randomdrake

I wonder if this extends to training models on new content as well. Are we creating a cyclical information-consumption and training situation in which models being trained are more likely to pick up on and reference content created by themselves or by other LLMs than by other humans?

  Location: Tigard, OR (Portland Metro)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: TypeScript, Python, Go, PHP, AWS, Kubernetes, React, Angular, Postgres, MySQL, Claude / MCP infrastructure
  Résumé/CV: https://davidbyrondrake.com/david-drake-resume.pdf
  Email: david@randomdrake.com

Most recent: DevOps and Engineering Manager at Counterpart (insurance), where I led two full-stack teams plus DevOps and built an MCP infrastructure connecting GitHub, Linear, Salesforce, Snowflake, and Slack across the full insurance lifecycle. Agile success rate peaked at 89% against an 80% industry benchmark. A git-tracked Salesforce deployment pipeline I built on GitHub Actions saved roughly $20k a year and made deploys boring again.

Before that: Director of Engineering at Flourish Software (up to 15 engineers, 60% improvement in on-time delivery, 50% reduction in support load), Senior Full Stack at Expensify (moved millions of dollars a day, six-stack infrastructure), CEO of RedDep Labs (17 people, $8.6M valuation), CTO at iCracked (Y Combinator, 400+ technicians, dispatching system).

How I lead: I hire people who care about each other's success as much as their own, set clear commitments, and then trust the team to do the work. I trained as an actor and was a special education teacher before I wrote code, which is how I keep technical conversations legible to non-engineers and how I'm comfortable in any room.

Best fit: a team that values shipping over performance, has real users, and wants a leader technical enough to read the code and grounded enough to keep the team steady when things get hard.

I got a paper route just to get a hold of the dx2.

It was a life-changing machine.

Ordered, I believe, from the depths of a Computer Shopper magazine.

When I was in college, we were required to take a business class (Business 101) that mandated a finished business plan as part of the project.

It had to be long, in-depth, and include everything you mentioned.

I was incredibly surprised when I entered the tech and startup workforce that these were generally absent.

I had misunderstood the class and instructor and thought that you couldn't even start a business without one.

Then, when I started raising money for my own venture, I thought for sure a complete business plan was a prerequisite.

Nope. A few graphs, preferably hockey-shaped, and a good story were all that was necessary.

My venture failed, of course. But if I were to do it again, I would do myself the favor of having a complete plan. It would definitely save a lot of headaches and guessing in the moment.

Thank you for your post. Very informative. Why is it too early for AI? It’s clearly an emergent cultural evolutionary byproduct that’s been many years in the making and quite mature. Perhaps your own bias is limiting you to imagine what AI is truly capable of?

Wrote and released a daily reader on sobriety and stillness called I Will Not Drink With You Today.

There’s a companion website: https://iwillnotdrinkwithyoutoday.com

I wrote the book in markdown, stuck it in a SQLite DB and wrote a parser to put all the data in static JSON so it loads very fast.

I also created a new personal homepage to update my presence on the web as a published author and experienced leader and technologist: https://davidbyrondrake.com

Book was released less than a month ago—growing it organically like a startup has been fascinating in terms of marketing, sharing, building, and measuring success.

Have been utilizing my acting skills again with readings from the book on my Instagram and TikTok.

Having a really good time with it!

Defending focus is way harder than adding features.

When you're building, adding yet another feature can sometimes shave off all the edges that made you successful in the first place.

Same with messaging. The more you try to sound universal, the less anyone hears you.

Strong opinions that are honestly held and communicated are such great signs of respect. It's refreshing to see: "This is who we are. If it's not for you, that's okay."

Good piece.

This is a well-done library that’s fun to work with. I put together a proof of concept org chart generator[0] with it a while back when working on another project. Very easy to use and well-documented.

[0] https://github.com/randomdrake/react-flow-org-chart

Betty White holds such a highly regarded “Hollywood Star” place for me. It was fascinating to see her brought to life through her very ordinary belongings. Fun read.

The original research[0] is available for free online.

It goes into more detail about how they established the genetic signatures and has a lot more images as well.

Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in three generations of Syrian refugees

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z

Worked here. Changed my mind on SQLite. Hipp worked alongside us. SQLite can be crazy performant:

https://use.expensify.com/blog/scaling-sqlite-to-4m-qps-on-a...

Nice to see the library brought back in some kind of way for tech companies.

15 years ago, most tech companies had a library of sorts because it was required. Sure, there were manuals online, but they didn't offer the depth available in books at the time.

Stack Overflow either didn't exist or was in its infancy, so your options were to either find an O'Reilly book on the subject[0], hop in a Freenode channel on IRC and talk to folks who were in the weeds (or even the maintainers themselves), or you had to use mailing lists.

[0] - okay, not all of the books were O'Reilly but a huge number of them around that time period were

The arts. The further and further you go in instruction, the more it becomes about the little differences and quality. Practice always helps, but quality definitely taught and learned by many as well.

Fantastic claims require fantastic evidence.

Please be careful with things like this before someone gets hurt or worse.

I have friends in the medical profession who have tested GPT4 and it’s good, but not quite good enough for them.

I wouldn’t touch this with a 20 mile stick; something that claims actual medical advice like this.

