inspired by tinyrj.com, tiny.london, and vancouver.isoworld.xyz, here's isometric seattle
ty @imnotchalk, @ktoya_me, and @xthomasms for the vision
ty @imnotchalk, @ktoya_me, and @xthomasms for the vision
6
6
68
3,074
a bit delayed, but i finally wrote up a few thoughts on my experience at @P99CONF, shoutout @fasterthanlime, @natevanben, @YaySteveK, and @georg_kreuzmayr for some of my faves :)
thanks for having me!
thanks for having me!
2
2
7
321
thanks dylan retweeted
Some things I learned working at Microsoft:
1/ large numbers everywhere. $100M ARR service isn't even a footnote on executive slide decks. Leadership time is too valuable, come back when you're $1B+. Msft ecosystem is so rich that $1B+ sales are common (it's ludicrous how much work goes into closing these). Azure has ~250 services, some are a few mil and stagnant, others in hypergrowth, some are cash cows, you see every quadrant of the growth-share matrix. Imagine the imperial navy with ships of vastly different sizes as far the eye can see
2/ more on immense scale-- the smallest of Azure services run on 10K+ VMs. Large services run on 1M+ (some maybe 10M+ VMs, idk). Msft is stamping one new datacenter into the ground every four days (!!!!), a bewildering rate. Demand is so high, even with all this buildout we're forever capacity constrained. Azure brings in $100B in revenue and is growing 40%+ annually (at this size!!) There are ~225K msft employees. You almost have to think in scientific notation, 10^4 is a tiny number here
3/ msft is totalitarian re serving the customer. It's counterintuitive to outsiders, but the warts in msft products fall out of this culture. For example, it would be easy to improve the Azure Portal. But in all my time working with customers and partners here, I haven't heard even one person complain about the portal UI. Msft invests $0.00 dollars in anything that doesn't serve the customer and is completely unapologetic about downstream implications of this mindset
4/ msft can reshape itself overnight (when it has the will). People argued whether we waited too long to adapt after Storm-0558/Midnight Blizzard hacks (with the benefit of hindsight, we definitely did). But once the leadership team privileged security, everyone's job changed in two weeks. LT tied every engineer's comp to security, centralized reporting of embedded security teams, every org reshuffled its roadmap. Within days everyone was pushing PRs with security fixes. I would have thought it inconceivable to mobilize 200K+ employees this fast
5/ Azure is complicated. Postgres depends on compute, networking, AKS (or EKS for you aws people), secrets, etc. AKS depends on compute, networking, some datastore (probably Cosmos but idk), a dozen other things. Cosmos depends on... you get the idea. When anything breaks, everything above can break too. Some construction crew accidentally cuts a fiber cable in Brazil South, or a dedicated hardware compression chip browns out in storage, or compute failure rate in west eu spikes for some reason, or a million other failure modes. Msft is relentless about improving this, idk exactly but fully loaded probably 50% of engineer time goes into resilience
6/ re lifers who work 20+ years here, SV sneers at this but I now see it differently. I was once on the bridge debugging some IO issue, we call storage, the guy diagnoses it in about a minute, we chitchat, turns out he built NT asyncio support. Or same story but with networking, the guy built NT tcp/ip stack. I used to have a boss here, we were bumping into some problem, she casually goes oh yeah, we hit that when I was working on .NET bytecode. The ex-DEC VAX/VMS database engineers built SQL Server, some are still here. I love bumping into these people
7/ I never *really* understood distribution until I got here. As an example, our team had a customer in Seoul w/ a deep performance problem. We had to fix it to unlock one of these giant contracts. We don't speak Korean, they don't speak English. Of course msft has specialists in Seoul who get to the customer site before you could even get on a plane. There is an office in every major city, a relationship with every major entity, legal experts in every jurisdiction. You can reach these ppl instantly. Claude tells me msft has ~180 offices in ~100 countries (!!) U.S. government has ~270 consulates in ~170 countries. So msft outposts aren't quite as vast as U.S. diplomatic network, but pretty vast
8/ in the 90s everyone was afraid of msft. The lore is that BillG was ruthless. He'd clone you, beat you via ecosystem/distribution strength, and moreover make the ecosystem stronger with the new product. I wasn't there to compare, but msft of today is ruthless about winning, has the will to adapt, and has the wherewithal to undertake colossal projects. Ppl see Teams bugs or whatever and completely misread the signals. Teams is less polished than Slack because msft doesn't care one iota about polish. It cares about winning, and is frighteningly good at it. Underestimate at your own risk
