Luis Flores

🎉 Big congratulations to our incredible team (Haoyu Chen, Nick Greenquist,Yuxing Wang, Sridevi Maharaj, Ruiyang Wu and many more) for delivering several quarters-long impactful features on the Play Store! 🚀 We’re thrilled to have launched key updates like Search Home, Sports Moment, and WearOS recommendations, all designed to enhance personalization and help billions of users worldwide search and discover content they love. 🌍✨ Check out the Play Store Q3 updates: https://lnkd.in/dn5wx8Mi #GooglePlay #Personalization #Recommendation

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Want to tease something my team has been working on over at Buffer! The attached image isn't a mockup, but a screenshot of a live prototype of RSS feeds directly in Buffer! It's only available internally and still pretty rough at this point, but we'll have it available for user testing soon. With this enhancement, we hope to help Buffer users easily find new and engaging content to share with their audiences. What do you think? Will RSS feeds in Buffer help you create more content?

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Come join us tomorrow in SF to learn more about the latest updates to run AI workloads on Google Cloud!

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I'm sure there are a few of you out there wondering what I have been up to since I left Cadence. I was lucky enough to join a terrific startup called Metrics Design Automation. I’d like to tell you how wonderful our products are, but it would be better if you saw for yourself. If you have any interest in simulation, please go to www.metrics.ca and check it out! While you're there, watch a couple of the videos we put together that show you how easy it is to get started with DSim.

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During LeadDev NYC, I met an engineering leader who just left a job with great compensation and perks. Why leave, especially in this economy? Sometimes, they said, “you just lose faith.” They had great things to say about their former employer: the company will pay for any book you want, they offer $3K/year for professional development, and curiosity is one of the values on their careers page. But after the company’s IPO, they lost trust. They still trust their manager, but the higher-ups? Not so much. Even while offering competitive benefits and espousing positive values, leaders can still unknowingly erode trust, especially at pivotal moments like an IPO. With everyone on edge, even a change to snacks or an extra in-office day can become a symbol of broken trust. For employees, this loss of trust can be deeply unsettling, especially after investing time and emotional energy into a company they believed in. People aren’t just motivated by perks or professional development—they want to feel heard and valued as part of a shared mission. When that feeling fades, even the most attractive benefits can lose their luster. At Hear Me Out, we’ve found that the key to maintaining trust lies in open, honest communication. The results can be transformative: an engaged team, solid retention, and a stronger, more resilient culture. With jobs still scarce, it's tempting to think that great compensation and growth opportunities are all you need to retain great talent. But when an employee loses trust, nothing else will fill the void. Before you overhaul benefits, start a mentoring program, or rewrite your values, take a moment to listen. Your people can tell you what they need to believe.

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Want to know more about How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale? Still skeptical of why we built horizontal sharding on RDS instead of <insert-cooler-database-technology>? Wondering if you should copy what we did? Check out out my new podcast with Software Engineering Daily as we dive deep on spicy stories that didn't make the blog post from surviving my first Figma Config conference to debating which database technology comes out on top. https://lnkd.in/gFfh7C-A

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From "tunnel rat" to senior engineer with FAANG on the resume - a TL;DR of my salary journey in tech: 2005-2015: Worked for the MTA in NYC as a Track Worker. I was literally swinging hammers on the rails, laying down tracks. 2015: Attended General Assembly, a 3-month bootcamp, and learned how to code. Quickly resonated with Front End development. Was the 1st in my class to get a job offer and by the summer I was working at Accenture. This represented an $11k raise from the MTA. 2016: Gave myself a $22k raise and accepted a job at L2 Inc. My first startup! I learned React here as well. Good times. 2017: Gave myself a $24k raise and accepted a job at Transfix. To this day, this was one my my favorite companies to work for. This was a hard company to leave, but I was early in my career making up for lost time in the tunnels. I also spit a verse over a dope beat as my farewell email and sent it to the whole company. 2018: Gave myself a $48k raise - welcome to Bloomberg! At this point I thought I plateaued. I was now making more than 2.5x what I was at Transit. Talk about a life change! God is good. I had no plans of leaving until drastic internal changes happened. 2019-2021: Took a 3k base pay cut but... joined Meta and give myself a significant overall raise due to those sweet, sweet RSUs. God, is this real?! Some of the best working experiences I've ever had. What a ride. 2021-2023: Base pay bump of 30k - now I'm at Coinbase. And still, those sweet, sweet RSUs. Liquid cash is always the best! This would be the company that made me realize I had the "golden handcuffs" on. It's SO hard to walk away from RSUs, but my family would ultimately help me realize there's more to life than money. 2023 - present: 30k base pay bump as I joined the good ship Docker, Inc. Pretty much at the top level (financially) of being a senior engineer but the golden handcuffs are finally off. Join me and 🌻 Anna Miller this Thursday as we continue our conversations about my career journey. The whole point is to give people insight and encouragement on theirs. 🫡

