Before I went to work for Audible (five years ago now — time flies!) I had a bias about engineers that worked for large corporations. I assumed that they weren’t as good as indies and engineers at small companies, or else they’d actually be indies or work at small shops like Omni.
Obviously I knew there had to be exceptions, particularly at Apple, or else we wouldn’t have had great things like AppKit and UIKit and everything else we’ve built on over these years. But the bias persisted.
* * *
Before Audible, the largest company I’d ever worked at (Newsgator) had just over 100 people. When I worked at Omni it had roughly half that number.
I’ve spent half my career working at even smaller companies, with just me and Sheila (Ranchero Software) or at places with three people (Q Branch) or like six people (UserLand Software).
And of course I was arrogant enough to think that I was better — much better — than any corporate engineer. While a corporate engineer might own some small part of an app or framework — or just a single button, as the (lame) joke went back in the day — I was shipping entire apps on my own or with a very small team. Popular, valuable, newsworthy apps that people loved.
And so I learned very quickly when I started at Audible that I was very wrong. I was impressed, and grew more impressed as time went on, by my fellow engineers’ rigor, talent, professionalism, care, and, especially, ability to work with other people toward common goals.
While I’m the die-hard introvert who just wants to go into a room and sit in front of a Mac and write some code and get things done, I learned that my co-workers — even if they, like me, kinda just wanted to sit and write code — were great at app development as a team sport. I was impressed with how they wanted to grow and did grow — always leveling-up their individual skills and their ability to work on a team and across teams.
And what a team it was! It’s not a new observation, but the indies I mentioned above, and the ones I didn’t, tend to be white men born in the United States — the people who could most afford to fail, in other words, because for them (for me, absolutely) there’s always another opportunity.
My team didn’t look like that — it was quite a contrast with my previous experience. Many more women, people of color, people born outside the United States. (But note that there’s always more progress to be made!)
The engineers on my team could write apps as well, if not better in many cases, than the indies I know. And the ones who aren’t quite there yet — well, just give them a little more time. They’ve all given me reason to believe in them.
I regret my bias about engineers working in corporate environments, and I’m so glad I learned the truth almost from day one on starting at Audible.
* * *
For a couple years I did a lot of hiring — a lot of interviews — at Audible. And I noticed something: there was a strong correlation between being hirable and having worked with other people.
The folks who’d worked largely by themselves, or on just one small team, weren’t as good candidates as the folks who’d worked with more people. This, of course, went against my original bias that indies are the best engineers — but by then I knew that a candidate who’d worked with lots of other people had been exposed to more code, more dilemmas, more challenges (technical and human), and they were not just more ready to work on a larger team but more knowledgeable. Even their individual skills were greater.
Advice time: if you’re a newer engineer, find ways to work with other people. Not just because you’re more likely to get hired at a place like Audible — but because, no matter where you want to work, you’ll be better at it.
You can’t just sit alone in front of your computer all day and write code and expect to be a great engineer.
Lesson learned!
* * *
With retirement imminent — this is my last job, and June 6 is my last day (maybe I’ve buried the lede here) — I want to thank my team publicly for how they’ve made me a better engineer and, more importantly, a better person. From the bottom of my heart.
I learned more from them than I could ever have taught; I got the better part of this deal.
Builder.ai let you build a website or an app without coding — but with AI! Allegedly.
Builder was the great hope of Artificial Intelligence for the UK. It scored $450 million in venture funding — mostly from Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Fund.
Customers had mixed experiences with Builder. A lot of positive online reviews turned out to be written by Builder employees. The company also put several logos on their website of companies that were never its customers. [FT, 2024, archive]
Anyway, Builder finally went broke yesterday, after years of interesting financial activities and a few minor accounting scandals, such as allegedly falsified sales figures and an auditor with conflicts of interest. [FT, archive]
CEO and founder Sachin Dev Duggal had stepped down in February — though he kept the job title “Chief Wizard.” [FT, archive]
Here’s how Builder’s front page — still working for the moment — says the process works: [Builder.ai, archive]
Chat to our AI, Natasha
Get a fixed price and accurate timings
Meet your own dedicated expert
AI assembles your app features like a LEGO set
Features are customised by human specialists
Your app is ready
The most “AI” part of the whole thing is Natasha the keyword bot at the start of the process.
Steps 3 and 5 are where A Guy Inside does the actual work: [builder.ai, archive]
Natasha recommends the best-suited developer for your app project, who then customises your code on our virtual desktop. We also use facial recognition to check that the developer working on your code is the same one Natasha picked.