I don’t know about the method of application, but the restaurant industry, in particular, has almost always operated on hiring bodies that actually walk in the door versus applications from someone online. Especially true for entry-level stuff in my experience (10 years in the service industry).

Retail and restaurant companies won't ever respond to my applications, despite constantly spamming the same jobs month after month.

I don't know of any place in the U.S. that doesn't have wanted signs in the windows for restaurant work. Between fast food, back of house, or front of house, there really are a ton of options both in downtown areas and suburbs from my experience.

Have you actually gone to one of these locations, physically, and applied? Did you follow up instead of just dropping an application by and hoping for the best?

Examining the source, you can use coordinates instead of address when calling get_aoi.

https://github.com/chrieke/prettymapp/blob/main/prettymapp/g...

Sounded like a neat project but seemed light on documentation.

Had to go back to 2015 in the Internet Archive[0] to actually find a copy of the website mentioned.

The site is in Russian but Google Translate seems to do an okay job of bringing it into English[1].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150223174714/http://www.hydron...

[1] https://web-archive-org.translate.goog/web/20150223174714/ht...

Totally fair. I guess I was mostly considering the more typical client-server consumption, RPC-type uses and wasn’t really thinking just how much we use it for basic data interchange and serialization. Thanks.

How far from WSDLs and SOAP we’ve come.

I applaud this effort. I hate that we’re back to where this feels necessary. I’m not sure if there’s anything better.

JSON sure felt better than XML. But did we abstract too far, or did we just get so much better bandwidth and processors, that enriched data exploration is just insignificantly possible?

I read the use-cases for this, but I feel like: if you’ve gone so far to where this is helpful/useful, have you just gone too far?

Yes, please. It’s been sad to see Freenode disappear. I’m afraid I don’t know where to call home in the IRC world anymore.

Everyone seems pretty wrapped up in the social part. But I think many forget that “media” was actually a big part of this.

Photos weren’t always so easy to share. Having places where media was only based on your friends or people you knew was incredibly novel and useful. A single website you could log in to in order to view photos (and eventually videos) related to you was novel when we all had flip phones and a “camera phone” was special.

Sharing media was tough. Photos - let alone, video - required tech, bandwidth, and a whole-ass computer.

I think that in addition to the social aspect dwindling, changing, or evolving, we must also account for the fact that media is so much easier to create, share, and consume. This is true with friends, relatives, and strangers; locally and afar.

We don’t “need” social media anymore because the media part is mostly solved. Fewer and fewer people don’t have a connected media viewer and creator in their pocket at all times anymore.

Being social with media is as simple as texting someone, or many people. And we do it in high definition all day, every day. No login. No ads. No algorithm.

You may be happy to know, then, that Gary Larson is making new Far Side comics.

https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff

Flourish | Senior Full Stack Go Engineer | Remote (PST to EST) | Full-time | https://www.flourishsoftware.com

Flourish Software is a leading cannabis supply chain SAAS provider. We are a team of supply chain and distribution experts that have helped global brands move products and goods on an enormous scale.

We're seeking a remote Full Stack Go Engineer to join our growing 5-person Scrum team. This role will help deliver impactful software, reporting, and changes to code that processes millions of dollars and thousands of pounds of cannabis and cannabis products across the United States and Canada.

Your focus will be on delivering well-written Go and JavaScript to our robust codebase, and our job will be to support you and remove obstacles that prevent you from getting uninterrupted time to do good engineering.

Our back end features various APIs and services written in Go that communicate with our front-end Angular platform along with many external state compliance and partner technology providers. The application spans from cultivation to manufacturing and distribution, including retail solutions.

Salary: $120,000 - $180,000

For more information or to apply: https://www.flourishsoftware.com/careers/full-stack-engineer

Maybe you don’t yet grok vi.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/1220118

This is neat. Dig the illustrations. Would love to see a kid’s version of this.

119.84°F

For folks interested in technology that helps to keep our less-technological relatives connected, I highly recommend NanaGram[0].

I’ve been a paid user since the early days and it’s an absolute delight to my grandmother every single time it shows up during the month.

1. Register and get a unique phone number to text

2. Start sending photos to that number via SMS

3. Share the phone number with other relatives and tell them to do the same

4. Grandparent gets envelope of printed photos just like the ones filling their old albums on the shelves

It really is that easy. It’s affordable. And the founder is very responsive to any support inquiries.

It was a service I always wanted to build myself but never had the time. I’m very grateful for it.

[0] https://nanagram.co/

Can’t believe it’s been over ten years.

2008 was when there were numerous undersea cable disruptions[1]. I wrote about them when it happened from the best sources I could find at the time[2].

It isn’t surprising to see that surveillance may have occurred as a result.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruptio...

[2] https://randomdrake.com/2008/02/12/the-submarine-cables-a-co...

I am.

I guess it wasn't clear that I was also implying there may be something wrong when one of the largest companies in the world can sell ?? number of devices aimed specifically at children, without this regulation being enforced/checked for ?? amount of time.

Either enforcement, or regulation failed. I think we've got a lot of mechanisms for enforcement, as this article is bringing light to the necessity of.

So, perhaps the aforementioned "regulation" is not enough, and properly written regulation that can be enforced with some regularity and haste is required considering this is for children.