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Come join us on Nov 13 at 10am PT / 1pm ET for a live webinar, How Notion Engineering uses Notion. We'll dive into how our engineering team uses our own tool to create workflows that enable us to work faster, better, and more collaboratively. We’ll show you how we: 🏗️ Quickly access important information via our engineering teamspace 🚦 Track project status and assign tasks—directly in Notion 🏃 Automate workflows to save time and help us build more swiftly Don't miss out! Register here: https://lnkd.in/gB9NcYmB

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Your career shouldn't be defined by "ex-(company)" on LinkedIn. It should be defined by your values, skills, and curiosities instead. I'm grateful to Deborah Liu inviting me to share my personal journey taking back power in my career despite making plenty of mistakes along the way. 📌 Get my story and 5 steps to take back power in your career here: https://lnkd.in/gWnTTnvz

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🆕 New system design interview question breakdown! Design Dropbox or Google Drive. Watch one of our co-founders, Evan, walk step by step through this common question, highlighting exactly what interviewers are looking for from candidates at all levels. https://lnkd.in/g6VmmTwp

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Meet Alicia Dougherty-Wold, VP and Head of Design at Meta! In our latest interview, she discusses the evolving role of designers in tech, how AI is enhancing design workflows, and what inspires her creative vision. ➡️ Check out the full interview: bit.ly/4iWl4Ec #LifeAtMeta #DesignAtMeta #WomenInTech #AI

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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

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It was a wild, two-and-a-half-year ride, but Friday was officially my last day at Meta.  After twenty years, I left Microsoft to do the kind of consumer AR/VR content creation that MS wasn't really doing at the time. I had a great time at Meta, working with some amazing people, but it turns out I didn't end up doing that kind of content creation there either, instead working in Horizon Worlds first on helping build platform features for the Arcade world, and later working on the scripting platform. I have no complaints, and I loved both the work and the teams. After wrapping up my latest, year-long project, and with my current team pivoting to a whole new area of focus, it was a natural inflection point for introspection. My oldest is heading to High School in September, and my youngest to Middle School. They'll both be leaving for college and their own lives before you know it. So, I've decided to take a few months off, to spend more time with the wife and kids, decompress, and focus on some personal projects that have nothing to do with C++, C#, Unity, headsets or computers. I'll probably hack on my third novel, and I'll probably sleep in a little later, especially on weekdays. I've been calling it my career halftime. I actually don't know what comes in the second half, which is both scary and exciting after 22+ continuous years of coding. I might make my way back to Meta or Microsoft, or I might try something completely new at a company I've never heard of before. The possibilities are, literally, endless. My goal is to make my next company my last company, because I'm the kind of employee that flourishes under long term relationships and loyalty. For the right position, I'm #OpenToWork now, but I don't plan to start actively searching in earnest until later this year, or maybe after the holidays.

