Anthony Ferrara

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...

12

2 Comments

Recently I was reading about the VW data disclosure, and I was thinking: could an LLM spot this? So I built a small prototype using PDL script, and the results are pretty good to be honest! More detailed information here: https://lnkd.in/dqJSMPkU

5

Y'alls know accessibility is important to me, and that comes in a lot of forms! I wanted to share out two things I've been working on recently that follow the a11y theme, with Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) right around the corner: First, plugging the work we've been doing at Ro around building technology to give patients more access to healthcare so they can achieve their health goals via Patient Intake. Intake isn't "just a form" - it's the key way for patients to communicate their health history, goals, and preferences to their providers in a way that feels human. Behind the scenes, we're making sure every piece of information a patient provides is structured to make sure every point is seen and heard so that our providers can deliver the best possible personalized care. More info on the platform here: https://lnkd.in/gC4ru5ip Second, the lovely Elliot Kipling and I caught up on the Enginears podcast last month around healthcare accessibility and digital accessibility in general. The episode dropped today, check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gbGcBvsB

40

2 Comments

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?

2

So many things to unpack in the wake of another company squeezing their open source users towards licensing. Thinking of the current OSS climate and the lack of participation of companies generally as well as not being able to endorse using a solution fearing that a company will pull the rug out from under you once you're fully integrated with a solution. https://lnkd.in/gVpME4Uz

2

1 Comment

It can't be a coincidence that my favorite band, LinkinPark, is celebrating their comeback in the same year I decided to step away from my current leadership role to become a software engineer again. Damn, it feels good hammering some lines of code on the keyboard while listening to LinkinPark again. 😅🤘🎵 Why did I change my role, you ask? The short answer: less talking, more doing. I’ve always loved leading creative teams and helping people shine. But leadership isn’t only about a title or a place on the organizational chart — it’s about setting an example and inspiring others. As a Principal Software Engineer at Shopware, I see my role as one where I can lead by example, pushing boundaries and driving innovation from the frontlines. It’s a hands-on approach, focused on building and making things happen. This is not a step back, but just another chapter in my career and not the last time I will try to be a good leader. "Heavy is the crown". https://lnkd.in/emHAJXkj

44

If you're the kind of person who's excited about all the recent S3 feature announcements (bucket policy unlocks via temporary root sessions, up to millions of buckets per account, pagination and region filtering for ListBuckets, conditional writes, ListCallerAccessGrants API) and you're attending re:Invent, then you should come to our storage track session, STG306 Advanced security patterns on Amazon S3. Learn how to use all the exciting new stuff securely in the most interactive format available at re:Invent!

94

2 Comments

I'm so proud of the work that went into the OpenVMM and OpenHCL. My team has focused on storage devices, and there is a ton of great code in this repo contributed by the engineers working on this (me: I'm a manager, so of sometimes dubious value :)). It's very exciting to see this code become open source! Not only is this a checkpoint in all the hard work that goes into writing a new VMM (and in my team's case: storage emulation code), it also marks a new way of working for some of us. While many engineers in Microsoft from different orgs have contributed already, we're going to keep developing this in the open. As the blog post below mentions, reach out on GitHub or Zulip. Or, you can contribute to the code itself (anyone else love debugging IDE emulators?). While we're already using this code in Azure (over 1.5 million VMs last month, according to the blog), there's still plenty of interesting and exciting stuff to go do.

35

1 Comment

Some updates to my #FeatureFlags demo app (https://lnkd.in/eQd23gfU) - I've added an "Explain" view that outlines why a particular variant was chosen (based on the current context and rules). This is a companion piece to my feature flags book (read it at https://lnkd.in/ehxiy6bY).

10

Yesterday, I noticed (in my error logs) that a reader was trying to post a comment on my blog; but, could _not_ because they were inadvertently putting invalid HTML tags in the #Markdown. I was reporting this (to the reader) as a generic parsing error. But, as of now, I'm using #ColdFusion to extract the illegal tag names from the #OWASP #AntiSamy error messages. I don't love relying on String parsing; but, as always, #RegEx pattern matching makes life easier. https://bennadel.com/4679

8

I was reading one of the 2 newsletters I follow - The Grappler's Diary on Substack - and the author (Chris Wojcik) pointed out one of those "well, yeah, of course" kind of ideas that made me stop and think for a bit. Wojcik pointed out that it takes more and more effort to reach higher levels of skill in jiu jitsu. This is of course true of any skill. I've certainly seen that with programming. The easiest and biggest leaps are at the beginning. Going from zero to your first working program is pretty easy. Becoming a true professional developer takes years. Continuous improvement takes introspection, feedback, seeking out training and education, and lots and lots of work. And the noticeable improvements these days are small: cleaner code, improved readability, and better organization. Little things that matter. And the more time I spend as a "programmer" the less I write code and the more time I spend on related things: technical design, code review, stakeholder relations, project management, and more. Just as you get more skilled in martial arts, the more time you spend teaching, coaching, and advising, and the less time you spend getting beat up by kids.

7

5 Comments

Two recent o11y observations: 1. If you've never experienced rich tracing, it's hard to be told how good it can be. You need to experience it. 2. Once you have good tracing, it's easy to take for granted and be critical of a system, forgetting how high the bar already is. O11y's hedonic treadmill.

11

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

16

2 Comments

A new quick Cypress blog post about my "should read" assertion https://lnkd.in/eUC3ryaS

22

3 Comments

Simy log in to the Amazon Bedrock Studio web experience using company credentials (SSO) and start experimenting with Bedrock FMs and tools to build applications. With Bedrock Studio, developers get a secure environment outside of the AWS Management Console to leverage Bedrock tools such as Agents, Knowledge Bases, and Guardrails.

8

In Search and Rescue we have a saying "slow is smooth and smooth is fast". The same mindset can be applied to #SoftwareEngineering. Have urgency and bias towards action, but don't rush. Find the root cause. Fix it once. Fix it right. An extra few cycles now will make you faster in the long run.

2

1 Comment

There is a lot of advice out there to use URLProtocols for mocking HTTP requests in your tests, but I think there is a much better way, so I wrote about it: https://lnkd.in/gduS-UhA #swift #swifttesting

10