Happy Halloween! We talk about the reasons for the BLUES inconsistency. At what point does a retool become a rebuild? Plus, 2 NHL teams that have impressed Donny so ...

Ep. 138 – Why are the BLUES so inconsistent? When does a retool become a rebuild? What are the 2 most impressive teams in the NHL so far?

Offensive coordinator Mike Bobo doesn’t have to game plan for an opponent this Saturday so there’s time to retool after losing one of college football’s best players. Bowers played nearly every significant snap for Georgia this season, but went down ...

Will Georgia football survive toughest part of its schedule with star Brock Bowers out?

New York Daily News | Gary Phillips: For the fourth time in 11 years, the Yankees find themselves sitting at home while the league’s best face off in the postseason. As we start to give our best guesses as to what the team is planning for the offseason, we can look at those previous futile years for clues to the direction Hal and Brian want to take the franchise. After missing the playoffs in 2014, the Yankees spent big on a trio of free agents, while they merely waited for the Baby Bombers to come to fruition after 2016. With concerns about the CBT and an underwhelming free agent class, the 2024 offseason will likely feature a mix of both those strategies. Sports Illustrated | Pat McAvoy: Officially, Juan Soto isn’t on the trading block just yet, but there are more than enough rumors that the Padres are dangling the star outfielder. For their part, the Yankees are said to be “closely monitoring” the situation, as Soto checks off so many of the boxes the Yankees have struggled to fill over the past couple of seasons. However, his expected $33 million salary for 2024 may clash with the abovementioned CBT anxieties. MLB.com | Bryan Hoch: Aaron Judge became the fourth Yankee, and first since Derek Jeter in 2009, to be honored with the Roberto Clemente Award for 2023. The award recognizes the player who best combines on-field skill with outstanding personal character and community work, and is chosen from a field of 30 nominees, one from each team. Players take the award very seriously, so Judge must be proud of adding another prestigious trophy to the case. MLB.com | Bill Ladson: Frank Howard, a Judgian-sized two-time home run king in the 1960s and 70s, passed away yesterday at the age of 87. The 1960 NL Rookie of the Year spent 16 seasons in the majors, before embarking on a coaching career with seven teams and spending time in player development for the Yankees. Howard was famous for his instrumental role in New York’s spring training camps.

NYY News: Examining prior retool plans

How previous playoff-less offseasons played out; Yankees monitoring Soto situation; Judge wins Roberto Clemente award; Frank Howard passes away

The New York Giants have traded defensive lineman Leonard Williams to an NFC rival ahead of Tuesday's trade deadline.

BREAKING: Seahawks-Giants Complete Massive Blockbuster Trade Involving Pro Bowler & Valuable Draft Picks

Jeremy Rutherford joins Alex Ferrario and Donny Fandango! The guys discuss where the Blues are in their retool, Vrana's health scratch in

Ep. 137 – Jeremy Rutherford joins the show, where are the Blues in their retool, Vrana’s healthy scratch, and tonight’s matchup in Vancouver

The St. Louis Cardinals should offer Japanese right-hander Naoyuki Uwasawa a contract after it has been reported that he wants to play in MLB.

Cardinals Could Try To Sign Frontline Starter Reportedly Entering Free Agency

TO prepare business establishments for the future of work, the Quezon City government will be holding the "Innovate.Adapt.Thrive: The Quezon City Future of Work Conference 2023" on November 13 and 14,

QC government to host 'Future of Work Conference' in November

The Houston Astros will likely make some changes to their team heading into the 2024 season as they retool to get themselves back into World Series contention.

