Unpop roundup (Go Time #334)

Workflow orchestration has always been a pain for data scientists, but this is exacerbated in these AI hype days by agentic workflows executing arbitrary (not pre-defined) workflows with a variety of failure modes. Adam from Prefect joins us to talk through their open source Python library for orchestration and visibility into python-based pipelines. Along the way, he introduces us to things like Marvin, their AI engineering framework, and ControlFlow, their agent workflow system.

Nicholas Bloom finds WFH is powering a productivity boom, Matt Mullenweg has decided that WP Engine's beatings will continue until morale improves, Levels.fyi has added a salary heat map, Gareth Edwards highlights just how fragile the Internet really is & Artem Zakirullin details how cognitive load is what really matters in software development.

Go Time co-host, Johnny Boursiquot, joins Adam & Jerod to discuss not making the (first) cut, applying Founder Mode, being a cog (or not), realizing that companies are posting fake engineering jobs & the (maybe) imminent demise of the .io TLD.

Lili Cosic's experience at different companies & communities has given her insights into what's important & when to adapt to learn new (or old) things.

John Nunemaker joins us to share his new thesis for acquiring Rails based SaaS apps. He's early days on his next big thing called Very Good Software and recently acquired Fireside, a podcast hosting service started by Dan Benjamin. This comes after many years since John's acquisition of a lifetime of Speakerdeck to GitHub, which laid the foundation for these moves.

Jerod & KBall discuss a trio of goings on in/around the web dev world: Evan You's new startup, Matt Mullenweg's WordPress mess & Ryan Carniato's WebComponents debate.

The last time we did a roundup of our unpopular opinion polls, it was November of 2021! That's too long ago, so today we fix that bug. Join Go Time producer, Jerod Santo, as he ranks & reviews the most (un)popular opinions of 2022.

As Argilla puts it: "Data quality is what makes or breaks AI." However, what exactly does this mean and how can AI team probably collaborate with domain experts towards improved data quality? David Berenstein & Ben Burtenshaw, who are building Argilla & Distilabel at Hugging Face, join us to dig into these topics along with synthetic data generation & AI-generated labeling / feedback.

A bias against hyperlinking has developed on platforms, GitHub engineering continues to evolve Issues, Evan You announces VoidZero, some companies are only pretend hiring & Klaas van Schelven asks: does it scale (down)?

Dave Eddy has learned systems programming the traditional way with books and man pages. Now he's sharing what he's learned, starting with bash.