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Case study // Trellis Design System Learn how I drove initiatives to ensure the maturity and scalability of the Trellis Design System and how this work supported Lacework feature teams in a shared mission to improve the user experience. Outcomes: ✨ Partnered with engineering to introduce keyboard accessibility to Lacework UI, achieving approximately 70% coverage across all pages and 89% level AA WCAG compliance across the product. ✨ Led the migration to a new component library, achieving 94% compliance, and defined the product vision for the Trellis Design System, aligning with the Senior Design Manager on feature team prioritization. ✨ Implemented a component contribution process, reducing design debt by 62%, ensuring consistent use of design system office hours, and achieving a 4.5/5 rating for component ease of use and a 5/5 rating for documentation helpfulness. ✨ Developed success metrics, goals, and initiatives aligned with company OKRs, capturing them on the roadmap and driving results. ✨ Defined visual design language during product redesign, managed transitions between libraries, and secured stakeholder buy-in through collaboration with cross-functional teams on pattern implementation and planning. https://lnkd.in/g49HCzAb #DesignStrategy #DesignSystem #DesignSystemDesigner #VisualDesign #ProductDesigner

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Today I'm sharing this 🔥 video from our recent Engineering onsite at Demandbase HQ in SF! https://lnkd.in/eFAFR6QG We were so fortunate to host Zhengxuan Wu and Aryaman Arora, two upcoming AI researchers from Stanford University Department of Computer Science. Their approach to fine tuning, called ReFT, targets the representations emitted by neural net layers rather than the weights of the layers themselves. This makes it very flexible when using the same base model for swapping multiple fine tunes. The memory overhead is also very low for their intervention weights. Another highlight is how powerful it can be. One POC they showed forced the LLM to speak in only emojis exhibiting ReFT's power to control output. Control is crucial when, for example, you want to prevent your bot from offering customers unauthorized refunds!! If you're already familiar with LoRA, it should be pretty simple to use with only a few extra hyperparameters -- details in the video. Here's a link to the repo. Give them a star! https://lnkd.in/eJScNbzK Thanks again for letting us host your first external talk Aryaman and Zen. It's very exciting tech!!

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🍜Anybody up for some ramen? I am excited to share that I am back in the garage, building again (it’s actually a house in the Berkeley Hills). We are taking the wraps off of Supercog AI, a new startup focused on solving Application Integration using LLM powered agents. My co-founder in this new venture is a great friend of mine (and a former co-founder partner), Alex Osborne. Alex and I have worked around the application integration space for a long time, and we are unrealistically excited about applying the GenAI stack to this problem. Not many people relish the task to get some bits to move from system A to system B. But it’s a critical job to be done, and that’s led to a lot of brittle scripts, a myriad of inflexible “no code” tools, and a lot of hand crafted SQL. But the power of the Large Language Model, trained on a huge corpus of information, offers a remarkable tool to solve this problem. The LLM you use today already knows the APIs of hundreds of popular systems. It knows the SQL dialects of every major database. It understands the semantics and data schemas of many popular SaaS systems. It understands much of the specific domain in which your business operates. I like to call the AI revolution “the last platform shift”. That may turn out to be hyperbole, but I definitely believe we are in the very early stages of seeing what this new stack can enable. I know we are hardly the first folks to claim that “amazing stuff is coming!”. But this is why Alex and I have decided to focus on a real and hard problem. If we can prove that LLMs can power a new way to solve this problem, it will be the first successful *new* approach in 15 years.. We will have much more to share about this new platform soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in getting a peek - or even better if you have application or data integration tasks that you would like some help with - please reach out because we want to help. #genai #startups #backinthegarage

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The challenges of scaling and recovering AWS MSK clusters are now effectively mitigated, representing a significant advancement in cluster management.

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Senior engineers lose money and responsibility at Meta partly because of an unwritten rule. Candidates are expected to not follow their interviewer's instructions to SUCCEED. Yes, you read that right. That blew my mind. There are other common reasons for downleveling as well. Some of these are expected but others are surprising. Kevin Landucci + Kashish Singhal, loved the simple practical takeaway for candidates. And the full episode rocked! Subscribe to ApplyPass to get more tips in your feed 🛎

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Here's something counterintuitive; taking on more investment risk reduces long-term returns: https://lnkd.in/gHwkjHmP This is only my second investment video, so I'm still learning. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it. Based on the feedback from the first video, I tried to make the audio more balanced on this video. I also shortened the length, to make the content more digestible.

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