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I had a whole post ready for today to discuss “dark matter developers” and the silent majority that keeps our software applications running. After reading Anthropic’s press release for new Claude models today I felt that was more important and the dark matter developers post will be up next week ✌️ ​ Claude 3.5 Release ​ Anthropic has released an updated Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, showing major improvements in software development capabilities. The new model scored 49% on SWE Bench tests (up from 33.4%), Claude was already the best model for software development and it has now extended the lead scoring higher than all other publicly available models in solving real-world GitHub issues in Python repositories. ​ Claude Sonnet’s understanding of business domains has also improved with performance on the TAU-Bench metrics increasing from 62.5% to 69.2%. This means that Sonnet is more capable of reasoning and understanding compared to previous models and most importantly when compared to other public models. ​ Claude 3.5 Haiku has some updates as well. It is now more efficient and has the same cost as the previous generation of Claude Haiku 3.0 with much better results. Haiku can now outperform the previous generation of Opus and remains the best option when building user-facing AI applications. ​ Interestingly, Claude Opus has been removed from the model list where it was previously marked as “Coming Soon”. Online, people are speculating this is because Anthropic is able to get better results with a smaller model, if so that is very exciting and continues to show the growth in research and increasing power of AI systems. ​ The most exciting part of this release is the Computer Use feature where Claude can now take on the role of a user in a real world application accessing browser windows and even the computer itself. In their demo video Anthropic researchers show Claude filling out a form based on spreadsheet data, other online information and information from the user’s computer. The possibilities of this to increase productivity is massive with many data entry tasks being fully automated. ​ One thing I do wish Anthropic would resolve is their versioning, it would be much better if this was called Claude Sonnet 3.6 instead of reusing the 3.5 version number. This duplication of versioning means it is more difficult to understand what people are referring to particularly in blogs or on X. ​ If you are curious about how Generative AI and LLMs can help your business particularly if you are an engineering manager or software engineer please reach out. I would also love to hear from you if you have interesting use cases or examples from your real world workflows. ​ If you are interested in following my journey you can subscribe to my blog and YouTube channel. My other links are available on My Linktree. ...

I started a new role in October that has a strong focus on event sourcing and domain driven design (DDD). One of the recommended books in our on-boarding materials is *Domain-Driven Design Distilled *by Vaughn Vernon. Below are my notes taken while reading the book, some will be specific to my context either at work or other applications I have worked on while others are more general. Regardless, I hope they are useful to you. ...

One year ago (and some change) I started Juiced BJJ with the goal of being able to pay for the store’s initial costs which at the time was a Shopify subscription ($350/yr), product design and manufacturing costs. Shopify was running a promotion at the time offering 3 months for $1/month which gave me the confidence to take that first leap on the store. **Quick background: **Juiced BJJ is an ecommerce store selling jiu jitsu themed t-shirts and rashguards. What sets Juiced apart is the focus on graphics, higher quality materials and that it is Australian owned and operated. I have spent over a decade in the sport, know the community and it’s needs well. Now I am making the gear that I would want to buy. ...

Over the last few weeks there has been a lot of discussion on Twitter and YouTube about the merits of serverless and reliance on companies like Vercel. The cause of this was recent changes to Vercel’s pricing that led to massive increases for developers particularly in the hobbyist space. The debate centres on two points: the first is that you should maintain your own infrastructure to retain ownership and independence. The other side believes that Vercel’s pricing increases are insignificant compared to the value they provide. ...

I recently read a post titled “Operate at all levels” by Pedro Franceschi who is the co-CEO at Brex. The post is an internal communication that he has shared to his team about the requirement he has, particularly for managers, to operate at all levels. Pedro provides the example of a director at his company that both leads the AI team and writes tooling for engineering dashboards. Firstly, I agree with Pedro’s assertions that a leader who can operate at all levels earns respect from their team and if you want to be a successful leader in any business you should have the skills of the organisation you are managing e.g. if you are a director of engineering you should have a software engineering background, if you are leading a sales organisation you should have experience with sales and partnerships. I am consistently surprised when I meet people in my work either as a consultant or engineering manager that have not worked in the field they are managing. In amalgamated organisations it makes sense that you may have a person skilled in marketing also managing an ecommerce engineering team if that team does not require a senior leader but it should be a requirement that at some point in that person’s career they were a senior individual contributor (IC). ...

Deno is a Javascript runtime like NodeJS and it has a new security feature that you need to know about. We all love Deno’s allow permissions but this month they released a new deny permissions API that might change how you write your applications and run scripts. Check out the video, have a play and let me know in the comments what you think. Will you keep using Allow permissions? Does Deny permissions change how you write your applications? You can read all about Deno’s new permissions API in the 1.36 release notes https://deno.com/blog/v1.36 ...

https://www.youtube.com/embed/S6eKMZ-5K-0 When you start your career as a software engineer you will meet recruiters. They are a core part of the industry and provide a service to both the company they work for and to you, the candidate. It’s important when working with recruiters to understand how they make money and the incentive structure they have in place. I’m going to generalise here and talk about the methods I have seen and I don’t promise that this will be an exhaustive list. ...

The perpetual scroll of social media feeds has become boring to me. I open up Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, Instagram, and various others, yearning for a fresh discovery, only to be inundated with regurgitated clips and opinions designed solely to generate superficial engagement. I find myself mindlessly consuming low-quality content, squandering hours on platforms that offer little substance. I am so sick of looking at feeds and consuming junk content that in the words of Elon are “regrettable time spent on a platform”. I don’t dislike the content on them for the most part, videos of dogs doing tricks, a podcast clip, sports videos. What I dislike is that I waste so much time on them and for the most part the content does not matter, it can be consumed at any point. There is no breaking “must-know” news, no ideas that will change how I run my business just recycled clips from other pages or some inane take designed for engagement. So much of the content can feel urgent or necessary to know but ultimately I just don’t care anymore. ...

It’s difficult to avoid doom and gloom in finance reporting at the moment whether it is bank collapses or rising interest rates we seem to be heading towards a recession, whether or not you agree on the cause and solution to inflation people are worried about a recession and most importantly their jobs. When times are tough people begin to look for alternative sources of income also known by the popular millennial refrain: “The Side Hustle”. A lower effort and easy-to-start side hustle for millennials which have now been in the workforce for two decades is to begin content creation, in this post I would like to explore my hypothesis that we will see more people become content creators in an effort to stave off redundancies and make themselves more valuable in a changing, unstable market. ...

It’s my belief that streaming and video platforms are going to create better experts over time and push most fields into some pretty impressive areas compared to today. In this post I will look at a few different platforms and how they help people learn, the biggest focus is jiu jitsu but I also discuss Javascript and technology learning since its another area I’m familiar with. I find it beneficial to gather information from multiple sources when studying a sport or skill I am interested in, as it allows me to gain a diverse range of perspectives and knowledge beyond a single sports league or brand. It’s my belief that there are more jiu jitsu experts since the rise of FloGrappling as people can now watch from multiple competitions and formats which didn’t exist five or ten years ago. People watching this content are now able to watch the sport forever since there is such volume of content on FloGrappling and other streaming platforms like BJJ Fantatics or UFC Fight Pass. ...