Dan Shiebler

Suppose you are a payment processor handling thousands or millions of payments every day. Some small number of the payments that you process are bound to be fraudulent. How can you spot them? This problem - identify a small number of bad events in a sea of good events -... [Read More]

Sloppy analytics can lend false confidence to bad decisions. Leaders who understand a few common pitfalls can make better decisions from data. The most common pitfall is underspecification. The answer to a simple-seeming question like “are users more likely to churn if they see more than 3 ads on their... [Read More]

The CEO needs to increase company margins. He turns to the engineering leadership team to help. Engineering leadership puts together a sound plan. First the objective to “Increase Company Margins” is decomposed into a collection of eng-level goals like “Reduce Tier 2 Support Hours”. Each of these eng-level goals decompose... [Read More]

I’ve spent a lot of time leading large and small engineering teams over the last decade. Through this experince I’ve developed some opinions about what good leadership looks like. My central leadership tenets are: Set a Strategy Do Row-Level Inspection Set Clear Expectations Give Frequent Feedback Let Builders Build Set... [Read More]

Generative large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are like wild beasts. They are powerful but difficult to tame. One formidable challenge lies in the cost and latency associated with these models. Compared to traditional software solutions, LLMs can operate at a slower pace, incurring higher costs along the way. Instead... [Read More]