Houston Astros Could Move On From Star Veteran Slugger

Retool

retool

Last month, I built a prototype of an admin control panel to manage our users in Retool. Until now, I have used scripts and queries to create, bootstrap, and update user accounts. It worked but was error-prone, especially with copying the user data from the customer onboarding process. The nail in the coffin was the product key management. Initially, we gave our users one key per install, but our users wanted multiple installs. Therefore, the number of product keys will change unpredictably and will be uncoupled from our user base. We needed a way to have someone non-technical create and manage keys. I could spend a week or two building, testing, and iterating an admin control panel from scratch, but I don’t have the time, nor will the page be in front of our users generating revenue. My initial approach was to have a contractor build something, but a friend mentioned Retool, and I thought it was worth a try. A week later, after about 8 hours of work, I had a usable beta version. Retool lets you build UIs and connect them to APIs and databases with minimal code. Their platform targets developers who want to create control panels, dashboards, and other expert tools but don’t have the expertise or staff to do so. But if you want to build for public use (unauthenticated users) then you have to sign up for the expensive Business or Enterprise plan. The Business plan costs at least $50 per month (if you have one admin user and no other authenticated users). However, Retool supports multiple databases (SQL, PSQL, mongoDB, etc.), REST APIs, RPC, and frontend scripting via JS. Perfect for my use case. After eight hours, I could do everything my scripts and queries did: list users, update users, create users, create product keys, and deactivate product keys. But along the way, I faced quite a few issues and headaches, not the least of which was that the testing feature was in closed beta. I’ve organized my learnings into deal breakers that may prevent you from using Retool; pain points you can overcome, and highlights. Deal Breakers No Credential Rotation Retool does not allow you to programmatically rotate DB usernames and passwords. Nor does it enable server API keys to be rotated. You have to go to the resources page and manually update the DB and server info, which is tedious and error-prone. This may not be an issue if you have one DB and server or if you don’t have automatic credential rotation setup. But if you do, Retool will break every time your credentials are rotated. This is an issue others have pointed out: https://community.retool.com/t/allow-database-password-secret-rotation-programmatically-via-an-api/5069 Expensive Per User License The user licensing arrangement is bonkers to me. I think it unnecessarily limits the use cases for Retool apps. Every plan increases the price for your end-users, Retool will eat your margins. Even for internal tools it is problematic. This forces everything you build in Retool to be a demo or proof of concept. Why not a usage fee? If you need just one feature offered by the other plans, your user base or margins will suffer. I need the multi-release (staging and production) for testing — for that one feature, I’ll go from paying $0 for our three users to $15 a month. If I need a feature from the business plan, my costs will triple to $45 for no end-user utility. The app will remain the same for my users (the plans mainly include dev-ops features). My job as a developer gets more manageable, but my users have to pay for it. https://retool.com/pricing Expensive Public Access “Public apps are only available on Retool Cloud with Business and Enterprise plan,” and those plans are expensive. At minimum $50 per month ($600 per year) for an app that has only one admin (standard user) using the Business plan. That’s a lot for hosting, especially as the app matures. Later in the development cycle you will use Retool less for editing and more for maintenance and hosting. https://docs.retool.com/apps/web/guides/embed-apps#public-apps https://retool.com/pricing They Keep the Code Not a suprise but you can’t export your app’s HTML, JS, CSS, and Queries. You can export Retool as JSON to share with others. https://docs.retool.com/apps/management/guides/import-export https://community.retool.com/t/can-i-export-app-produce-in-retool-to-form-html-workflow-or-a-reference-use-to-build-reactjs-app/12639 Gray Area App Data and IP Retool does not claim any rights to your app or its data except for: Maintaining and improving Retool Fixing issues — security, bug, and support Following the Law For anything else, they need your written permission. These limitations look good, but there is a gray area in the phrase that grants you control of your app’s IP: “Customer will own all Customer Data and Custom Apps, but ” excluding the components of the Services What do they mean by components? Does this you own the organization and structure of the app but not the individual UI elements, the hooks that connect the UI to your queries/scripts, and the other components that Retool provides? The app is useless without all that. Nonetheless, I don’t see Retool running away with my little startup’s admin tool — but you may be in a different place. Consult a lawyer. https://docs.retool.com/legal/customer-terms-of-service#ownership-and-proprietary-rights