Machine Learning Magic

Image ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’ve got a box (indeed, boxes!) full of Magic: The Gathering cards, nearly all from boosters you either bought because cracking boosters is fun, or (more likely) that you’ve accumulated from limited events. Most are bulk commons, but there’s definitely a few really interesting cards in there — but because they’re singles or doubles, and you don’t really play that color, they’re just gathering dust.

You’re thinking: The meta-game needs a bit of a shakeup, but everyone’s so damned focused on [Karn, Scion of Urza]((https://scryfall.com/card/dom/1) and Walking Ballista. You’re sure you’ve got something in your collection that can bring an element of surprise, and maybe even a solid win or two.

But where to start?

DevRel × Sales

We’re all on a boat. The same boat. Together.

Take a long hard look.

Tl;dr. Developer relations is not a cost center, but a revenue center, whose goals are closely tied to sales’s goals. And this is good news, because now we have something interesting to measure. And we’re just going to have to get over it.

DevRel is about scaling trust

Come with me if you want to build cool things

You and me, we do DevRel. Let’s take a moment and be blunt.

DevRel is, for me, about building—and scaling—trust. Trust and awareness. Trust and awareness and a business case for international travel. But I get ahead of myself. Let’s talk about trust.

Look — if we want our products to be no-brainers for people to choose (and who doesn’t?), we have an enormous task ahead of us, one of building trust. Without trust, not using our product is the easy decision. To make using it an automatic choice requires intense, widespread trust.

We want developers to automatically turn to our product or tool. We need them — perhaps all of them — to believe in the value of our tool implicitly, which means trusting us, the people behind the tool, implicitly.

That’s tough.

So yeah, I left San Francisco and Slack to move to Paris

Three months ago, I left San Francisco for Paris. I accepted a job with a French Tech startip, left my old position at Slack, and with a lot of help from my wife, sold our home, packed up all our belongings and we got on an airplane with our 8 year old daughter in tow.

“Why,” I am often asked “would you leave San Francisco?

“And why Paris?”

Bref, the French tech scene is a goddamned rocket ship. Better yet, it’s still on the launchpad — the best time to climb aboard.

So when the time came for me to embark on a new adventure, Paris was the obvious destination. Read on to understand why.

Bot-to-bot communication models for Slack

Bot-to-bot communication is quickly becoming something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I’ve heard tell that this kind of contemplation will be the end of us all, but in truth, although I enjoy dabbling in a bit of amateur eschatology myself from time to time, I’m optimistic about our bot-powered future.

In particular I like to think about what it means for bots to talk to each other in the first place, and how bot communication opens the door to composing bots into larger units and workflows, and how these can make our (working) lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

Why should we care about bot-to-bot communication? (Aside from dark fascinations with the bot apocalypse?) When bots can talk to each other, they can coordinate their actions (for ill, or, yes, *for good*—let’s stay focused on the good). And bots that coordinate can be composed into even more interesting entities. Imagine—a swarm of bots working together to make your working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. I find this idea fascinating.