Accountability is a word you'll hear in your performance reviews, from your manager, and increasingly as you step into leadership. It's also one of the most abused and misunderstood concepts in our industry. Many of us h…

How I built a demo generator with GitLab Duo Agent Platform

A demo used to take me days to build — screenshots, narration, stitching it together in an external tool, chasing feedback — and every time the feature changed I'd have to start over. A few months ago, I handed most of t…

How We’re Building Scam Alert on WhatsApp With End-to-End Encryption and Verifiability Guarantees

WhatsApp is committed to helping people stay safe while protecting the privacy of their messages. As scam tactics evolve — from impersonation to social engineering to AI-generated lures — we’re always evolving as well, s…

Every day, security scans face the same problem: an agent or a developer adds a comment, reformats a file, or moves a function, and a naive vulnerability tracker suddenly reports the same finding twice. Security teams en…

In July, OpenAI and Hugging Face responsibly disclosed an OpenAI model under internal evaluation escaped its sandbox, reached the open internet, and accessed Hugging Face’s internal production infrastructure. The agent t…

GitLab Secrets Manager adds ESO, Terraform, API support

Today, you might maintain separate secret stores for CI/CD, Kubernetes, and Terraform. However, that leaves multiple tools to manage, access models to keep in sync, and audit trails to correlate when something goes wrong…

Confidential AI for GitLab Self-Hosted

Your developers want AI coding agents. Your source code is regulated IP that can't be sent to a third-party AI service, and your compliance team has said so in writing. The usual escape hatch, standing up your own GPU cl…

From User Sequences to Scaling Laws: A Multi-Stage Architecture for Meta’s Ads Ranking

Every day, Meta’s recommendation platforms handle billions of user interactions, generating rich temporal signals that capture individual preferences and intent across products, ads, and content. In our 2024 post on sequ…

GEM Training: How Meta Doubled the Efficiency of Its LLM-Scale Ads Foundation Model

Meta’s Generative Ads Recommendation Model (GEM), the foundation model behind ads recommendations across Instagram and Facebook, now trains at LLM scale on several thousand of the latest-generation GPUs. This post goes i…

Kafka App? There’s a Skill for That

Etsy is home to over 100 million listings from 5.6 million active sellers. Because the items for sale are unique and creative, there is no standard product catalog that tells us what they are. When someone searches for “…

There's a cognitive trick our brains play whenever we face a hard question or a difficult decision: we quietly swap the hard thing for something easier to answer. It's called substitution, and we do it constantly — usual…

Exploring Hierarchical Interest Representation For Meta Ads Deep Funnel Optimization

Hierarchical Interest Representation is a research area for Meta Ads. We’re exploring an upstream representation layer over the universe of Ads entities – users, advertisers, products, services – learning unified embeddi…

Shipyard: How We Built Slack’s Next-Generation EC2 Platform

Over the past few years, we’ve been on a journey to modernise how we run Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances at Slack. In our first post, Advancing Our Chef Infrastructure, we shared how we moved from a single C…

Modernizing the Meta Ads Service With an Open-Source Kernel Scheduler

TL; DR At Meta’s scale, a few milliseconds of latency degradation can have a significant negative impact on ads performance.  When a Linux kernel upgrade risked regressing latency across Meta’s ad serving fleet, we turne…

The skills you build and the tools you master matter, but they aren't your most important asset when things go wrong — and something eventually will. In this episode, I work through why our careers and lives are governed…

Meta’s AI Storage Blueprint at Scale

Over the past several years, model capabilities and training dataset sizes have experienced exponential growth. During the past year or so, the time between new-frontier-model releases has gone down from months to weeks.…

If you are a manager, a lead engineer, or anyone growing into more responsibility, this throwback episode is built for you. We keep hearing the same question, now louder than ever: "Why can't this go faster?" AI and agen…

Every Choice Changes Everything: The Show

About 3 weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of what will be a new monthly show on the TWiT network. Naming things is hard, and we almost voted on the name, like we did for Stack Overflow, but we quick…

The skills problem isn't going anywhere — it's just wearing new clothes. In this episode, I unpack how the lessons we learned decades ago (limiting work in progress, the theory of constraints, test-driven development) ar…

Agentic Testing: Where Agents Fit in the E2E Testing Stack

Abstract Agent-driven end-to-end (E2E) tests add a new exploratory layer to testing, but should they replace traditional deterministic tests? We ran more than 200 agentic E2E workflows using the Playwright MCP, Playwrigh…

The skills that survive every industry shakeup aren't the ones you can Google — they're softer, harder to name, and far more durable. In this episode, Jonathan explores principle-oriented thinking: the practice of stripp…

Slack AI: The Path to Multi-Cloud

In early 2023, Slack faced a foundational challenge: serving Large Language Models (LLMs) at enterprise scale with the security, reliability, and performance our customers expect. Over three years, we evolved from basic …

