Technology

Originally published on Next Play The Bottom Line A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is a software engineer who owns customer outcomes - not just satisfaction scores or relationships, but actual results customers achieve with the software. This distinction fundamentally changes everything about how engineers approach their work. The critical insight is that you cannot easily hire your way to a true FDE organization. This skill set is too rare and specific, dependent on experiences most engineers never have. Traditional engineering roles insulate engineers from customer reality. The only way to build an FDE organization is to take talented people and put them through experiences that transform how they think about building software. ...

Originally published on Kepler Everyone’s talking about context engineering right now, but most of the conversation is focused on the wrong thing. Read the blog posts, the guides, the thought leadership. They’re all asking the same questions: What should I include in the context window? How do I manage tokens efficiently? How do I curate what the model sees? These are valid questions. They’re also the easy part. The hard part isn’t deciding what context to include. It’s building systems that deliver that context reliably, with provenance, at scale, every single time. That’s not a context problem. That’s an engineering problem. And engineering means something specific. ...

Originally published on Kepler AI produces numbers that are incorrect, untraceable, and unverifiable. Asking the same question twice yields different answers, and there’s no way to distinguish right from wrong outputs. This unreliability poses serious risks across industries like healthcare, legal, insurance, government, and finance where numerical accuracy directly impacts outcomes. Through conversations with 137 financial firms - including private equity, hedge funds, and investment banks - a consistent pattern emerged: everyone wants to use AI, but nobody trusts it. As one managing director stated, “I can’t put a number in front of a client if I can’t show where it came from.” ...

Originally published on Sync Computing Databricks’ DLT offering showcases a substantial improvement in the data engineer lifecycle and workflow. By offering a pre-baked, and opinionated pipeline construction ecosystem, Databricks has finally started offering a holistic end-to-end data engineering experience from inside of its own product, which provides superior solutions for raw data workflow, live batching and a host of other benefits detailed below. Since its release in 2022, Databricks’ Delta Live Tables have quickly become a go-to end-to-end resource for data engineers looking to build opinionated ETL pipelines for streaming data and big data. The pipeline management framework is considered one of the most valuable offerings on the databricks platform, and is used by over 1,000 companies including Shell and H&R block. ...

Originally published on Sync Computing Serverless functions have had their 15 minutes of fame (and runtime). As is the case with many concepts in technology, the term Serverless is abusively vague. As such, discussing the idea of “serverless” usually invokes one of two feelings in developers. Either, it’s thought of as the catalyst for this potential incredible future, finally freeing developers from having to worry about resources or scaling concerns, or it’s thought of as the harbinger of yet another “we don’t need DevOps anymore” trend. ...