erikwiffin

Even more un-fathomable, Mozilla's CTO has been writing a substack with the underlying theme of "if the AI isn't running on your hardware, you don't own it" https://newsletter.ownersnotrenters.com/

They're still 100% cognizant! And yet.

SlimeBallBench was not me, but it is cool! and at least partially what inspired me to build my own.

Mine is less fun, but hopefully more useful https://erikwiffin.github.io/memory-reasoning-eval/

Selling to labs is more than I'm looking for. I'm aiming for a couple hundred dollars so I don't have to finance a Fable vs Sol run out of my own pocket. It would be cool to have my benchmark be one of the ones referenced in a model card!

I've developed a benchmark that I think should be resistant to saturation, is easily verifiable, and anecdotally correlates with desirable behavior (ability to not get confused while generating text with state).

I think it's interesting, I think other people would find it useful, but I don't want to spend a bunch of money running it against all the frontier models.

What's the best way to reach out to labs like yours to collaborate on something like that? Are there any labs that are more open to submissions from internet randos?

I actually started with it as a PWA, but ended up rewriting it in react-native. I wanted a couple features (heart rate monitor, lock screen integration) that afaik don't work with PWAs.

Ugh, that happened to me too. But instead of researching other apps and waiting for them to decide to go premium too, I built my own workout app. Been using it for a couple months now and it's working great, but the hassle of publishing it to the app store means that it will only ever be a solution for me and I can't share it with anyone.

As a diver, I'd love to use this and show my friends, but it's a bit hard to get to actual results for a location. Particularly for sharing, if the URL changed to something like `/diving/location/{lat},{lng}`, it would be helpful so I can drop a link in a group chat for "here's the conditions we'll be seeing later".

  Location: USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, Typescript
  Résumé/CV: https://erik.wiffin.com/
  Email: [email protected]

Fractional Tech Lead with 17 years of tech industry experience. I work with early stage and bootstrapped companies to help them establish a solid technical foundation. Whether that's building your MVP, your first engineering hire, or setting up an SDLC that gets out of the way so your team can focus on what they do best.

When I first moved into management, I wrote an article about how my direct reports could get more value out of our 1:1s. I'd probably write something different now, but the broad strokes remain true. https://erik.wiffin.com/posts/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-you...

1. Don't make it a status update. It's your time, and that's probably not the best use of it. 2. Spend some time figuring out what you want to get out of our 1:1s. If you don't know, tell me that, and I'm happy to work with you to figure it out. 3. End the conversation with next steps/action items. It's easy for me to say something that you interpret as a promise even if I didn't mean it that way and calling out action items explicitly is a good way to keep that from exploding into a huge problem.

This is asking a lot from you, but in your situation, I think your goal should be to build up enough of a relationship with your manager that you feel comfortable telling them that, or realize that that's never going to happen at your current company and find a new job.

I have reports who have told me that they're happy doing what they're doing. I don't see it as a negative at all - they're employees who are quietly getting their job done and I don't have to worry about them leaving for career growth or Peter Principle-ing them into incompetence. It's important that we continue to have 1:1s though. People aren't static, they can change their mind, and I also want to make sure I keep an ear out for little things that are annoying them, and do what I can to make them go away.

Ironically, the feature that keeps me from using Goodreads is that I want it to be less social. Do you have the option for private bookshelves?

If Bob had a plan for doing the work that didn't involve Alice's library, there's a good chance he would have just jumped straight in to implementation without talking to anyone, and maybe the library wouldn't have come up until code review (if at all). By identifying the complexity mismatch ahead of time, they saved 3 points worth of effort. This doesn't affect sequencing at all, but still seems valuable to me.

I've always done planning poker with the Fibonacci sequence - 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. The idea being that the more complicated the task, the harder it is to estimate accurately.

I think there's value in that debate (within reason) even as a developer. If Alice thinks a task is worth 5, and Bob thinks it's worth 8, then there's a good chance one of them knows something the other does not. Is Bob aware of some hidden complexity that bumps it up 3 points? Or is Alice familiar with a convenient library that solves exactly that complexity? Planning poker is a convenient time to get that knowledge out into the open.

