June Yi

West Point | Software Engineer

Trying stuff. Some will work, some won't. But always learning.

[June Yi @JuneYi]

"Using Antigravity’s custom skills framework, we packaged this entire multi-stage workflow into an open-source skill"

alright, i enjoy and appreciate rust too, but creating a skill dedicated to RIIR....never wouldve believed google would be the one to lead this cult community

[Google Antigravity @antigravity]

Earlier we shared a look at translating legacy Fortran into Rust. Here’s the deep dive into our exact process.

Read here: https://t.co/4T4QlhZQqF

[June Yi @JuneYi]

@Yuchenj_UW can we throw in unit tests into that pile as well? :D

[June Yi @JuneYi]

this reminds me of a time where an engineer got so angry when a coworker broke an app functionality by making a change to an API, and was the catalyst that led to establishing smithy contracts as a mandatory prerequisite for any new apis or modifications to an older API.... forever. we're talking about less than 20 engineers here and already it takes two pull requests to make a change or addition

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

You CANNOT fix CULTURE with PROCESS.

Earlier this year, one of my sales managers slacked me a new Google Form. Every sales engineer (SE) would have to fill it out before every customer call. FOREVER.

I get why he created it.

A rep on his team showed up to a call the prior week unprepared. The SE was there too, just as unprepared. He spent the call asking the customer questions we should have known the answers to before we ever dialed in.

They wasted the customer's time.

So he did what most managers would do: "I'm going to create a process so this never happens again - so now before an SE or an AM gets on a call to show the product, they have to fill out this form."

Then he spent his Saturday - his Saturday - building a 14-question intake form. Required for every SE. Before every customer call. FOREVER.

That is not the answer. You don’t fix unprepared reps with a form.
You build a culture where nobody shows up unprepared in the first place.

Every process you add is a TAX.

And you CHARGE that tax to every person on your team who never had the problem - every day, forever - to fix the one person who shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Stack enough of those and you end up with processes on top of processes and everything slows down.

Some processes are worth the tax. Most aren't. This one wasn’t, so I told him to kill the form and do this instead:

Before you build a process, say the standard OUT LOUD.
Get the team on a call, tell them what happened and tell them what the standard is.

In our case: ���Competing with ZoomInfo should be a DAUNTING experience for ANY of our competitors. This is NEVER acceptable. Showing up unprepared to a customer call doesn't live up to that. Full stop.”

Point back to that standard every time someone misses it. Let the people who can't meet it self-select out.

Manager: "But Henry, what if it happens again?"

Then it happens again. And you have the conversation again. Louder this time.

Process fixes broken systems - it doesn’t fix broken standards. Start with the standards.

[June Yi @JuneYi]

been wondering about this a lot these past couple weeks. at least for now you can start with disqualifying signals like if they ever start a response with "my robot is saying..."

[Jean-Denis Greze 💡 @jgreze]

This is one of the hardest skills to hire for in tech right now.

We have someone at Town who's so good at using AI that I'd happily hire 5 more of him. But it's really hard to find people like that and even harder to figure out how to interview for it.

How can you figure out if someone has that ability in a couple of hours?

I believe interviews are a pretty contrived way to evaluate people. So to test for this "AI gene", I put a lot of weight on whether someone is smart, hungry, and spends a lot of time tinkering with these tools.

The best way to see that is to see how they ALREADY use AI in magical ways.

https://t.co/B1WsfZuz05

[June Yi @JuneYi]

I just recently created a new corporate account and can't believe how different expectations are today. cuz I don't have much ratings on the account, it's easier to see my score of fluctuate based on the rides. I don't talk much during the ride and honestly like to sometimes just sit in silence but for whatever reason, every so often, I get a low rating because of that.

most recently I got a low rating from the driver after he tried to engage in a conversation about the upcoming midterms which I just simply said I'm not following on all the details but tried to be polite and ask him a few of the things he's excited to see changed.

[June Yi @JuneYi]

you absolutely do have a say in the roadmap. key trait of an FDE should be an ability to develop rapport and trust with the customer and be able to influence product direction. most companies get this wrong by hiring for fde title but focusing purely on technical skills in candidates

[June Yi @JuneYi]

trying to figure out what the correct response should be after opening a PR containing +20k LOC spread over 200+ files...

