Brandon Doran

Project update! My application tracking extension is now doing fuzzier matching and injecting new information into LinkedIn (and other sites) to keep me from doubling up on applications. Next up: local storage and bulk import/export operations...

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Today, we’re publishing our biggest piece yet.   We partnered with Puzzle to write about the next generation of accounting tools.   Our CEOs, Alex Lee and Sasha Orloff, explain how AI can turn accounting from a repetitive chore into a major source of business intelligence.   They cover everything from decreasing costs to improving accuracy and enhancing customer support.   We also hear from Fouad Farhat of Soma Capital—an investor in both Truewind and Puzzle—about the current state of accounting, and where it’s headed.   📌Check out the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eUzvZjTm

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Want a preview of what I'm going to be talking about in my keynote for RubyConf? You can catch a glimpse of it here!

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This product was practically built for me. I’ve been waiting for something like it for years, long after I gave up writing on paper almost entirely. Heck, if it wasn’t for having kids, I probably could have gone the last the past decade with the challenge of not writing anything down on paper. Which makes it all the more frustrating at the price point it’s released. This isn’t targeted for grade school students, college students, or young professionals. It’s targeted at prosumers which share the same space as an iPad Air, and the market is already dominated by prosumers who want that product. For those who can’t afford the iPad, Amazon releases tablet computers in the $100 range. I know Remarkable is a much smaller company, and can’t compete on price with Amazon, or volume like Apple. But waiting so long for something I can’t justify the purchase price just hurts. At half the price it would have been a no brainer. It checks practically every box.

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While some folks hire entire Figma design teams for their personal websites, I'm here at 6:30 AM explaining to my partner why I need a third coffee to "write stuff." 2022: "I'll share monthly insights about building companies!" 2024: checking it -> Writing consistency matches crypto winter performance 📉 But look - AI got better at English faster than I got better at writing. That's what we call product-market fit. New strategy for 2025 - Actually write 12 articles - Convince partner these dawn coffee raids are essential business ops Track my progress (or lack thereof) here: https://lnkd.in/e6bkkxvH P.S. If my partner reads this - yes, this is exactly what I'm doing at 6:00 AM either wiring or reading the book. Note: Will open source my coffee consumption metrics in Q3 2025. Full transparency, like web3 promised.

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I am genuinely curious about something and frankly, this seems like the only place to get a good answer: Are people in business classes still being taught models based off of factories? (e.g. You run a Widget Factory that produces some number of items per day.) If so, that might explain a lot of the more curious approaches and fixations I've noted over the years working for decidedly non-factory based industries.

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At InVision, we worked with some amazing software vendors. I know I've talked about most of these in the past; but, I just want to give a final shout-out to some of my favorites: * LaunchDarkly - feature flags completely changed the way we approached product development. And, allowed us to all but eliminate our incidents and outages (shameless plug for my own book: https://lnkd.in/ehxiy6bY). * Postmark - delivered all of our outbound emails and powered our inbound reply-by-email workflows with flawless uptime and befuddling performance. * Pusher - powered our real-time collaboration via WebSockets, bringing our UIs to life and keeping browsers synchronized. * Intergral | FusionReactor APM - gave us deep insights into our JVM performance, allowing us to track down SQL, API, and processing bottlenecks. * Datadog - truly world-class metrics, alerting, and monitoring. * Adobe ColdFusion / Lucee CFML - the programming language and application server that allowed us to move fast, keep things simple, respond to users, and build wonderful things. * Cloudflare - your CDN, WAF, and web workers took a beating so that our origin servers could stay online. * Amplitude - connected me to the users by giving us insight into what our users were actually doing (or not doing). At one point, I think we had over 300 different SaaS subscriptions; so this list is faaaaar from exhaustive. And, I'm sure I'm forgetting other beloved services. And, many of our teams worked with entirely different technologies. This is just my little corner of the organization. And, I couldn't have done it without them. Thank you so much! ❤️