Again, this is all within reason, and if it takes 15 minutes on every ticket, the team should probably work on their communication skills.

I made this transition recently, and felt compelled to write about it. https://erik.wiffin.com/posts/missing-manual-professionalism...

One of the things I noticed is that all of the "how to be a good developer" books/blogs/etc felt much more targeted at product orgs - there's a real lack of "advice" for people working at agencies. That being said, maybe I just don't know where to look, and someone in this thread will point me in the right direction.

It may be the worst domain name ever, but the site only exists because I thought that using "0" as a subdomain was a neat trick, and worked back from there to figure out what to do with it.

FWIW - the only way I can ever find my own website is by searching for it in my github repositories. So I definitely agree, it's not a terribly memorable domain.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've updated the text.

That's interesting, I had no idea. There's probably a way more detailed Rosetta Code style project that could cover all these nuances, but for a single page demo, there's only so much detail I can get into before it would be more confusing than helpful.

If you'd like to flesh out the perl section a bit though, maybe include the differences between 5 and 6, I'd be happy to merge a pull request.

Oh Excel... I'd love to see that up on the site, mind sending me a pull request? https://github.com/erikwiffin/0.30000000000000004

That's 90% of the reason this site exists.

That's valid, but I was going for an ELI5 style explanation of a concept that surprised and confused me at the time. If you want to provide a better one, I'm happy to merge any pull requests.

The expression comes from a measurement of visual acuity, the correct notation would be 20/20.

I think you're misunderstanding what "10x developer" is supposed to mean. The impression I've gotten is that they are considered to be 10 times as productive because of the work they don't do. They write code that has less bugs, is more scalable, requires less refactoring, is easier for other developers to understand, etc. You'd never see it in LOC or sprint points completed, but there'd be a noticeable difference of pace between a project of 10x devs and a project with 1x devs.

Research Square - Durham, North Carolina and remote - www.researchsquare.com

# About Us

Research Square (est. 2004) helps researchers succeed through our world-class technology enabled services. We are home to the American Journal Experts, Rubriq, and JournalGuide brands, which provide solutions that help researchers communicate their work so they can get back to making discoveries. Research Square is a dynamic company with a global reach, located in the West Village area of Durham, NC.

We have challenging opportunities for bright, hardworking, and self-motivated developers. The focus of this role will be on the back end, with occasional front-end work, utilizing PHP & MySql. We are looking for mid- to senior-level developers who exhibit personal humility and who strive to enable the success of their team in our fun and collaborative environment.

We do agile development running 2-week sprints. You will have time to write your unit tests, your code will be reviewed by peers, and it will be pushed to production on a weekly basis. What you create will get used!

# Software Engineer

http://researchsquare.theresumator.com/apply/lCMdO2/Software...

As a developer you will be working on a variety of projects for both internal and external clients, including building web applications, APIs, search and social integration tools, and data analysis tools; maintaining existing PHP code; optimizing MySQL queries; and developing custom PHP solutions. For this position, we are seeking applicants with 3+ years of PHP development experience.

Requirements

  + 3+ years of PHP or OOP development
  + 3+ years experience with relational databases
  + Understanding of MVC design principles
  + Familiarity with Git or other DVCSes
  + BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience

Bonus Points

  + Experience with multiple programming languages
  + Experience with Zend Framework / Slim Framework
  + Experience with Agile Development
  + Experience with Doctrine
  + Experience with JSON, REST and APIs
  + Experience with JavaScript (jQuery)

Not just alcohol. An interesting observation in An Economist Gets Lunch (one of my favorite books on food) is that Prohibition is responsible for putting many great restaurants of the era out of business (restaurants make money on alcohol). The remaining restaurants adjusted to a more "family-friendly" palate, (think grilled cheese, chicken nuggets, and cheeseburgers) and away from more subtle flavors.