[June Yi @JuneYi]

there are those who lean heavily on ai and then there are those who lean heavily on ai

one understands a suite of complementary tools that make up their overall harness ecosystem including its limitations, the other I find often as meat proxies

[June Yi @JuneYi]

the doordash founders were really just great FDEs starting out

[June Yi @JuneYi]

@Tailscale can't quite put my finger on it but something about this site, whether it's the spacing, color choices, or the font, feels really nice to read on mobile

[June Yi @JuneYi]

@nbbaier @eatonphil for the interested - https://t.co/vF63WbVTwg

[June Yi @JuneYi]

@davidgomes @modal this was a fun read. really liked the initial whiteboard picture they added. must've been a fun session to be in

[June Yi @JuneYi]

best thing i've read this month. this is what it takes

[Glauber Costa @glcst]

Almost every single time I released something in my career, I see people saying: you are clueless. You don't understand the space. You don't know what I am doing.

In the early days of the Turso Cloud, there was this guy here that would every now and they remark that "Turso keeps building the wrong thing", always followed by an explanation of what SQLite *IS*, what is good at, what is not good at, how people use it, etc. Turso now has almost one signup every 5 minutes, and 700,000 databases were created in our cloud this week.

On the rewrite of SQLite itself, the common accusation was that we didn't understand that people use SQLite because of its reliability, and any rewrite would fail because it had no access to their test suite. We took Turso out of beta last week and power many production users already.

Before that, it was Scylla, a rewrite of Cassandra. We were roasted by many, who said that we were morons who didn't understand that Cassandra was I/O bound, so any improvements in the CPU architecture were pointless. Scylla was 10x faster than Cassandra in real life.

My first experience of that was when at Red Hat we patched QEMU to be the virtualization layer for the device abstraction for the KVM Hypervisor. I was 19 at the time, and being part of the team I submitted a talk to a local conference, who rejected me saying that QEMU was an emulator, and I didn't even seen to understand the different between virtualization and emulation if I was conflating the two.

The common thread in all of those is always the same: people getting dead set in their ways, always looking at the world as it is, completely unable to understand that if you just tweak things, most things can be very adaptable. Things can reach new heights. They can be used in different ways.

[June Yi @JuneYi]

i have no way to back this up but i feel using my personal api keys over company provided keys has added higher roi in the long term. I'm much more prudent about how I use it, how I plan, the limitations, the difference in latest models from all major competitors, what goes in .md files (less is more)...etc

I've tried the latter for a week or two and I felt myself just getting complacent and sloppy. perhaps this is a me issue, but I can't unshake the thought 💭

[June Yi @JuneYi]

@samlambert @sammysintech that and other men fashion subreddit i could never get on board. im not a fashion person by any items and have no clue on whats what and so i dont want to demean those folks but i just couldnt see what they were seeing

[June Yi @JuneYi]

I think it's a product decision trade-off. may not fit all users, but I'm sure they have a targeted audience theyre focusing on and its a risk theyve decided to assume in order for a better experience for the intended demographic... I know you and others may not agree but only time will tell how it plays out

[June Yi @JuneYi]

@JPoehnelt that last article was a great read. not so much on the mechanics or design of CLIs (there's technical docs/blogs everywhere...) but I really liked the focus on the difference in how an agent thinks or minimally requires vs. how a human operates or consumes energy

[June Yi @JuneYi]

i constantly see posts about scaling like this and dont understand why i've met so many sr engineers who insist that postgres is the bottleneck and nosql is the solution. i'm being massively deceived by someone. lesson here though is i need to clamp down and study

[Sam Lambert @samlambert]

@hazzngn OpenAI proved postgres can scale pretty far on read workloads. They did not prove postgres can scale write workloads. the posts own solution to write scaling is to move those workloads to cosmo. not much of a lesson here.

Luckily Neki fixes all this.

[June Yi @JuneYi]

never would've guessed that wanting to be able to stop or at least speak up against seemingly bad system decisions is what has pushed me to habitually crack down on studying DDIA