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What's the options market telling us about Shopify's upcoming earnings (expected this week)? Looking for more of the same: consistent revenue growth in the 25-30% YoY range and GMV growth in the 20-25% YoY range, leading to an anticipated move of around 7% post-earnings announcement. Since the normalization of e-commerce post-Covid, Shopify's growth narrative has shifted towards its Merchant Solutions segment, driven by GMV, as opposed to its Subscription Solutions segment, which is fee-based. Sustaining revenue growth hinges on merchants generating more income through the platform. Options activity is reflecting a slight premium for downside risk protection, but with minimal short interest. Sentiment suggests SHOP keeps flying upward 🚀

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Some thoughts on being available "off hours": I've seen a few threads on LI/otherwise about being available for work during off hours, vs having work/life separation, and changing trends there (ie: younger people are less willing to let work intrude in their personal time). As someone who has been in both situations in his career, I have some thoughts. A company will always want employees to work 24/7 (at least exempt employees). They will applaud employees who "give extra", "do what's necessary", "are good team members", or whatever other euphemisms are deemed effective to encourage this. But, employees are also generally disposable to employers (especially larger companies). This is often a rude awakening for younger people, who have been conditioned with propaganda like "your work family", etc. Generally, you should work for compensation, not some sense of obligation to a company that would discard you without a second thought for a small bump to their bottom line. Ideally, those types of expectations should be up-front and by consensus with one's employer. Generally, circumstances permitting, I will check messages off-hours, and respond/work if there's a critical situation which needs my attention (and not otherwise). However, that's inherently dependent on the employer also; if the employer makes that "hard" (eg: restricting the ability to check messages to only corporate devices), then I interpret that as a signal that working off hours is not something they value (at least enough to make it "easy"), which is fine with me. In some ways, that's a better situation, if/when the employer is implicitly making it hard to work off-hours anyway, it easier to ignore any implied pressure to do so. Anyway, that's my take, fwiw.

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The difference between a decision and a data-driven decision is like the difference between a shot in the dark and a carefully aimed arrow. Which decision do you want to make?

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I keep reading this every couple days and falling in love with it more. We keep having more and more systems because people need to write articles and books. And, of course, you have to have your own acronym. But when we step back and look at the core of things, most of it boils down to: 1. Go to therapy and deal with your own shit 2. Talk to other people. Be humble. 3. Actively listen to them and think deeply about what you heard from them 4. Don't be a dick. Have empathy. 5. Try to figure out situations where everyone wins That's it.

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I think this topic of „memory“ or I‘d say using our human brain for different problems and tasks is what is my biggest fear with „all hail to AI/AGI“ push. Historically we ended up here using our brains for more complex problems at hand. Yet, AI/LLMs incentivise the opposite often times. And imagine a new codebase is already hard to manage after 6 months. No one knows the details, LLMs ends in a loop of weird things. Software folks aren’t good in providing the need for migrations, tech debt or refactoring of their own solutions. How do we make a case to rebuild everything from scratch (because AI does it for us) for businesses?

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It's probably no surprise to anyone that knows me well, that I love self-development podcasts. One of my favorite is Ramit Sethi's I will teach you to be rich (aka Money for Couples). I recently got this email newsletter When I ask people what their Rich Life looks like, most people say something like: "I want to do what I want, when I want."   Success is rarely a dollar amount. Most people want a lifestyle. In the workplace, this means having a flexible job.    Which might look like: -Never having to do the daily commute to the office -Having a schedule that lines up with when you’re most productive -Taking a spin class in the middle of the day -Picking up your kids from school every afternoon -Living in different countries for several months at a time If this describes your idea of a great job, Pinterest is for you. Check out the 75 open roles in engineering: https://lnkd.in/gapDB_u3 At Pinterest, we hire smart people and trust them to do a good job. We don't track how often you badge into a building or how many days you show up in the office. We care about the business impact your code generates. We know that in person collaboration is useful, and we come in the office about 1/week. This isn't an unbreakable rule that you will get punished for violating. We want you to be your best you and to do your best work. We believe that flexibility enhances creativity and productivity. If you see something that calls to you, reach out and I am happy to answer questions.