That’s not AI, that’s outsourcing. Builder.ai was just hiring your work out to A Guy Instead. But it was marketed to its venture funders as “AI.”
Builder claimed that the fabulous Natasha AI did most of the development planning. Builder also claimed that Microsoft wanted to use Natasha to sell customers business app development. [press release, 2024; TFN, 2023]
But there’s no evidence that “Natasha” wasn’t just a human doing all the tricky bits. Because Builder had past form on using A Guy Instead.
Back when Builder was called Engineer.AI, they were caught in 2019 selling “AI” development with a bot called Natasha that turned out to be some guys in India who wrote the app for you. Engineer.AI told the Wall Street Journal at the time that the alleged AI was just “human-assisted.” Yeah, 100% human assisted. [WSJ, 2019,archive]
It’s not clear if anything’s left of Builder.ai. There’s no money and there’s no AI. But the real reward was the wild “off-site company meetings” along the way, where they splashed out the investor cash on a week in a five-star hotel in Vietnam for the employees. And Natasha the keyword bot. [FT, 2024, archive]
US Government employees (and former employees) are going through a lot of chaos. Many of our colleagues, collaborators, and friends are out of work — suddenly and unexpectedly.
At Shostack + Associates, we can’t fix that. But we can offer something concrete.
In times of uncertainty, we focus on what we know, and what we know is threat modeling and how to teach it. It’s what we do best, and it’s how we can help.
We’re opening a free instance of our Threat Modeling Intensive
course — a $3,900 value — no strings attached. This will be a
distributed, live instruction instance of the course for people
whose government jobs have gone. The course is designed for
technologists who have at least a couple years of experience as a
software developer, systems operator or technical project manager,
and have shipped one or more systems.
This is the full version of our most popular training. It’s practical, focused, and designed to
help you move into a new role with in-demand skills. It’s
interactive and hands on. You’ll be threat modeling and
collaborating to get peer feedback and review. Complete the work and you'll finish the week with new capabilities and a course completion certificate.
The course runs the week of July 7. We
don’t want to cap attendance, but our training is interactive, so
we need to use the Zoom meeting form, and that leads to
participation limits. So if you sign up, please do so with a plan to attend and
participate. If you’ve lost your job — sign
up. We’ll cover the full cost. You bring your attention and drive,
and you can sign up at our Google form. Also, you can learn
more about the course on our general Threat Modeling Intensive Course page.
In the spirit of transparency, there’s something in this for us
too: one of our major customers is planning a large-scale course,
and we want to experiment and see if there’s limits to how many
folks we can teach effectively. We're confident in our
approach. We believe that our mix of hands-on, small peer group
discussions and larger full class discussions can scale. And we
love experimentation and learning.
Please share this with anyone you know who’s been impacted. We’ll
do our best to make this useful, relevant, and hopefully a step
towards something new.
PS: If this sounds good but you’re not an impacted government
employee, we have upcoming open trainings at OWASP Global Appsec Barcelona
(May) and Blackhat in Las Vegas (Aug 2-3 or 4-5), as well as
self-pace trainings and private offerings.
Update: Bolded the descriptions of who the course is for and
alternatives after weeding through responses.
Because you, as a person who reads blogs, are dear to me– you get to be among the first to know that the new DC Tech Events site is live.
I’m still tweaking, but I’m pleased with how it works right now– it’s a static site deployed on Github Pages. There’s a form for submitting events, but behind the scenes that just opens a pull request.
Next up: getting the newsletter piece up and running.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
A short video taken inside an Illinois school captured troubling behavior: A teacher gripping a 6-year-old boy with autism by the ankle and dragging him down the hallway on his back.
The early-April incident would’ve been upsetting in any school, but it happened at the Garrison School, part of a special education district where at one time students were arrested at the highest rate of any district in the country. The teacher was charged with battery weeks later after pressure from the student’s parents.
But the department’s Office for Civil Rights regional office in Chicago, which was responsible for Illinois and five other states, was one of seven abolished by President Donald Trump’s administration in March; the offices were closed and their entire staff was fired.
The future of oversight at Four Rivers, in west-central Illinois, is now uncertain. There’s no record of any communication from the Education Department to the district since Trump took office, and his administration has terminated an antidiscrimination agreement with at least one school district, in South Dakota.
In the April incident, Xander Reed, who has autism and does not speak, did not stop playing with blocks and go to P.E. when he was told to, according to a police report. Xander then “became agitated and fell to the ground,” the report said. When he refused to get up, a substitute teacher, Rhea Drake, dragged him to the gym.
