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The Weekly Variable
Another busy week for me and the rest of the world on this Friday. Business, security, podcasts, AI and space. Lots to cover.
Topics for this week:
divs.consulting
I had an intro meeting this week to potentially offer Salesforce consulting services and the call seemed promising.
But in the never ending search for the next client, I’ve been considering a few different approaches to finding new leads.
I’ve consumed enough business content and written about Alex Hormozi videos enough to understand the standard marketing approaches and their pros and cons.
Word of mouth and referral is one of the stronger and easier methods, which is the route I’ve been going right now, but I think another strategy is targeting high quality leads, which I was also considering for divs.design.
I liked the idea of SEO and having leads find you, but more and more it feels like high quality leads won’t be googling for high priced services.
SEO makes more sense for people looking for free or reasonably priced tools, not multiple figure, multiple month services.
Right now, LinkedIn sounds like the best way to both find potential clients and start a conversation.
And of course ads and YouTube aren’t a bad way to go either, but I’ll probably start with researching some potential leads and practice cold outreach.
If you know anyone that needs help with their Salesforce implementation, send them to divs.cloud or email me at [email protected]!
Coding With AI
The Dev Sync is officially over 33% of the way to 21 episodes!
Episode 8 went live on Monday after a few attempts at using some tools to automatically edit the podcast.
Apparently it had been a few weeks since I had done my normal editing process because it took multiple attempts to edit everything correctly, and I’m still pretty sure there’s some editing errors.
One of these days The Dev Sync will be big enough to hire an editor, but for now, automation remains the strategy.
Eric and I talked about my experience with Claude Sonnet 3.5 writing an AI app for me and distributing it to Kubernetes, and then we get sidetracked into a conversation of the potential use cases of AI with coding.
If that sounds interesting or you want to support our climb to the top 1% of podcasts, you can check out the episode for yourself below:
A Historic Outage
CrowdStrike is a security firm offering business tools to protect against cyber security attacks and they are going through a nightmare scenario right now.
As of this morning they released an update that is causing Windows machines to BSOD (the dreaded Blue Screen of Death) and it seems the only way to fix the issue is to manually update the affected machines.
The problem with that is in the day and age of cloud computing, some businesses might not even know where that machine is physically located, or they have to get a plane to reach the machine, or it involves hundreds of machines that will all need to be manually fixed.
Reports of banks, airlines, and medical services like hospitals and 911 call centers have been impacted, delaying flights and shutting down entire systems.
I suppose this is to be expected for any company that reaches any considerable size, the odds of a catastrophic error are bound to increase as the company grows.
But it’s still hard not to wonder how something like this could get released world wide. If nothing else, this is an incredibly tough lesson for CrowdStrike that they have room for improvement in their testing and release approval process.
I’ve been in a few incidents where software wasn’t working as expected but nothing at this scale and nothing that bricked entire machines.
I feel bad for my fellow tech employees experiencing one of the worst incidents I could imagine. Hopefully they are able to find decent solutions quickly.
Growing Pipeline Potential
I keep coming back to this AI pipeline idea.
Multiple companies are trying to creating the “god model” or the one AI model to rule them all but that’s a tough competition to be in and I’m not sure there will be a winner.
The more likely successful outcome would be using different AI models for their strengths.
ChatGPT is a great generalist at interpreting data and input, from text to images to video, while Claude Sonnet seems to be the top code generator at the moment.
Another more unique model, Groq uses an LPU (Language Process Unit), but the Groq team announced this week that their model is the highest performer in function calling.
Function calling is a core concept to programming, wrapping blocks of code into functions so that you can call that function and execute that block of code when needed.
This ties nicely to an article I referenced a little while back about LinkedIn’s AI pipeline and how they use multiple models to generate the best answer.
The pipeline uses a smaller, faster model at the beginning to decide which other AI and data sources to use to find its answer then calls functions to retrieve the data it needs to build a proper answer.
Groq’s model would prove very helpful for that if it shows its strength in using function calls, being able to better interpret when and where to use functions and when not to.
The pieces are showing up and a nice AI pipeline could be a great shovel to sell in the midst of a gold rush.
More to think about on that one…
Chris and David Talk Space
And finally, some good old fashioned space talk.
Dr David Kipping chatted with Chris Williamson for more than 2 hours about space and it was just a fun listen.
David is brilliant and also very calming to listen to.
They get into all kinds of interesting topics including:
David’s study of exomoons
the potential origins of life on Earth other planets
the ever present problem of the Fermi Paradox and the concept of the Great Filter
the potentially infinite universe
getting to use the James Webb Telescope
It’s great conversation if you’re into astrophysics at all and have 2 plus hours to kill:
And that’s it for this week! A little business, a tech crisis, some more AI, and space talk. A well rounded read.
Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.
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