1/ large numbers everywhere. $100M ARR service isn't even a footnote on executive slide decks. Leadership time is too valuable, come back when you're $1B+. Msft ecosystem is so rich that $1B+ sales are common (it's ludicrous how much work goes into closing these). Azure has ~250 services, some are a few mil and stagnant, others in hypergrowth, some are cash cows, you see every quadrant of the growth-share matrix. Imagine the imperial navy with ships of vastly different sizes as far the eye can see
2/ more on immense scale-- the smallest of Azure services run on 10K+ VMs. Large services run on 1M+ (some maybe 10M+ VMs, idk). Msft is stamping one new datacenter into the ground every four days (!!!!), a bewildering rate. Demand is so high, even with all this buildout we're forever capacity constrained. Azure brings in $100B in revenue and is growing 40%+ annually (at this size!!) There are ~225K msft employees. You almost have to think in scientific notation, 10^4 is a tiny number here
3/ msft is totalitarian re serving the customer. It's counterintuitive to outsiders, but the warts in msft products fall out of this culture. For example, it would be easy to improve the Azure Portal. But in all my time working with customers and partners here, I haven't heard even one person complain about the portal UI. Msft invests $0.00 dollars in anything that doesn't serve the customer and is completely unapologetic about downstream implications of this mindset
4/ msft can reshape itself overnight (when it has the will). People argued whether we waited too long to adapt after Storm-0558/Midnight Blizzard hacks (with the benefit of hindsight, we definitely did). But once the leadership team privileged security, everyone's job changed in two weeks. LT tied every engineer's comp to security, centralized reporting of embedded security teams, every org reshuffled its roadmap. Within days everyone was pushing PRs with security fixes. I would have thought it inconceivable to mobilize 200K+ employees this fast
5/ Azure is complicated. Postgres depends on compute, networking, AKS (or EKS for you aws people), secrets, etc. AKS depends on compute, networking, some datastore (probably Cosmos but idk), a dozen other things. Cosmos depends on... you get the idea. When anything breaks, everything above can break too. Some construction crew accidentally cuts a fiber cable in Brazil South, or a dedicated hardware compression chip browns out in storage, or compute failure rate in west eu spikes for some reason, or a million other failure modes. Msft is relentless about improving this, idk exactly but fully loaded probably 50% of engineer time goes into resilience
6/ re lifers who work 20+ years here, SV sneers at this but I now see it differently. I was once on the bridge debugging some IO issue, we call storage, the guy diagnoses it in about a minute, we chitchat, turns out he built NT asyncio support. Or same story but with networking, the guy built NT tcp/ip stack. I used to have a boss here, we were bumping into some problem, she casually goes oh yeah, we hit that when I was working on .NET bytecode. The ex-DEC VAX/VMS database engineers built SQL Server, some are still here. I love bumping into these people
7/ I never *really* understood distribution until I got here. As an example, our team had a customer in Seoul w/ a deep performance problem. We had to fix it to unlock one of these giant contracts. We don't speak Korean, they don't speak English. Of course msft has specialists in Seoul who get to the customer site before you could even get on a plane. There is an office in every major city, a relationship with every major entity, legal experts in every jurisdiction. You can reach these ppl instantly. Claude tells me msft has ~180 offices in ~100 countries (!!) U.S. government has ~270 consulates in ~170 countries. So msft outposts aren't quite as vast as U.S. diplomatic network, but pretty vast
8/ in the 90s everyone was afraid of msft. The lore is that BillG was ruthless. He'd clone you, beat you via ecosystem/distribution strength, and moreover make the ecosystem stronger with the new product. I wasn't there to compare, but msft of today is ruthless about winning, has the will to adapt, and has the wherewithal to undertake colossal projects. Ppl see Teams bugs or whatever and completely misread the signals. Teams is less polished than Slack because msft doesn't care one iota about polish. It cares about winning, and is frighteningly good at it. Underestimate at your own risk
121
214
4,022
569,274
benchmarkmaxxing is the new tokenmaxxing
We spend 2 trillion+ LLM tokens a month. That’s way too much money spent to trust our agents based on gut feeling.
