Willing to relocate: No unless very strong commitment.
Technologies: Python, JavaScript, Scheme, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, compilers, interpreters, foreign function interfaces, FastAPI, Flask, Celery, RabbitMQ, Redis, Pydantic, SQLModel, technical strategy, team management (6+ devs + interns), SDLC best practices, etc
Résumé/CV: Sent by email
Email: See profile!
I have over a decade of experience working in various roles and industries, from healthcare to education to finance. My last role was CTO of a FinTech that I brought from zero to one, architecting and implementing all of the tech stack from compliance to distributed locks while managing a team of 6 developers.
I am looking for interesting problems and a good team. I strongly believe that good, thoughtful work pays dividends when things break or need to move fast. Boring, proven tech before shiny new thing.
My first task at my last job was removing access to an employee being let go. I had just gone through onboarding so I knew every (documented) service we needed to handle. We live tested it on my own accounts, measured the time before I noticed, and then proceeded to successfully go through the checklist.
Except not everything was properly documented, and it turned out the employee had given admin rights on some resources to a contractor which proceeded to wreak havoc on their behalf (the 'rm -rf' kind). Eh!
I don't fully agree with the quote. You can't really outsource thinking nor understanding. You can outsource the generation of streams of tokens that may or may not be appropriate for what you're looking for. But you absolutely have to know what you're looking for, or have a very solid intuition of what it should look like and behave, otherwise you're just digging your own grave.
The skill is in making the LLMs reliably generate useful and pertinent streams of tokens. That takes work, reading the output, intuition, experience, rigor, real commitment to doing good work, not fall prey to being lazy, etc.
I have just stepped down from a CTO job where I built a FinTech's stack from the ground up. I leveraged a Claude Max plan for about 8 months and I can say with absolute certainty I would not have been as productive without it. I have barely written any code by hand during that time, but I did read almost every single line of code produced. My role was much more that of an "editor", as another article posted here mentioned. There is no doubt in my mind that you can be very highly productive with AI, it's just not the magical silver bullet some people market it as. I have a lot of notes describing the process that I'm considering publishing.
Just yesterday I was interviewing for a very interesting job and I completely flunked the coding question in an unacceptable way for my level of experience. The question was easy, I just couldn't get past some syntactic issues. For 8 months, Claude wrote all of my Python classes and Pydantic types. Now I had to write a dataclass, and because I always just resorted to standard classes before the advent of LLMs, I stumbled. And froze. And panicked. And that was it. Of course you could say I should have just scrapped the dataclass and written it as a simple class. The point is I felt very, very stupid. LLMs suddenly felt like a huge disadvantage.
All this to say I disagree with LLMs "rotting" my brain. Quite the opposite, I know that it's possible to use LLMs to be efficient and correct. It's more the actual mechanical act of writing that gets rusty.
Wait, your final outlook on the situation isn’t that the LLM rotted your brain? Are you sure that this isn’t a case of “I refuse to believe I could have done the wrong thing for 8 months”?
There’s zero chance you know if your code is robust, it’s barely had any time in production. Comment back in two years.
Something degrading because of lack of use is literally the definition of rotting. If you forgot how to multiply then yeah, calculators rotted your brain. If you never knew how to multiply then no. You clearly knew how to write code before and now you don’t. Rotting.
I would say about 80% of the code was in "production". Obvious hiccups were fixed after a few weeks of running. The platform was collecting, transforming, distributing data as designed without any major issues. The financial code was heavily tested by a PhD Wall Stree quant. The less tested parts were the front-end and the swarm itself under load.
And to clarify: I didn't "forget" how to code. I froze for a moment, after relying on a tool to write for me for most of a year. More like rusting.
Ooh, don’t feel sad. They’ve just hadn’t caught up to revolution yet. And let’s not use the bad S word! Let’s call it “temporarily agent deprived”. Just buy another $200 subscription and it will be okay again.
Willing to relocate: No unless very strong client commitment.
Technologies: Python, JavaScript, Scheme, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, compilers, interpreters, foreign function interfaces, FastAPI, Flask, Celery, RabbitMQ, Redis, Pydantic, SQLModel, technical strategy, team management (6+ devs + interns), SDLC best practices, etc
Résumé/CV: Sent by email
Email: See profile!
I have about 14 years of experience working in various roles and industries, from healthcare to education to finance. My last role was CTO of a FinTech that I brought from zero to one, architecting and implementing all of the tech stack from compliance down to distributed locking while managing a team of 6 developers.
I am looking for interesting problems and a good team. I strongly believe that good, thoughtful work pays dividends when things break or need to move fast. Boring, proven tech before shiny new thing. Sleeping at night is priceless.
BTW the team has received a well-deserved ISMM Best Paper award for their work. I just want to say a huge congrats to all of them who I have seen work very hard on this paper!
It's a fully client-side Python IDE with single-stepping, a virtual (non-hierarchical) filesystem, an FFI to call JS code and a few other things (see the docs). Sharing apps in CodeBoot is trivial: right-click the "play" button and copy a shareable URL. I have helped people solve data wrangling problems using CodeBoot and they now have their little app bookmarked. It works really well.
I could go on for a while. AMA if you're interested. We're actively working on it and some great new features are on the way!
Really glad you appreciate! We use it to teach introductory programing courses and the simplistic UI is purpose-built for that use-case.
It really is a joy to program with, but we're struggling a bit to communicate everything it can do. We are working hard on that front and should have a landing page and better explanatory material soon. We're very interested in feedback. If anybody wants to learn more, just contact me through the email in my profile.
Instead of a landing page, may I suggest a '?' button, or at least putting the landing page on https://codeboot.org/something and redirecting from referrers but not direct loads?
Browsers are getting more and more aggressive about deleting cookies / making cookies ephemeral, and nothing is more annoying that dealing with one or multiple pop-ups on each page visit.
For an example of how bad it can get, load LMarena in a private window.
Cookie pop-up, agree > type something, press enter > ToS pop-up, agree > press enter again > processing > answer > type somethi- verify Cloudflare, agree > type something
Other than that I don't have much comments yet except that it seems a nice product!
This really echos our own experience at BLINX [1].
Pr. Marc Feeley's lab develops codeBoot [2], an online IDE to teach students programming (and more!). We created BLINX as a hardware platform for students to go along with our IDE. The device acts as a data collector for various Grove sensors and publishes the data as an HTTP endpoint. You can program it directly from codeBoot.
BTW if anybody has any questions feel free to reach out!
Hi :) You should check out Gerbil Scheme (https://cons.io). It is built on top of Gambit Scheme (https://gambitscheme.org) and has the generics you are looking for.
I was CTO/engineer at a FinTech up until last month. You can find my email in my profile.
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