly. Whether I was hired with low expectations to do trivial parts or to learn to develop something is still being determined to this day. What is clear is the results a few months there had in me.
We live in a software revolution. It is just a matter of when it will explode. What happened a very long time ago with (big) hardware in the industrial revolution is going to happen again with software (and then again with ai). We live in a day where Machines aren’t specific anymore. A 3D printer can make a piece designed to be made by a machine half the world away. We don’t need to import highly specialized machinery from Germany to build car parts. We can print metal, circuits, and everything, anywhere. We will need the design of that required piece, and we’ll be able to print it anywhere from Australia to Manhattan.
“Crypto Wars” is the name of the US government’s attempts to limit the public’s and foreign nations’ access to cryptography strong enough to resist decryption by national intelligence agencies. Restricting access means weakening encryption to allow the government to intervene in any encrypted information. The people won the crypto wars in 2005 and were allowed to encrypt as desired.
As we progress toward better software, reading has become one of the most important things to do. Practice makes perfect, yes. Implementing all sorts of algorithms makes you the wizard of that specific language. But it is reading that expands your mind on new concepts. This time, it’s Joel on Software. Almost every programmer I know has heard of Joel’s blog. And yet, very few have read it deeply.
It’s that time of the year again! Excitement about new devices, leaks, and thousands and thousands of recent blog posts are reviewing the releases. This year it will be all about the new MacBooks and how quickly it is catching up!