Another staff member took a photo and alerted school leadership. Principal Amy Haarmann told police that Drake’s actions “were not an acceptable practice at the school,” the police report said.
Xander’s family asked to press charges. Drake, who had been working in Xander’s classroom for more than a month, was charged about three weeks later with misdemeanor battery, records show. She has pleaded not guilty. Her attorney told ProPublica that he and Drake did not want to comment for this story.
Tracey Fair, the district’s director, said school officials made sure students were safe following the incident and that Drake won’t be returning to the district. She declined to comment further about the incident, but said school officials take their “obligation to keep students and staff safe very seriously.”
Doug Thompson, chief of police in Jacksonville, where the school is located, said he could not discuss the case.
A screenshot from a recording of a CCTV video shows Xander Reed being dragged down the hallway by a teacher at the Garrison School.
(Obtained by ProPublica)
Xander’s mother, Amanda, said her son is fearful about going to Garrison, where she said he also has been punished by being put in a school “crisis room,” a small space where students are taken when staff feel they misbehave or need time alone. “He has not wanted to go to school,” she said. “We want him to get an education. We want him to be with other kids.”
Four Rivers serves an eight-county area, and students at Garrison range from kindergartners through high schoolers. About 70 students were enrolled at the start of the school year. Districts who feel they aren’t able to educate a student in neighborhood schools send them to Four Rivers; Xander travels 40 minutes each way to attend Garrison.
The federal scrutiny of Garrison began after ProPublica and the Tribune revealed that during a five-year period, school employees called police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. Police made more than 100 arrests of students as young as 9 during that period. They were handcuffed and taken to the police station for being disruptive or disobedient; if they’d physically lashed out at staff, they often were charged with felony aggravated battery.
Garrison School is part of a special education district that’s supposed to be under federal monitoring for violating the civil rights of its disabled students.
(Bryan Birks for ProPublica)
The news organizations also found that Garrison employees frequently removed students from their classrooms and sent them to crisis rooms when the students were upset, disobedient or aggressive.
The Office for Civil Rights’ findings echoed those of the news investigation. It determined that Garrison routinely sent students to police for noncriminal conduct that could have been related to their disabilities — something prohibited by federal law.
The district was to report its progress in making changes to the OCR by last December, which it appears to have done, according to documents ProPublica obtained through a public records request.
But the records show the OCR has not communicated with the district since then and it’s not clear what will come of the work at Four Rivers. The OCR has terminated at least one agreement it entered into last year — a deal with a South Dakota school district that had agreed to take steps to end discrimination against its Native American students. Spokespeople for the Education Department did not respond to questions from ProPublica.
Scott Reed, 6-year-old Xander Reed’s father, said he and Xander’s mother were aware of the frequent use of police as disciplinarians at Four Rivers and of OCR’s involvement. But they reluctantly enrolled him this school year because they were told there were no other options.
“You can say you’ve made all these changes, but you haven’t,” Scott Reed said. For example, he said, even after confirming that Drake had dragged the 50-pound boy down the hall, school leadership sent her home. “They did not call police until I arrived at school and demanded it” hours later, he said.
“If that was a student” that acted that way, “they would have been in handcuffs.”
Scott and Amanda Reed, Xander’s parents, enrolled their son in Garrison School after being told they had no other options.
(Bryan Birks for ProPublica)
New ProPublica reporting has found that since school began in August, police have been called to the school at least 30 times in response to student behavior.
Thompson, the police chief, told ProPublica that, in one instance, officers were summoned because a student was saying “inappropriate things.” They also were called last month after a report that a student punched and bit staff members. The officers “helped to calm the student,” according to the local newspaper’s police blotter.
And police have continued to arrest Garrison students. There have been six arrests of students for property damage or aggravated battery this school year, police data shows. A 15-year-old girl was arrested for spitting in a staff member’s face, and a 10-year-old boy was arrested after being accused of hitting an employee. There were at least nine student arrests last school year, according to police data.
Thompson said four students between the ages of 10 and 16 have been arrested this school year on the more serious aggravated battery charge; one of the students was arrested three times. He said he thinks police calls to Garrison are inevitable, but that school staff are now handling more student behavioral concerns without reaching out to police.
“I feel like now the calls for service are more geared toward they have done what they can and they now need help,” Thompson said. “They have attempted to de-escalate themselves and the student is not cooperating still or it is out of their control and they need more assistance.”
Police were called to the school last week to deal with “a disturbance involving a student,” according to the police blotter in Jacksonville’s local newspaper. It didn’t end in an arrest this time; a parent arrived and “made the student obey staff members.”
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