Shaping Product Understanding with Contrastive Reinforcement Learning

Etsy’s marketplace is defined by the creativity and craftsmanship of our sellers and the hundreds of millions of highly diverse products they offer. You can find silversmiths who cold-forge recycled sterling silver, weav…

From SSH to REST: A Security-Driven Modernization of Slack’s EMR Data Pipelines

Excerpt By 2024, Slack’s data platform had accumulated 700+ SSH-based operators orchestrating critical data pipelines. We’re talking daily search indexing that processed terabytes of data, analytics jobs powering busines…

Thank You For Being a Friend

It's been one of those months, and by that, I mean one of the 663 months since I was born. This won't be a long post, because I only have two things to say. First, I'm really glad we re-ordered the GMI (Guaranteed

Managing context in long-run agentic applications

Excerpt In complex, long-running agentic systems, maintaining alignment and coherent reasoning between agents requires careful design. In this second article of our series, we explore these challenges and the mechanisms …

From Custom to Open: Scalable Network Probing and HTTP/3 Readiness with Prometheus

The Problem: Legacy Tooling and Its Limitations Currently, Slack utilizes a hybrid approach to network measurement, incorporating both internal (such as traffic between AWS Availability Zones) and external (monitoring tr…

Making Ads Count: Using MMoE and Auxiliary Tasks to Better Connect Buyers & Sellers

When buyers search on Etsy, they need to quickly and easily find the perfect item. At the same time, sellers need to be confident their unique products are being seen by the right customers. Our Ads Search ranking model,…

Migrating Etsy’s database sharding to Vitess

Etsy has maintained a sharded MySQL architecture since around 2010. This database cluster contains most of Etsy’s online data and is made up of ~1,000 tables distributed across ~1,000 shards. Over the last 16 years, it h…

Launching The Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative

It's been a year since I invited Americans to join us in a pledge to Share the American Dream: 1. Support organizations you feel are effectively helping those most in need across America right now. 2. Within the next fiv…

How Etsy Uses LLMs to Improve Search Relevance

Ever searched for something specific, only to be met with results that are close, but not quite? On Etsy’s Search Relevance team, that frustration is exactly what we are tackling. Our goal is simple yet ambitious: to hel…

Reducing experiment duration with predicted control variates

In 2021, we published a blog post titled “Increasing experimentation accuracy and speed by using control variates,” describing how we reduce the variance of metrics using CUPED in our experimentation platform. This is a …

The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income

The dream is incomplete until we share it with our fellow Americans.

Let's Talk About The American Dream

A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It ta…

Stay Gold, America

We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream.

FLOSS Weekly: FLOSS Weekly Continues at Hackaday - Hackaday is the new home of FLOSS Weekly

FLOSS Weekly continues with Jonathan Bennett at its new home at Hackaday. Host: Jonathan Bennett Visit hackaday.com/floss or search your favorite podcatcher to subscribe.

FLOSS Weekly 761: We Won! - The Victories of Free Software and Open Source

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Dan Lynch, Simon Phipps, and Leo Laporte gather to celebrate the final victory of free software and open source—and the final FLOSS Weekly as well. Hosts: Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman,…

FLOSS Weekly 760: Making Money In Open Source - Adam Jacob, Chef & System Initiative

Adam Jacob talks with Doc Searls and Shawn Powers about making money in open source, based on his long experience with Chef, System Initiative, and other development communities that are also businesses. Hosts: Doc Sea…

FLOSS Weekly 759: ActivityPub Crawl - Evan Prodromou on ActivityPub & OpenEarth

Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett go deep into what's happening in the fediverse with Evan Prodromou, the co-creator of ActivityPub, the open protocol behind Mastodon and other truly social networks on the Internet. Host…

FLOSS Weekly 758: Raiders of the Lost Source - Rocky and Oracle Unbreakable Linux, OpenAI Shakeup

Doc Searls and Dan Lynch explore long-standing ethical and technical imperatives of the free software and open source movements, and the wild new challenges they face in an age of AI that is still just beginning. Hosts…

Let a thousand programming publications bloom.

Calling AWS Bedrock from code

Using Python in a Jupyter notebook Continue reading on Better Programming »

Pandas v Psycopg:

A Postgres database speed test. Who wins? Continue reading on Better Programming »

Automating Your DevOps: Writing Scripts that Save Time and Headaches

Or, how scripting revolutionized my workflow Continue reading on Better Programming »

Integrating Psychology into Software Development

Emotional Architecture in Software Design Continue reading on Better Programming »

GPT Function Calling: 5 Underrated Use Cases

FLOSS Weekly 757: Noodling Around with OpenZiti - Philip Griffiths, OpenZiti and Secure Networking

Philip Griffiths of OpenZiti explains to Doc Searls, Shawn Powers, and Jonathan Bennett how OpenZiti is on its way to becoming the Linux of secure networking. An overview of OpenZiti and how it implements zero trust pr…

Remove Paywalls from Search Results

NBA Bubbleball and NBA Revenue [Podcast with Washington Post]

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