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Last Tuesday, Malsgufa, our legacy CMS backend, was shut down. This milestone for BI's Tech and Product team culminated years of planning, effort, and execution. Malsgufa's first commit was on July 25, 2014, leading to 5,186 commits across nearly 30 repositories. Built and maintained by scores of engineers, its deprecation represents significant cost savings (20 production replicas, 3 instances of Solr, and an insane number of Zookeeper instances!), reduced security risk, and the elimination of an often-blamed boogeyman. The journey began in January 2020. Our challenge: moving traffic off Malsgufa without rebuilding everything in Muse. Initially, we tried GraphQL as an intermediary between Viking and our services, but progress was limited by Viking's complex Angular/Vue architecture. In January 2023, we pivoted to the strangler fig pattern with a shim. This approach proved far more effective – all Malsgufa traffic went through the shim first, with verbose logging to track unhandled requests. Meanwhile, we built Story Versioning API (SVAPI), incorporating lessons learned from Malsgufa's limitations around history and publishing states. We ran four major migrations (stories, custom pages, slideshows, and videos), building support in Muse and shimmed compatibility for Viking. Traffic gradually decreased from a torrent to a trickle, leading to the gloriously uneventful shutdown. Next, we will deprecate Viking by Q2 2025, unifying our users in the Muse ecosystem to create the industry's most innovative CMS. Special thanks to the entire Story Creation team: Chase Gruber, Chris Speziale, Daniel Arita, Danny Feliz, Dasha Lary, Dawin Camillo, Eric Saam, Frederica Chen, John Laslo, Kelly Filush, Morgan Cohn, Sarah Pai, Tyler Greenfield! Thanks also to DaD, Engagement, Helpfulness, Cloud Engineering, Test Engineering, and Operational Excellence! Finally, we recognize Malsgufa itself. Developed as a unified CMS backend to support Business Insider's expansion into new markets, it served our global newsroom reliably for a decade, publishing millions of stories despite no major changes in recent years. While it became less sustainable as our business evolved, it deserves our respect. Thank you, Malsgufa. May you rust in peace.

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I am pretty productive. Making stuff is more a measure of prioritization than skill, and it's definitely not about productivity hacks. It's calories-in-calories-out: you either watch Love & Hip Hop Miami - or you work on your novel. For a lot of things, it's now or never. I just came across a comment from Brandon Sanderson I want to share, about the fallacy that taking more time on a project makes it better. This resonates a lot with me and aligns with my philosophies on engineering, product, service design, - and -- although I guess I excluded it in the past -- art. "Take more time" is great in theory, but if it starts regularly taking four years between Stormlight books as it did between the last two, that can easily become five .... Suddenly, I'm 80 before I even START the final era. ... For most highly-creative endeavors, more time doesn't always equate to quality increases. In fact, it often has a negative effect ...." The old mantra is "done is better than perfect." I want to make an amendment: 1. done is better than very good. 2. done is better than good.

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When Klaviyo recruited me three years ago to help architect a system that would deliver hundreds of millions of email messages per hour on behalf of their customers, I thought, "Wow. That's a lot of mail. How could I *not* build that?" Now that we're doing it for real, I still think, "Wow. That's a lot of mail. We *built* that." $3 billion+ in Klaviyo-attributed value. 420 million messages sent in a single hour on #BlackFriday. And over 15,000 customers having their best day ever (🙌) on Klaviyo.  Read our full BFCM By The Numbers report to learn how Klaviyo customers achieved recording-breaking results this #BFCM.

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After numerous recent conversations with engineering leaders, it's clearer than ever to me that when it comes to software development, we're caught in a reactive app performance management cycle. Teams prioritize rapid feature shipping, inadvertently accumulating performance debt with each release. The pattern is frustratingly predictable: 1. Ship features quickly 2. Performance gradually degrades 3. Users complain or infrastructure costs spike 4. Briefly optimize performance 5. Repeat the cycle This approach is fundamentally broken. Performance ideally should be a first-class citizen in our development process, not an afterthought triggered by crisis. With Codeflash, I'm exploring a more proactive approach to performance engineering. The goal is to build performance consciousness into our development workflows, preventing technical debt before it becomes a systemic problem. I'm eager to hear from other engineers: How are you addressing performance challenges in your organizations? What strategies have you found effective in maintaining software efficiency without sacrificing development speed?

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