will harris

fullstack swe prev @linkedin , @joinodf OD50-1, @opensea, 💻 disapora ✈ #atl, #aus, #sf, #mia, #nyc, 🛬

[will harris @boujeehacker]

kinda shy about public stuff like twitter for a long time but here it is

mostly me talkin about tech, remote, building great things working with awesome people, #mia, #atl and #atx along with the other places in my bio, music, whiskey, the NBA, and whatevs comes to mind.

[Heung Min Brad @TracyMcBradey]

Bro

[Shea Serrano @SheaSerrano]

if jalen brunson pulls this off it’s gonna be like a dirk nowitzki level championship where the one championship is actually worth like three championships

[CJB, Esq. @CJoeBlack]

There are two economic philosophies running hip-hop right now. Led by an elite and a counter-elite.

One says the guild decides who's legitimate. One says the audience decides. Jay-Z built one. Drake built the other. Today we talk about how and why this happened

A Thread:

[Cryptid Politics @CryptidPolitics]

The Dallas Mavericks drafting Luka Doncic AND Jalen Brunson in the same draft AND not having either one of them now is generational incompetence.

[Justin E Samuels @ThugDebugger]

What started as only a conference has formed into a movement for more representation for southern technologist. Happy to share that @RenderATL now has our own building in the heart of Atlanta. Expect us to host meetups, workshops and more representing the amazing community in the south!

Thank you to everyone for helping make this happen. From a conference to now a thriving physical community in 6 years. Thank You

#RenderATL

[will o’brien @Willob]

“So you bootstrapped the whole company?”

“Yeah, I turned it down. Turned down the funding.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I turned it down just to do this, just to grind it out, build it myself.”

“So you had an opportunity to take venture money?”

“Yeah, a term sheet and everything.”

“From who?”

“Yeah, a big fund out in Menlo Park. It was a top-tier firm, though. And they offered me like 15, some shit like 10 billion or something like that, 5 billion, something like that.”

“Wait, wait, wait. A term sheet.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, but not 5 billion dollars. They offered you 5 billion dollars for your seed round?”

“Yeah.”

“For a seed round?”

“Yeah.”

“What are we doing here?”

“Like, what the y’all, like, you know what I’m saying?”

“That’s more than the GDP of a small country.”

“But I was so younger, like, I didn’t know what a cap table was.”

“Are you sure they offered you 5 billion dollars?”

“I turned it down.”

“You didn’t even have a product.”

“It was a SAFE, like, I had to give up equity for this decade.”

“But you would get $5 billion?”

“Yeah.”

“You’d be one of the most valuable companies on earth.”

“It was somewhere, it was in the billions, though.”

[Peter Hague @peterrhague]

I’m buying some popcorn for the absolute meltdown this is going to trigger among the commentariat

[ℵ @nicktharula]

Silver deadass had no Finals decals on the court for 12 years for literally no reason at all

[Pardon My Take @PardonMyTake]

“Your outie loves the Knicks”

[Frank Rundatz @FrankRundatz]

You have 9 months - at most - to use AI tools to finish your application.

Then every AI company will ask you to pay for the compute you’re using and you won’t be able to afford it anymore.

[Danish Hussain @astrodanish]

In most professions, when you hit the 90th percentile in technical skill, the best use of your time is getting 90th percentile soft skills

the best barbers are therapists

the best photographers are comedians

the best engineers are iconoclastic cult leaders that inspire their team with a vision nobody else can see, and even fewer can beleive

stop maxing out your CAD skills, and start dreaming bigger!

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Kelsey Hightower has one of the most inspiring stories in tech: he went from a technician installing DSL modems, through self-directed study and very hard work, to one of the very few Distinguished Engineer at Google whom Satya Nadella personally persuaded to join Microsoft.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
03:34 Kelsey’s first job at McDonald’s
05:04 His non-traditional path into tech
11:45 Landing his first tech job with an A+ certification
15:33 His entrepreneurial years
19:45 Joining Google as a data center technician
27:48 Learning automation at a Rackspace spinoff
33:26 Moving into financial services
50:00 Building a reputation through open source
53:55 From configuration management to containers
1:08:20 The rise of Kubernetes
1:25:05 Why he almost joined NASA instead of Google
1:29:20 Defining DevRel at Google
1:38:20 Demonstrating impact at Google
1:41:20 Microsoft's offer
1:55:20 Learning how to slow down
2:06:39 Advising and investing
2:15:03 A people-first view of GenAI
2:24:27 Using AI with guardrails
2:28:26 Matching AI to the task
2:36:06 Staying relevant in the AI era

Brought to you by outstanding teams building products I love:

• @AntithesisHQ: verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. https://t.co/AKYm4cctss

• @sentry: application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers https://t.co/uoolyqTR6M

• @buildkite: CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber and others are customers: https://t.co/C05Ze9zzin

Three interesting learnings from Kelsey:

1. Side hustles and doing your own thing teach you business like no IC job can.

Before becoming a software engineer at Google, Kelsey was a manager for his comedian friend, operated a computer store, and did IT contracting. These gigs taught him logistics, planning, and about money. All this helped him be far more effective at talking with executives and acting as an executive sponsor inside Google.

2. Can you explain what your startup does without mentioning AI?

When Kelsey researches startups seeking his advice, he challenges founders to not say “AI” once. This means that they must explain the actual value their company creates. One unexpected benefit of this is that it often reveals there are easier, cheaper ways to achieve a goal than with AI.

3. It’s very rare to get an extra zero put on your compensation figure – but it happened.

Kelsey was a successful, well-paid Google engineer when Microsoft made him an offer that 10x’d his salary (!!). When Kelsey told Google he was planning to take the offer, it matched the offer, proving that his market value had massively increased. It shows that being well paid doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being paid at the correct market rate.

[will harris @boujeehacker]

@juan_snow1 Hmu I've dug people out of worse holes.

As long as the funding isn't running out (Make sure you know the answer to this question and are prepared for if it does)

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Podcast episode with a legend: Kelsey Hightower (out now)

Probably the best storyteller I’ve met - and what incredible stories he has!

[will harris @boujeehacker]

Turns out a lot of people they want to sell to are not just going to self-serve.

Many of those people will want to build applications and have problems that honestly don't really need AI.

But the promise of agentic automation will bring them to the table. Seems like a huge new customer base is on the way.

[will harris @boujeehacker]

I think you and your team will do quite well.

The industry just spent so long making the word consulting a bad word that it had to rebrand it to "forward deployed engineer" first.

Heavy investments happening last I heard Open AI raised 4 billion for their arm and Anthropic raised just under 2 billion for theirs.

[Chase Passive Income @chasedownleads]

"NYC isn't affordable!"

Wrong.

I just found several homes there listed for less than $100k

[Ned O'Leary @nedoleary]

one of my favorite things about the "forward deployed engineer" era is a generation of people reinventing from first principles what top consultancies do after having convinced themselves that top consultancies don't do anything

[will harris @boujeehacker]

@ajlamesa Taps the sign
https://t.co/dTyaEwMPhD

[will harris @boujeehacker]

I think the only answer is to get together a group to try to take it private.

Worst case it riles up the voter base enough to actually care about what happens to it and fund a turn around.

Best case you can work with real estate leaders in the area to build the actual mixed-use communities around the MARTA stations. They would need to become the thriving economic engines they should be and print money.

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

When your engineer finishes a session with a coding agent, they have more code than they started with and exactly the same amount of skill.

The agent produced output. It did not produce understanding.

You paid frontier prices to make your codebase bigger and your engineer no smarter. That is not an accident. It is a design choice, and it is worth remebering who it serves.