Benjamin Booth

544 posts

Benjamin Booth

Benjamin Booth

@benjaminbooth

Ex-IDEO, Ex-Uber, SoilMetrix CEO, making farmers profitable with AI

Austin, TX Bergabung Mart 2007
676 Mengikuti462 Pengikut
Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
I prefer Composer/Kimi for routine tasks, often, where classification is the meat of the work. Opus reserved for the extended big builds.
LionsofLaw@LionsofLaw

@aakashgupta Used composer 2 to edit a complex function on an app. could not get it right and eventually somehow crashed the whole app. Could not fully understand how the app was deployed. Needed to activate 4.6 to clean it up, which it did pretty easily.

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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
This is the way. Smart incremental code coverage the closer your code gets to production. Ratchets for ensuring that it is always improving.
Santiago@svpino

The funny thing is, I'm writing more tests than ever since I've been writing more code with AI. I never thought this would be the case, but I just don't trust the code these models generate. Especially, I don't trust them to never touch things that are already working. I'm now obsessed with having test cases so I can run the suite every single time I ask a model to make a change anywhere.

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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
Indefensible. Aside: Building 2FA involves infra beyond vibe coding and what many PaaS vendors provide today via APIs. PaaS should make this and passkeys standard.
Gergely Orosz@GergelyOrosz

Gumroad is pissing me off as it's the ONLY site that includes payments that has not managed to implement the very basic, proper 2FA. This means I cannot delegate login to someone on my team with a 2FA app. For a site that brags about paying out $100K+/month for some account, this is just unserious

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Trent Harvey
Trent Harvey@TheTrentHarvey·
@GergelyOrosz @benjaminbooth Our friend Ben needs to learn to thread. Can’t follow thread order easily but I got the gist. Incredible story, no lie.
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Gergely Orosz
Gergely Orosz@GergelyOrosz·
This is SO SUCH A GOOD example on why some things that do not make sense from the outside, make perfect sense from the inside. In 2016, Uber moved to its own chat system, off of HipChat (that had a disastrous data leak.) Full story from the trenches, from @benjaminbooth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth

@GergelyOrosz I was the person tasked by Thuan Pham and Shobhana Aluwhalia to replace Uber’s failing HipChat system in 2016. It was Sept and we were asked to complete the task before New Year’s Eve. What people don’t realize is that we wanted to use Slack to do it - and we tried.

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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@GergelyOrosz That little known Game Co company and critical partner to us at the time, soon after, got their 100M series A. If you don’t already know, the are none other than Mattermost, today’s only real open source alternative to Slack.
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Gergely Orosz
Gergely Orosz@GergelyOrosz·
Cannot wait for teams that build their custom JIRA/Workday replacement/custom CRM to one day turn around and ask: “Why do we have so much internal software that is buggy / has poor UX + we need to maitain?” Seen this movie well before AI, when Uber built uChat (custom Slack)
Chamath Palihapitiya@chamath

Our cracked team just used Software Factory to rebuild and replace Jira in a little more than a month. We first spent 3.5 weeks planning. This is Software Factory’s superpower. It allowed our lead PM, Designer and Architect to thoughtfully describe and detail exactly what they wanted. Software Factory then did the heavy lifting in filling in the blanks and allowing our senior tech folks to sharpen the direction of what they wanted. Then in 2.5 weeks 2.5 junior devs built a replacement. This will launch as an updated Planner module inside of Software Factory on Tuesday. It’s beautiful, clean and super useful. Try it here: 8090.ai

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Jonatan Bien
Jonatan Bien@jonatanbien·
@benjaminbooth @GergelyOrosz @zenzap_chat I still think that shipping B2C level chat experience ( millions of messages, sub 100ms latency device to device) in a B2B managed tenants for cell network is probably one of the toughest engineering challenges out there
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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@hkarthik @GergelyOrosz This was peek ‘me-too’ time when our own Susan Fowler blew open a story for egregious behavior from a few of our eng managers. TK was in the news for chastising a driver and on his way out. It was intense chaos and the last thing we needed was HipChat that didn’t work.
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Karthik Hariharan
Karthik Hariharan@hkarthik·
@benjaminbooth @GergelyOrosz I think we need a podcast episode on this whole story. I only got some of it through the grapevine at Uber when it was happening. I also heard Stewart Butterfield met with us and snubbed us because of Uber's reputation at the time. He didn't want to scale to meet our needs.
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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@GergelyOrosz So, we migrated from uChat to Slack in 2018. Mattermost took off. Uber had a sweet deal with Slack that was unheard of in the industry. I’m proud of what our team did in such a short time. There were many more like it in Uber’s rise and I’m glad I got to play a part.
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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@GergelyOrosz I was the person tasked by Thuan Pham and Shobhana Aluwhalia to replace Uber’s failing HipChat system in 2016. It was Sept and we were asked to complete the task before New Year’s Eve. What people don’t realize is that we wanted to use Slack to do it - and we tried.
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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@GergelyOrosz By end of 2017, Slack launched a new enterprise scale product. Pressure on our CIO to deal and by chirpy groups of Uber employees to use Slack were relentless. But the stark difference in cost was undeniable. Shobhana used this drive a $2/user/month deal with Slack.
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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@GergelyOrosz Key to living with a less polished and less featured version of Slack UX was that 1) it scaled to arbitrary number of users in a single channel and 2) our all-in uChat cost was ~$1.75/emp per month and, keeping our team as-is, would only decrease as Uber grew. Slack: $28
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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@GergelyOrosz To justify our considerable expense to continue supporting and improving uChat, I developed extensive financial analysis, had to present/defend our approach to newly hired CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and charted a product path forward.
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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@GergelyOrosz Throughout 2017, the internal pressure to just use Slack, and Slack’s own sales team, were a constant drum beat. But we fought to improve uChat daily. I also worked to help our Game Co partners some visibility and funding to secure their longer term role in uChat if necessary.
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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@GergelyOrosz Avg Uber employee reactions were equal parts incredulous and quiet ridicule. ‘Slack ripoff’ (yes, by design), ‘An external team built that’ (critical partners, yes), and more. But we launched on time. By 2017 March, all 30K-strong Uber was chatting 24x7, >1M msgs/day on uChat.
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Benjamin Booth
Benjamin Booth@benjaminbooth·
@GergelyOrosz In 3 months, we did it. We delivered a shaky but scalable Slack knock off called uChat. Another needed mention in all this, is our PM, Ed Wolf. Ed had a penchant for buzz and did a great job at internal marketing for uChat. We had posters and SWAG.
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Jelajahi

@TheTrentHarvey @GergelyOrosz @travisk @jonatanbien @zenzap_chat @hkarthik @elonmusk @BarackObama