Mary Baptista Martinez

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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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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Want to tease something my team has been working on over at Buffer! The attached image isn't a mockup, but a screenshot of a live prototype of RSS feeds directly in Buffer! It's only available internally and still pretty rough at this point, but we'll have it available for user testing soon. With this enhancement, we hope to help Buffer users easily find new and engaging content to share with their audiences. What do you think? Will RSS feeds in Buffer help you create more content?

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Come join us on Nov 13 at 10am PT / 1pm ET for a live webinar, How Notion Engineering uses Notion. We'll dive into how our engineering team uses our own tool to create workflows that enable us to work faster, better, and more collaboratively. We’ll show you how we: 🏗️ Quickly access important information via our engineering teamspace 🚦 Track project status and assign tasks—directly in Notion 🏃 Automate workflows to save time and help us build more swiftly Don't miss out! Register here: https://lnkd.in/gB9NcYmB

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Want to know more about How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale? Still skeptical of why we built horizontal sharding on RDS instead of <insert-cooler-database-technology>? Wondering if you should copy what we did? Check out out my new podcast with Software Engineering Daily as we dive deep on spicy stories that didn't make the blog post from surviving my first Figma Config conference to debating which database technology comes out on top. https://lnkd.in/gFfh7C-A

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I'll let you in on a little secret ... My #1 interview question when hiring new team members is “Tell me about a [….] you love and why” For a product position that could be “Tell me about a product you love and why” For an engineering position: “Tell me about a project you love and why?” For a marketing position: “Tell me about a marketing campaign you love and why? For an infodev position: “Tell me about documentation or product help you have used that you love and why?” This is a powerful question that allows interviewees to express their personal motivations/passions, critical thinking skills, and how they approach their work as a genuine conversation instead of a standard list of interview questions. 1. Reveals Passion and Communication skills By asking candidates to discuss something they "love," you give them an opportunity to express genuine enthusiasm, which can be an indicator of passion for their field. This is valuable in any role because passion often correlates with motivation and resilience. It also puts them in a place where they can show their best communication and persuasion skills. 2. Uncovers Depth of Knowledge The question invites candidates to dive deeper into what makes a product, strategy, or approach effective, giving insight into how well they understand their field. For example: Product role: It shows if they have thought critically about user experience, design, and functionality. Support role: It may reveal an understanding of customer psychology and empathy. Sales role: It highlights whether they grasp the nuances of successful sales tactics and customer engagement. 3. Shows Alignment with Company Values Candidates’ responses can reflect whether they value similar qualities as the company does, such as innovation, customer-centric design, or transparency. 4. Demonstrates Analytical Skills and Reasoning Asking “why” requires candidates to articulate the reasoning behind their choice. This sheds light on their analytical and critical thinking skills—qualities that are essential in any role but especially important in roles that require strategic decision-making. 5. Encourages Authenticity and Personal Expression This question is more open-ended and personal, allowing candidates to feel comfortable sharing their unique perspectives. This can lead to more genuine responses, which helps the interviewer get to know the candidate beyond rehearsed answers. 6. Assesses Creativity and Problem-Solving Approach Their answer can demonstrate creative thinking or innovative approaches they appreciate and potentially would bring to the role. In product management, for example, it can indicate a candidate’s capacity to think outside the box. This question is so versatile and strives to create a genuine conversation that explores a person's passions and experience over standard rapid-fire questions. Genuine conversation will always be better for both the interviewer and the interviewee.

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🤔 Looking at YC's latest Request for Startups struck me: Every category—gov tech, manufacturing, fintech, space—has AI humming under the hood. 🔄 Maybe it's not about having AI (like it's not about "having electricity" ⚡). It's about reimagining whole industries with it. 🚀 Checkout the whole article: https://lnkd.in/gcQkKMja

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This is not just any "hey, we are looking for a dev" post. This might be one of the most exciting engineering roles we have ever hired for. Let me explain why: I have the great privilege of being the product lead for the exceptionally brilliant Rendering Engine Team at Miro. Several months ago, we took a bold step to revamp our foundational rendering technology from the ground up, setting an ambitious vision far beyond what Miro is capable of today. Building a highly performant rendering engine for a product like Miro is not trivial though. You are dealing with an infinite 2D canvas with potentially thousands of multimedia objects, all while multiple people collaborate in real-time. We want professionals & creatives to spend the majority of their working days in Miro. Unfortunately, every lag when panning a large planning board, every jiggle effect due to low FPS when zooming out from a large planning session, and every slight delay when selecting hundreds of multimedia objects not only results in lost time but also slight frustration. It's that small, annoying feeling that something felt slightly slow, slightly not instant, slightly irritating. A products performance is not just about the time you lose; it is about the feeling this product gives you. On the other hand, we all know the feeling of delight when you do something complex in a product, and it happens instantaneously. That feeling that no matter what you do, no matter what workload you throw at an application, it will be responsive, fast, and instantaneous. This is what we envision: A rendering engine that continuously surprises you with its snappiness, making work feel light and delightful. We are looking for someone who is as equally annoyed by these issues as we are and wants to take the lead in solving them. We aim to build a rendering engine that raises the bar for what people consider possible on a web-based canvas. A computer graphics professional who wants to take on the challenge of working on a renderer that powers the day-to-day work of millions of users and some of the most creative and innovative companies in the world. If you work in the field of computer graphics and want to contribute to the heart of a product that aims to amplify collaboration and creative work, give it shot. Feel free to DM me for more information or directly apply below:

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𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗹𝗲𝗲𝗽 💤 ? because you can't pinpoint your CI bottlenecks or spot problematic trends? At Pinterest, we faced the same challenges—but we’ve found a solution. 🌟 In our latest Pinterest Engineering blog post 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eJJ_GpGW We share how we’re leveraging honeycomb.io to identify CI root causes through cross-data correlations. Discover our innovative approach for categorizing CI failures in real-time using job log analysis. Learn how to segment CI jobs by agent wait time, script execution, specific Bazel targets, or any other level of detail tailored to your needs. Our enhanced CI observability metrics have let us improve CI stability and boost developer productivity—and they could do the same for you! Check out the blog for the full breakdown and see what’s possible when data-driven decisions guide your CI workflows. 🚀 Let’s make CI faster and more reliable together! #DevOps #DevX #CICD #honeycomb #observability #engineering #softwareengineer

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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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🍜Anybody up for some ramen? I am excited to share that I am back in the garage, building again (it’s actually a house in the Berkeley Hills). We are taking the wraps off of Supercog AI, a new startup focused on solving Application Integration using LLM powered agents. My co-founder in this new venture is a great friend of mine (and a former co-founder partner), Alex Osborne. Alex and I have worked around the application integration space for a long time, and we are unrealistically excited about applying the GenAI stack to this problem. Not many people relish the task to get some bits to move from system A to system B. But it’s a critical job to be done, and that’s led to a lot of brittle scripts, a myriad of inflexible “no code” tools, and a lot of hand crafted SQL. But the power of the Large Language Model, trained on a huge corpus of information, offers a remarkable tool to solve this problem. The LLM you use today already knows the APIs of hundreds of popular systems. It knows the SQL dialects of every major database. It understands the semantics and data schemas of many popular SaaS systems. It understands much of the specific domain in which your business operates. I like to call the AI revolution “the last platform shift”. That may turn out to be hyperbole, but I definitely believe we are in the very early stages of seeing what this new stack can enable. I know we are hardly the first folks to claim that “amazing stuff is coming!”. But this is why Alex and I have decided to focus on a real and hard problem. If we can prove that LLMs can power a new way to solve this problem, it will be the first successful *new* approach in 15 years.. We will have much more to share about this new platform soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in getting a peek - or even better if you have application or data integration tasks that you would like some help with - please reach out because we want to help. #genai #startups #backinthegarage

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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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Hey friends - have you used Kafka and can share pain points & feelings on usability? I have a friend working on a project to improve the dev-friendliness and would love to chat (just 15-30 mins) if you're open to it -- comment below :)

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If you've ever had to deal with inconsistent UX, multiple generations of design systems, and the perpetual back and forth between UI and backend developers - there's hope, you are not alone. And let me just say it out loud - there's no "full stack" development - it is simply impossible for an engineer to stay up to date on all the development across JavaScript, frameworks, Node.js, Kubernetes, Java, etc. You either have deep and somewhat narrow, or broad and shallow. These problems are quite common for everyone who has inherited an existing product (which is like 99.9% of us). This blog post by Kyle Shevlin about building a tightly-enforced composable design system resonated with me. #UI #designsystem #react https://lnkd.in/gStEWHtC

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We've been making some cool examples of things that can be built with substrate.run lately. Here's a simple chatbot that can help you cook: https://lnkd.in/eEZm-nRJ If you're working on building a chatbot, take a look and see what it might look like to use Substrate 🧑‍🍳

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Here's something counterintuitive; taking on more investment risk reduces long-term returns: https://lnkd.in/gHwkjHmP This is only my second investment video, so I'm still learning. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it. Based on the feedback from the first video, I tried to make the audio more balanced on this video. I also shortened the length, to make the content more digestible.

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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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UPDATE: It's here! For anyone who missed my talk at this year's Product Collective (Acquired by Pendo) INDUSTRY, you can watch it right now (link in comments below). I'm already working on iterating with some great feedback from the conference, but you tell me - what else would you like to see? What's missing? What could be better? Hit me with that feedback 😎 #product #productmanagement #productstrategy #productleadership

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