So, we started using custom benchmarks.
We ran into plenty of problems, from parallel runs to open-ended tasks. Here’s everything we learned along the way:
0
0
4
197
when the latency-sensitive service is still using django...
thanks for having me BIOS Sphere, and big ups to @cognition @orchid_hq @gching @jorybraun @JakeKing and all the speakers for an excellent conference!
thanks for having me BIOS Sphere, and big ups to @cognition @orchid_hq @gching @jorybraun @JakeKing and all the speakers for an excellent conference!
3
2
11
407
@cognition @orchid_hq @gching @jorybraun @JakeKing check out my talk here! dylanamartin.com/media/snakes-t…
0
0
3
84
he gets it
I'm now building an "improvements" feature into all of my personal vibecoded applications: a freeform text input that's hooked up to an agent that yolo implements whatever is submitted.
It's an interesting experience -- the activation energy barrier to sanding any rough edge or ature becomes extremely low. Someone else who uses one of the applications I created has already implemented 150 improvements over the course of a few days. This pattern feels like a new kind of tool -- liquid software? -- and every application that doesn't have this feature now has a slightly rigid and anachronistic flavor. Why can't I just tell it how I want it to be different?
Now, it's not obvious to me how this pattern can or should scale. Does it become unmaintainable after a while? (Maybe model intelligence improvement outstrips my feature appetite such that it's fine?) How does collaborative software work in this model? Can software designed this way be secure and reliable?
Whatever the larger questions about broader deployment, it definitely works great in a personal context. It reminds me a little of the visions of Lisp/Lisp machines, Smalltalk, and HyperCard -- systems that the user can take control of and modify. Those visions never quite worked, though: the vast majority of software today is not end-user modifiable in any useful way. So, while this "liquid" affordance is a very small touch, the way it changes one's relation to the software feels a bit transgressive and empowering in a Lickliderian and Engelbartian way.
1
0
2
175
see you soon, vancouver! looking forward to talking about lines going down (and i promise i'll pick a new topic soon; i just can't help but spread the good word of rust)
can't wait to hear from @kentcdodds @alessio_joseph @theCTO @JakeKing @ayushsoni_io @TheCyclotron @jkudish @lucamaraschi @MichaelThiessen @yagudaev @shanni_talks @kimjune01 @ashaya @dmarticus @wyattjoh 🔥
luma.com/biossphere
need a tick? comment below, we basically at cap
1
0
4
108
Shoutout to my boy Alex
My post on how we do heavy LLM benchmarks at @posthog - from code review agents and issue validation to custom research agents with tons of MCPs.
There are lots of real examples, and the code is opensource. Hope you find parts valuable to your projects.
posthog.com/blog/how-to-be…
1
0
4
58
got my team into maptap this morning and now i'm realizing there's a bevy of these stupid geography games that i hadn't even heard of
0
0
2
72
posthog the band the show the company
Confirmed: brand.posthog.com/hoggies works on Wii browsers
0
1
6
238
change is the only constant in this industry
@mipsytipsy got this right
- This is a weird time to be in computing. So much has changed, so fast. As a technologist, it's hard not to be dazzled by the possibilities, the speed, the range. As a human being, it's hard not to be tired.
- Address the envelope: Any time you send someone an artifact, tell them what it is, why you're sending it, and what you hope to receive from them, and any other useful context you can think of.
- The bar is going up: Every technological transition resets the baseline for performance—not by mandate, but by what becomes possible. This is true for companies, products, teams, tools, and people. What was excellent five years ago is table stakes today. We welcome this. The nature of technology is that it always catches up. Which is why the nature of technologists is, we stay ahead.
We love @honeycombio @sageox. I have been such a huge fan of Scuba since my days at Facebook (2013 - 2015)
0
0
0
49
