charliebwrites

I am a people & open source obsessed Product Manager with over 10 years of experience working on databases and developer platforms. I was an iOS developer for 5 years prior.

I have lead product teams at:

- Grafana Labs (Loki, k6)

- Sauce Labs (Sauce Orchestrate, Modern Frameworks)

- Cloudflare (Workers KV, Cloudflare Queues, Pub/Sub)

- Salesforce (Mobile Platform)

I am looking to get more focused on the people side of tech, either through expanding into a role where I help other PMs grow & succeed or through pivoting to UX Research or Developer Advocacy. I am also looking for volunteer OSS opportunities.

I prefer to be in roles where I have high agency and the ability to act directly.

Location: Charleston, SC

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: If assistance is provided

Technologies: Grafana Loki / k6, Cloudflare Workers / Developer Platform, Sauce Labs / Selenium, iOS Development, IoT Device development

Website: charlesburnett.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesgburnett/

Email: Not public. Message me on Linkedin

If anything above resonates with you, please reach out!

That’s literally how Facebook started

I remember begging my older step brother for an invite since he had the college email to get in

If you’ve ever wondered why the symbol of health is a snake spiraling a staff (the Greek god Asclepius’s staff to be specific), it’s because in Ancient Greece they used small amounts of snake venom to treat serious illnesses

We’ve come full circle

Anecdata, sample size of one:

When I was looking for my next role after being laid off, I didn’t get much of a response with my human handmade resume despite my experience

Just for kicks, I asked ChatGPT to “Analyze my resume and give it a score for what percentage it was in” then I asked it to revise it to make it score as high as possible

I still tweaked and fact checked it but after I started sending that out, I got a much higher hit rate than before

But who knows, maybe the market changed, was a better time of year, etc

I still had to pass interviews and prove my worth. But it probably helped me get my foot in the door

We can’t know, they didn’t disclose ;-)

Just checked. I continue to have Claude Code with my Pro plan

This is concerning though. If I lose my current usage allotment at this price point I will likely switch to codex

This is why the First Amendment is so important

Apple is usually pretty good at keeping older phones performant enough but,

This is the first upgrade cycle that I upgraded in anger over an unusably slow and energy inefficient OS on an “older” model

I was traveling in south / south east Asia and my iPhone 15 Pro was dying twice a day despite minimal use besides maps and taking some photos. My battery health was 86% so not perfect but surely it shouldn’t die twice a day.

That coupled with the keyboard constantly lagging with every letter I typed made me realize Apple no longer cares about older models.

They threw that out with Liquid Glass.

I wish Android wasn’t also closing off their ecosystem.

If Gmail goes down in 20 years, it will be a major occurrence. If mailgoforward.fart goes down, you’re screwed.

The technical equivalent of “if you default on a $100,000 loan you have a problem. If you default on a billion dollar loan the _bank_ has a problem.

The steps to trouble:

- identify who owns the number

- compel that person to give unlocked phone

- government can read messages of _all_ people in group chat not just that person

Corollary:

Disappearing messages severely limits what can be read

Every time I see this, I upvote it

I’m sure it’s different than it was when I was a teenager but building Linux from scratch was the thing that got me into computers as a kid

It shows that computers can be accessible _and modifiable_ at the lowest levels

I’d love to see how this impacts their bottom line

Sure short term it’s more “focused” and “greedy”

But the damage to the community and acquisition through a free tier must drop those numbers in an impactful way

Why so?

Apple explicitly acknowledged that they were using OpenAI’s GPT models before this, and now they’re quite easily switching to Google’s Gemini

Someone tried to get into my account 2 days ago by attempting to reset it with “forgot password”

That’s never happened to me before, wonder if it’s related

My hot take: We’re already in a recession.

We just use AI to justify doing all the same recession behaviors while making it sound like innovation

- not hiring this year > AI is making us productive!

- no wage growth > AI means we don’t need to raise salaries

- layoffs > with AI we can do more with less people

- spending less on offsites, work perks etc > we really need that budget for AI

- not spending money on that new business tool > AI can do it instead

sudo killall coreaudiod seems to fix it for a while

For me this fixes it for about 30 minutes then I have to do it again… and again… and again…

I wonder why some folks need to do it more than others

It is a vs code fork

Google may have won the browser wars with Chrome, but Microsoft seems to be winning the IDE wars with VSCode

What are the specific regulations that make building new power plants hard?

I wish they would’ve actually discussed _how_ the hack was accomplished

What are those species?

So when a storage device or a GPU burns out, how do you replace it?

Fly an astronaut to space..?

Anecdotal, but I switched to an M3 MBA from an M1 MBP for my iOS and other dev related work

I’ve had zero problems with lag or compile time (prior to macOS 26 anyway)

The only thing it can’t do is run Ableton in a low latency way without strongly changing the defaults

You press a key on the keyboard to play a note and half a second later you hear it

Other than that, zero regrets

Triaging existing packages and device compatibility to find a phone with the fewest, most fixable freedom problems is the first step

Maybe this is my PM brain but why go after the most compatible devices first vs the most popular devices today?

Surely you’d maximize software freedom by targeting the most used devices so those can switch first

Hulu, ESPN, and Disney+ also sent out a notice that they’re increasing prices around the same time

I wonder how many cancellations are related to the price increase?

I know I switched to a cheaper bundle around that time, and it had nothing to do with politics. I just didn’t see the relative value of ESPN if I’m paying that much more for it

Is it fun to get paid to watch baseball or does the constant live updating take the joy out of it?

They’re definitely the current insect plague of my tomato plants

Funny to think that some (proto?) human was swearing at these things 295 million years ago the same way I am

Austria, and Vienna in particular has always held a special place in my heart

Do we know if they have programs like this for high skill tech workers or is it just PhDs at this point?

I'm not the blog writer but I found this summed up my thoughts on the new Claude Xcode integration perfectly

How would one discover which VOIP providers are the source of calls?

“Man who creates bubble now fears it”