Son Pham

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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Come join us tomorrow in SF to learn more about the latest updates to run AI workloads on Google Cloud!

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How you can make your LLM applications better!

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🎉 Big congratulations to our incredible team (Haoyu Chen, Nick Greenquist,Yuxing Wang, Sridevi Maharaj, Ruiyang Wu and many more) for delivering several quarters-long impactful features on the Play Store! 🚀 We’re thrilled to have launched key updates like Search Home, Sports Moment, and WearOS recommendations, all designed to enhance personalization and help billions of users worldwide search and discover content they love. 🌍✨ Check out the Play Store Q3 updates: https://lnkd.in/dn5wx8Mi #GooglePlay #Personalization #Recommendation

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I am so grateful to have met many brilliant, creative, and industrious people at Irvine Tech Week. Our team, which placed 2nd 🎉 for the Techstars Startup Weekend, was amazing: Oliver Liu: AI expert, speaker, team lead and organizer. Considered numerous input from team members, and was fair and decisive, so that everyone could make efficient progress. Chloe Chi: Senior software developer. Designed and implemented marketing survey, performed competitive market analysis, collaborated on pitch deck development, etc. Chi Huynh: Creative visionary, businessman. So many great, valuable ideas regarding business target market, product features, marketing, and presentation, which allowed our team to pivot for the better. Helen Chen: Integrative medicine advocate. Very knowledgeable about healthcare and nutrition. Was willing to jump in wherever help was needed. Sua Lee: Graphics designer, UI/UX designer. Created complete mobile app prototype in Figma. Listened carefully and collaborated with teammates to create the best functionality and appearance for the product. It was an honor to work together and I learned so much from working in this team. One of the parts that I enjoyed the most were the many discussions we had. We talked about fine-tuning the UI/UX, choosing photos, choosing test cases for ChatGPT, how to improve prompts, tech stacks, product features, how the product makes you feel, competitor analysis, which customers to serve, market validation, pricing, presentation slides, effective pitches, and much more. It was a great educational experience and 💯% recommend Techstars Startup Weekend and Irvine Tech Week to anyone interested in startups.  #TechstarsStartupWeekend  #IrvineTechWeek  #OC / #Irvine #TechCommunity  #GenAI #ChatGPT #AIIntegration

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Well sequencer centralization is surely an issue. Maybe base can allow independent sequencers. Also if sequencers fail, can have a fallback mechanism to allow to submit onto Mainnet directly to remove reliance on the centralised sequencers.

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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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The challenges of scaling and recovering AWS MSK clusters are now effectively mitigated, representing a significant advancement in cluster management.

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🚀 Insights from Pathways to Tech Event #16 🚀 I recently had the privilege of attending the Pathways to Tech event, featuring an incredible lineup of industry leaders: Dennis Crowley - Founder of Foursquare ($150M Revenue) Tariq Afaq - First Engineer at AppLovin ($30Bn IPO) Julian Alvarez - Former SWE at Meta, CEO of Wisdolia ($20K+ MRR) Hamza Ali - CEO of Olostep (Hiring Headstarter Fellows) Erik - ML Engineer Intern at TRC, CS Creator with 75K followers Here are some of my key takeaways: 🔹 Dennis Crowley emphasized the power of team collaboration and the importance of creating emotionally connective products. His reflections on the role of software engineers in the AI age and the challenges of building a product with a potential exit in mind were particularly enlightening. 🔹 Julian Alvarez shared his journey from coding as a kid to founding Wisdolia. His advice on minimizing startup mistakes and focusing on specific user groups to drive business growth was truly inspiring. 🔹 Hamza Ali discussed the challenges of fine-tuning AI models and his mission at Olostep. His insights into using AI to enhance user experience were thought-provoking. 🔹 Tariq Afaq and Erik provided valuable perspectives on scaling tech companies and the role of personal motivation and growth in the tech industry. Favorite Speaker: Dennis Crowley’s discussion on the human elements of startups and impostor syndrome was particularly impactful. His focus on maintaining good health and staying updated with new tools resonated deeply with me. If you missed the event, you can catch the full video here: https://lnkd.in/d5-ZYukg Huge thanks to @ Headstarter for organizing this insightful event! 🙌 #TechEvent #PathwaysToTech #Foursquare #AppLovin #Wisdolia #Olostep #AI #Startups #TechIndustry #Headstarter

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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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Celebrating DoorDash’s 11th Anniversary with Tony Xu During my 4+ years at DoorDash, I've learned a lot. Here are my top takeaways: - Bias for Action: Move fast and work iteratively whenever possible. - Be an Owner: Ownership brings responsibility. You own the outcome, whether positive or negative. - Relentless: Nothing great happens without grit and persistence.

