Derek Watson

Beef patty aficionado, engineering @tubi, formerly @shopify, @twg, @cbc, @ctv. Living in Toronto, Canada’s cradle of science and technology.

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

Crunching the numbers on Me + you = 4eva

[Logan Bolton @septisum]

Just asked GPT-5.5-Pro a hard math problem and in the chain of thought I can see it reading teenvogue

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

Love the emdash right in the tweet. Meta.

[Mark Carney @MarkJCarney]

We just launched Canada’s new AI Strategy: AI For All. 

We’re taking control of our future — with AI that’s governed by Canadian values, AI that’s accountable to Canadians, and AI that serves all Canadians.

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

@tobi @millshawkins @Shopify I tried it on my codebase and it deleted redis!

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

@skanwar @tobi @andrewgordonmac @ameetshah @melltruong @TOtechweek Congratulations Satish, was an awesome experience can't wait for next year!

[Kazik Radwanski @redvineski]

This is the McDonald's where Ivan Reitman, Daniel Goldberg and Lorne Michaels founded the CFMDC and held the Cinethon Festival that screened John Hofses' Palace of Pleasure which featured a young shirtless David Cronenberg.

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

The title Forward Deploy Engineer is born of an industry that shit on consulting for decades and suddenly needs it.

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

@rohan10 Damn thought “hand wavey” was only a thing in the business world. I wonder if it applies to magicians too

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

Revue and Fox, Scotiabank for IMAX.

[Ben Harrison @6BenHarrison]

Yonge & Eg: best VIP rooms

Varsity: best vibe as a prestige cinema city (films that open there before expanding)

Yonge & Dundas: the only one that sometimes masks their screens properly + Dolby Atmos room

Scotia....if you need to see a movie more than a month in to its release

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

Michael and Don Corleone having a casual conversation in the garden.

[Sophy Romvari @SophyRomvari]

It’s rare that I feel national pride but last night was so special.

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

@jeffcanadamson What changes would you make?

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

I recognize that, but times have changed and letter delivery now needs subsidy. This is about unstoppable tech advancement that lowers the demand for letter delivery to unprofitable levels. Yet, it is still important infra. You would have a hard time competing in the open market for water delivery.

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

I was saying “typing is not the bottleneck” to my teams back in 2012.

[Jerry Neumann @ganeumann]

Idk, having watched a couple big SaaS businesses being built, coding was not the bottleneck

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

@communicable We have a spa boat too, and we’re getting the OP spa, and tons of new waterfront parkland including OP. Kinda killing it on these fronts actually.

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

More photos. Fun event!

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

This was a great event, opening the Tubi Toronto office and hosting our friends from the community. I'm hiring all kinds of eng roles: ml, infra, data, sre, mobile, creator tools, and am looking for AI-pilled, high-agency builders who want to stay nimble, ship big things quickly, and have fun. Hit me up!

[Mike Bidgoli @mikebid]

Hello from Toronto 👋 - Tubi’s newest tech hub!

Toronto is one of North America’s best cities for engineering talent, rooted in its top academic institutions and diverse culture, which is why we’re excited to open an office here.

Our aim is to make @Tubi a top five destination for engineers in Toronto who want to tackle problems like ML systems trained on billions of hours of viewing, product development across 30+ platforms, next-gen ad tech at billion-plus-dollar scale, and infra that serves 100M+ monthly users and major live events such as the Super Bowl.

We also want our office to be a welcoming hangout spot for the local tech community. So, to mark our office opening, I moderated a panel on How AI Changes Product Development in the Next 12 Months with a group I've been wanting to get in a room for a while: Qaiser Habib (Snowflake), Jeff Hodnett (Faire), Leho Nigul (Warner Music), Irfan Cehajic (Instacart), and two of Tubi’s most senior eng leaders Tian Chen & @MikeTamir.

A few takeaways from the conversation:

1. The bottleneck has moved. Coding is increasingly resolved. What matters most now is what to build and along with best ways to verify the work especially as agents run longer and can build anything for an increasing group of people in the company.

2. Roles (and interviews) are evolving fast. Engineers are expected to have more product sense; candidates are using coding agents in interviews; teams are rethinking loops, from live builds to product judgment to even revisiting brain teasers.

3. Three traits in talent matter most going forward: 1. Rapid learning (to keep up) 2. High Agency (to seize this moment of disruption) 3. Product Sense (taste/judgement for what to build)

4. Teams are getting smaller, expectations are getting bigger. More leverage → smaller pods, but also more ambition, more experiments, more surface area, more backlog getting tackled which is keeping overall org sizes the same or growing.

5. The stack is becoming agent-native. Infra and apps are evolving so agents can both build internally and interact externally in more native ways.

6. Keeping pace is hard but pays off quickly. Everyone had a personal workflow they’re constantly refining from a chief-of-staff agent,  to leveraging voice on the go with their agent (or NotebookLM), to talk through papers/articles/ideas, to weekend/night prototype projects, and more. 

If any of these resonate, we’re hiring across engineering in Toronto as we build this out.

Tubi was recently named the #1 Most Innovative Video Company of 2026 by Fast Company (#15 overall), and that recognition is really a reflection of the team and culture behind it. We’re excited to keep building that in Toronto. If you’re interested, check out our open roles (https://t.co/QU3FPrPnIn) or reach out to @dw__3000 Watson (Tubi's Toronto Site Lead / SVP Eng) or me directly!

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

@burkelibbey Great stuff. Have a listen to Michael Levin talk about latent information spaces and category errors like the ones you call out here. He’s very good at defining terms and seeing consciousness and agency as a spectrum witnessed in all systems. https://t.co/1jyDqhYvjE

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

@ddebow Oh, I have dined on honeydew!

[Derek Watson @dw__3000]

This is so funny because it’s impossible to not have social bias and impossible to separate it from your writing but you can sure try by only writing books about a single human alone in space.

[Fandom Pulse @fandompulse]

Project Hail Mary writer Andy Weir on social commentary in books:

"I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that."

"I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. I have no point to make, and I’m not trying to affect the reader’s opinion on anything. My sole job is to entertain, and I stick to that."

"To that end, I also don’t talk about my personal political opinions publicly. I don’t want readers to even know, honestly. I don’t want that in the back of their minds as they read my stuff."

Is this why he has the #1 sci-fi movie in decades?