Last year I wrote a post, career chutes and ladders, where I proposed that a linear climb to the C-suite is not the only approach to a satisfying career. At the end of the post, I mentioned I was stepping off the ladder to take on an IC role.

After over a year of being on a personally funded sabbatical, I started a new job at PostHog as a Senior Product Engineer. This week is my orientation where I get to drink from the firehose once again.

What is PostHog?

Apart from being a company that seems to really love cute hedgehogs, PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform. They have a set of tools to help product engineers build better products. Each product can be used as a standalone tool, but they’re designed to level-up when you put them together.

In particular, I’ve started on the Feature Flags team. Yesterday was my first day of onboarding and so far I really like my team.

Today is day two and I’ve already submitted a small fix for my first pull request!

Why PostHog?

When I was looking around at companies, an old buddy from GitHub who worked at PostHog reached out to me and suggested I take a look at this company. He said it reminded him of the good parts of working at GitHub.

Their company handbook really impressed me. What it communicates to me is that this is a remote-friendly company that values transparency, autonomy, and trust. It’s a company that treats its employees like adults and tries to minimize overhead.

Not only that, they’ve embraced a lot of employee-friendly practices. For example, a while back my friend Zach wrote about his distaste for the 90 day exercise window. PostHog provides a 10-year window. Not only that, they offer employes double trigger acceleration!

Double trigger acceleration, which means if you are let go or forced to leave due to the company being acquired, you receive all of your options at that time

This is a perk usually only offerered to executives.

I should mention we’re hiring! Please mention me if you apply. If we’ve worked together, let me know so I can provide feedback internally.

I’m excited to be part of a company that’s small, but growing. The company is at a stage similar to the stage GitHub was at when I joined. This is a team with a strong product engineering culture and I’m excited to contribute what I can and learn from them.

The Challenge

The other part that’s exciting for me is that I’ll be working in a stack that I don’t have a huge amount of experience with. The front-end is React with TypeScript and the back-end is Django with Python. I’ve done a bit of work in all these technologies except Django. However, I believe my experience with ASP.NET MVC will help me pick up Django quickly.

Not to mention, I’ve always taken the stance that I’m a software engineer, not just a .NET developer. Don’t get me wrong, I love working in .NET. But at the same time, I think it’s healthy for me to get production experience in other stacks. It’ll be an area of personal growth. Not to mention, they don’t quite have a .NET Client SDK yet so once I get settled in, that’s something I’m interested in getting started on.

The Future

I’ll share more about my experience here as I get settled in. In the meanwhile, wish me luck!

Starting with v23.6.0, Node.js supports TypeScript without any flags. This blog post explains how it works and what to look out for.

How is least privilege different in 2025? Richard talks to Bailey Bercik about the ongoing efforts to minimize users, administrators, and applications' privileges in 2025. Bailey talks about the power of Entra Permissions Management to help you see what permissions are going unused on various accounts so that you can tailor rights to individual accounts without things becoming unmanageable. Artificial intelligence is a forcing function for many permission issues, with these new tools potentially creating problems when given unnecessary rights. But those same tools can help you understand where permissions are being underutilized and help protect your systems!

Links

• Principle of Least Privilege
• Enable Permission Management
• Entra Permissions Management
• Microsoft Security Copilot
• Copilot in Microsoft Entra
• SEC545: GenAI and LLM Application Security
• How Attackers Use Apps to Attack Video

Recorded December 16, 2024

This is a list of CfPs (Calls for Papers/Presentations/Participation/etc.) that I know of, closing within the next two weeks.  It is updated approximately every week (usually on Tuesday afternoon), so nothing should fall through the cracks.  There are usually about ten to twenty, but highly variable.  It is an extract of a much larger list that I maintain on behalf of Toptal’s Speakers Network.  That one contains past CfPs, CfPs closing much farther in the future, and estimates when past ones should reopen.  (If you want access to that, use my referral link, click on the “Apply as a Freelancer” button, pass the screening, then apply to join the Speakers Network, which may require going through their Speakers Academy first.)

This list contains only the CfPs of conferences I am personally interested in, ones that other Speakers Network members inform me of, and a few others I happen to stumble across.  So, that’s mainly software development conferences, focused on Elixir (or Phoenix), Ruby (or Rails), Python, JavaScript, C, or sometimes closely related things (like the BEAM or C++), or not tightly focused on any particular tech stack (though it may lean heavily towards one or two), or occasionally testing (of the kind devs should do to their own code, not the kind a QA tester does).  It usually omits CfPs from conferences held in places I won’t go, lasting less than a full work-day, or about any other tech stack or topic, or tightly focused on various specific subtopics, or that doesn’t have a website of its own (at least about the series).

If you know of something missing, feel free to contact me.  Just please make sure that the CfP is indeed closing within the next two weeks from the latest update, else I might already have it in the big list, just not this extract.

You can always get the latest version of this list here.