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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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Distinguished Engineers (E9) at Meta make $4m/year. That's 16x the Bay Area median ($255k) Let's break it down [output = input x leverage] We all have 24 hours in a day, so there is a cap on [input] But hey, let's say they manage to have 2x-3x more focused time, so their [input] is 2x-3x There is still 5.3x-8x to go And that's [leverage] Here is the [leverage] they have: 1️⃣ Writing Every piece of text they write is clear to everyone, and they write a lot, for a lot of people 2️⃣ They create something from nothing And that something has clear value to the business 3️⃣ They influence other Engineers around them They are often described as having a "Midas Touch" in terms of their ability to uplift and develop other Engineers around them The best indicator is that the Engineers in their teams get promoted faster 4️⃣ They are well known and have an impact beyond Meta, promoting the brand 5️⃣ They have industry-leading experience in some areas There are rumoured to be <50 E9s at Meta

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Today I'm sharing this 🔥 video from our recent Engineering onsite at Demandbase HQ in SF! https://lnkd.in/eFAFR6QG We were so fortunate to host Zhengxuan Wu and Aryaman Arora, two upcoming AI researchers from Stanford University Department of Computer Science. Their approach to fine tuning, called ReFT, targets the representations emitted by neural net layers rather than the weights of the layers themselves. This makes it very flexible when using the same base model for swapping multiple fine tunes. The memory overhead is also very low for their intervention weights. Another highlight is how powerful it can be. One POC they showed forced the LLM to speak in only emojis exhibiting ReFT's power to control output. Control is crucial when, for example, you want to prevent your bot from offering customers unauthorized refunds!! If you're already familiar with LoRA, it should be pretty simple to use with only a few extra hyperparameters -- details in the video. Here's a link to the repo. Give them a star! https://lnkd.in/eJScNbzK Thanks again for letting us host your first external talk Aryaman and Zen. It's very exciting tech!!

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Getting started with AI can seem daunting, especially when contemplating its safety against data privacy. But past that fear lies a fix for itself: AI tools can be harnessed to overcome cybersecurity hurdles. Join us for an insightful discussion at the intersection of security, building resilience, and emerging technologies like AI, IoT, and others such as operational technology, and products intersecting with information technology and engineering. Get inspired, learn something new, and connect with peers, partners, and Googlers!

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Today I added stripe integrations (not as hard as I thought) and also finally added placeholder loading.tsx pages (yes it really did take me 6 months to remember you can do that 😭). https://lnkd.in/g2RUfhSh My end goal for the month of June was to be at the point I am now, so I am taking the extra time to clean up the code base and get it ready for more devs to work on. From production toggling to setting up hosted versions of the dev api, I want to make sure the people working with me have the smoothest experience possible. All of this working on a code base stuff in general is still relatively new to me, especially from the perspective of the person running the ship. It's one thing to work on a team when you're responsible for a single branch. But when you are making decisions on how best to orchestrate multiple code bases for use by multiple devs, it's a whole different ball game. Beyond that I also want to sit down and figure out the possible caching optimizations I can be making, as it's one of the big upsides of next.js. Shorter update again today, but as always if you've read this far thank you, and see you all next time <3.

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You know what's cooler than conversational AI? Empathetic AI 🤯 This week, I attended an Asian Founders event hosted by Asian Founders Club. ✨ I met Janet Ho, the COO of Hume AI, where she's guiding the development of the world's first empathetic voice AI. The company story was so compelling that I had to interview her afterwards. Here's our chat: 𝗤: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲? A: We envision a future where everyone has a personalized voice OS that follows them across apps, tailored to their communication style. It will be a trusted assistant for executing tasks. 𝗤: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘁𝗿𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵? A: We sell to developers building applications whether for healthcare, robotics or any other space looking for a voice to supplement their GUI. Speaking is 3x faster than reading and writing, so we believe voice is the next frontier. 𝗤: 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝘁𝗚𝗣𝗧-𝟰𝗼? A: GPT-4o is nonmodular while our product sits above any single LLM. If you wanna use Claude, Haiku, or any other LLM, we are the interface for that model. We will also allow for more personalization. 𝗤: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁'𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲? A: We believe the future is going to be flooded with AI systems and they're like strangers on the internet. We want an AI that can advocate for you that understands their preferences. Live interview: https://lnkd.in/g2MrZQJY #computerscience #softwareengineer #ai #humeai #llm #voiceai #chatgpt #asianfounders #claude #empathy

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LLMs and LangChain: The Dynamic Duo 🦸‍♀️🤖 Just finished a fun project where we built a Q&A bot using these two powerhouses. It's like having a personal AI assistant that's always ready to answer your burning questions! 🔥 Here's what I learned: LLMs are wizards: They can conjure up answers from thin air (or, uh, the internet). 🧙‍♂️ LangChain is the glue: It holds everything together and makes it easy to use. 🔗 Endless possibilities: This tech can be used for anything from customer support to writing catchy social media posts. 📝 Want to see it live (obvio a test server link 😛 ): https://lnkd.in/dZNAVCSV Note: it's a render link, they will take down the instance because of no use, you can hit the link and wait for two minutes, they will spin up the instance and you can try it out. Want to see the code? Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/dzjh4r47 #AI #MachineLearning #NLP #LangChain #LLM #Python #Developer #FunProject"

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Fail often, fail fast and fail better

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