Chamod Gamage

swe @angellist, @uwaterloo eng alum,
yet another member of the sauga to sf pipeline

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

Recently gave a talk at SF Ruby about Zaxcel, an Excel DSL we built (recently open-sourced!) at @AngelList empowering our financial reporting at scale.
Also wrote a blog post about how we turned a nightmare refactor into a novel approach to building Excel workbooks (link in 🧵)!

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

@mathurahravi Nice hamster

[jason kim @jasonkimvc]

OG Anunoby leaving Toronto and thriving in America like every homegrown Waterloo software engineer

[mathurah @mathurahravi]

building for the user quietly turned into building for the feed.

i wrote about slop and how it's eroding our taste, agency, and ability to choose in the age of AI
https://t.co/55URuO8YHv

[AngelList @AngelList]

AngelList has spent over a decade building the infrastructure for the startup economy. Creating a space where founders can actually build and collide with one another is just another expression of that mission.

If you want to be part of what’s taking shape in SF, either as a founder at @founders_cafe or as a builder on our team, links below.

[AngelList @AngelList]

🌁 If you are attending the inaugural @sfrubyconf, three current and former members of the AngelList team are taking the stage:

@exAspArk on Building Cloud Data Infrastructure with Ruby
@justinbowen on Building AI agents with Rails
and of course, @og_chamod who will be doing a demo that is a continuation of his talk from earlier this month: from open-source Excel generation to cloud-hosted, graph-modeled financial statements and the AI tooling we’ve built around them.

[avlok @avlok]

We write lots of software to generate financial reporting in Excel.

We're open sourcing the most important part, which is an Excel DSL called Zaxcel.

If you're obsessed with spreadsheets, check it out.

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

Read about the journey from pain to high-leverage productivity over the course of my internship back in Summer 2023: https://t.co/hMdtOBLVnw

GitHub repo for those curious about the library: https://t.co/rjmGLN4xAZ

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

Recently gave a talk at SF Ruby about Zaxcel, an Excel DSL we built (recently open-sourced!) at @AngelList empowering our financial reporting at scale.
Also wrote a blog post about how we turned a nightmare refactor into a novel approach to building Excel workbooks (link in 🧵)!

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

@leonhan_ Leafs winning tn is the most ironic part 😭

[Irina Nazarova @inazarova]

I love this so much! @og_chamod and folks from @AngelList came up with Ruby DSL for building Excel sheets as graph workbooks, leveraging the power of Ruby and separating the business logic from representation (exact rows and columns in file)
https://t.co/9fLknkC9tp

[gouthamb.eth @bgoutham]

We’re excited to host the SF Ruby Meetup tomorrow at the AngelList offices!

@og_chamod is sharing how we turned a painful process into a productivity win, making financial statement generation 10x faster at AngelList.

What used to take weeks now takes hours, and with AI agents built on top of solid abstractions, it’s down to minutes. Good abstractions compound over time!

If you’re into Ruby, engineering productivity, or just good tech stories, come hang out with us!

RSVP here: https://t.co/FGcgFqh6kJ

@IrinSon @inazarova @steveg_io

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

@mathurahravi @khushi_shelat nice you and the community getting stronger

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

visiting tims locations outside of north america always feels like a fever dream

[Timhortons.kr @timhortons_kr]

토론토의 가을은 큰 도시의 세련된 분위기 속에서도
조용하고 따뜻한 매력을 가지고 있어요.
⠀
가을 햇살이 선명해지는 오후
고층 빌딩 사이로 비치는 황금빛 단풍 햇살과
거리마다 퍼지는 커피 향이 어우러져,
한층 고요하고 따듯한 온기를 품어
토론토의 가을을 더 특별하게 만들어 줍니다.
⠀
바쁜 일상 속에서도
토론토의 가을을 느껴보고 싶다면,
팀홀튼 매장에서 토론토, 레드벨벳 피칸프랄린 라떼
한 잔을 즐겨보세요.
⠀
*해당 이미지는 캐나다 관광청 이미지를 사용하였습니다.
⠀
#timhortons
#팀홀튼
#alwaysfresh
#토론토
#Toronto
#torontomoments

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

I’m surprised we don’t see these in airline entertainment systems already

[Bearly AI @bearlyai]

Uber will give its drivers in the US an option to make money by doing “digital tasks”.

These short minute-long tasks can be done anytime including while idling for passengers:

▫️data-labelling (for AI training)
▫️uploading restaurant menus
▫️recording audio samples of themselves
▫️narrating scenarios in different languages

The opportunity is quite larges based on fact that two AI data-labelling startups (Scale AI, Surge AI) each reached ~$30B valuations.

Earlier in October, Uber — which has 1m+ drivers in the US — had acquried Belgian data-labelling startup Segments AI for an undisclosed amount.

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

@mathurahravi Well done!

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

@_KevinTong yessir welcome back to sf! Fun times ahead :)

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

I am curious how this section will play out - “in the national interest” feels likely to skew towards larger tech companies with thousands of H-1Bs more than anything

[Kevin Tong @_KevinTong]

h1b now costs 100k per year

visas for this year start in a week

this is really gonna shake up the bay area

[avlok @avlok]

Introducing: Founders Café from AngelList

The average café is simply not conducive for deep work.

They’re not open late, Wi-Fi isn’t fast, there aren’t enough power outlets and they’re not open on the weekends!

We’re solving this problem by turning the first-floor of our office into Founders Café: open daily, 9am–midnight, with fast Wi-Fi and plenty of outlets.

This is v.01. We will start with a two-week test and improve it like any product.

Link is below if you'd like to try it.

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

@DrUzuki @mathurahravi @cursor_ai @_nathanmarquez_ @FateJacobson @modal yeah i think it depends, i've seen cases where engineering teams lag behind keeping a design system library in sync with a design team's corresponding Figma project due to resourcing

with leaner orgs these days, anything that helps preserve focus time felt worth exploring

[Chamod Gamage @og_chamod]

@rcweston @mathurahravi @cursor_ai @_nathanmarquez_ @FateJacobson @modal main thing was it's super quick to spin up and deploy with local changes (@_nathanmarquez_ took like 5 min initially) as we only had a couple hours to ideate and build

what I did notice
- easy to specify dependencies
- containers are prebuilt+cached so nice warm starts