Pain Points Need a Wide Monitor You need an ultra-wide monitor; the retool editor has two panels — the side panel where all the actions live (DB/APIs scripts, HTML elements, etc.) and a central panel where your app lives. The problem is that these two panels generate two more panels. The side panel generates another panel when you select a DB or API and want to edit the query or request. The main panel opens a panel whenever you want to edit an HTML element. Navigating these panels was hectic even on my 34-inch display. This is what editing a query that fills a table will look like. On the left is the code tab, which has the query, and then it opens another tab, which has the actual query. In the center is the UI. On the right is the UI tab — in this case, the table, its properties, and event hooks. It is a mess, and unfortunately, you will run into it often. During frontend work, you constantly figure out which buttons, forms, etc. fire which events. This is an easy task if the project is structured and organized well, but there is no way to structure or organize your UI and scripts in Retool. Instead, you have this repetitive and exhausting dance of going from the UI, selecting an element, checking which query it fires, going into the code tab, and debugging/editing it. So get a big monitor — it was only tolerable on my monitor but not my 15-inch laptop. I wish Retool would: Remove the nested tabs — the code tab should automatically hide or minimize when query or script is selected. Add a dependencies section to the query/script tab to find which UI elements fire the script and which ones ingest it. Ideally, the editor should highlight the affected UI elements while editing a script. No Native Testing Support The testing feature is in closed beta. As it is, there is no way to test Retool from within Retool. I used Playwright and a dummy account to test my control panel. It took quite a lot of work. The UI is not made with testing in mind (no test IDs, there are layered elements that steal events, etc.), but it does work. It runs in CI too. However, the Playwright tests are all end-to-end tests. I have not found a way to write unit tests for individual queries or scripts in Retool. Retool has not said when they will release the testing feature — it has been in Beta for almost two years now—, but it looks decent. It seems to offer support for unit and end-to-end tests. There is support for CI but only for on-premise Retool deployments — comically, the tests in CI use Playwright. Contact support to get into the closed beta: https://docs.retool.com/support Docs https://docs.retool.com/private/testing#sample-unit-test https://docs.retool.com/private/testing-in-ci Discussions: https://community.retool.com/t/anyone-working-with-automated-web-testing-of-an-app/26926/5 https://community.retool.com/t/how-to-add-unit-test-cases-on-retool/10548/4 Grid System is Annoying Retool has a grid system that you can snap UI elements too, but Retool’s grid snapping is unintuitive and can’t be turned off. They are working on it. But for now, you have to deal with off-centered elements, blank spaces that can’t be filled, and, if you have hidden elements, elements displaced by seemingly nothing. https://community.retool.com/t/adjust-snap-grid-in-design-mode/18183 Counterintuitive Drag & Drop The blue rectangle around the element is only for resizing. You need to click on the element’s name to move it. I found this incredibly counterintuitive. Every time I returned to Retool, I’d forget and spend a few minutes circumnavigating buttons and trying to get the drag icon to appear. It’s Live All the buttons, queries, and requests are live while you are in the editor. This led to many bad queries and requests hitting my staging environment. So when you are dragging that submit button into the perfect place and accidentally click, it will fire a submit request to your server and trigger all the other UI events. Resizing a table, and you accidentally click the delete button? Yes, that row is deleted. This becomes extremely annoying when alerts and other UI is hooked to these events. Editing becomes a minefield of accidental clicks, alerts, invalid form inputs, and data pollution because there is no way to disable JS while editing. You may need to set up a separate environment or don’t connect anything until you are absolutely certain nothing bad will happen. Retool should create a way to disable events while editing, but they don’t seem to be working on this feature. Then there is the script/request “preview” button. This helpful but poorly named button is there so you can easily test your queries and requests. This button gives instant feedback because it runs the script. It does not preview it, it sends an actual request to the DB or API. Be careful. https://community.retool.com/t/editor-disabled-mode/26053 Variables Have a Confusing Interface It is excellent that Retool lets you create variables, but they don’t return values. They are objects that wrap values. This caused me pain, but I understand why they did it — it avoids insidious errors caused by unintended mutation. So is an object is the actual value. Be very careful when using variables in conditional. I often did , which is always false, or worse, ; it’s always true. This is a failure of Retool; they should update their editor to catch this common mistake. my_var my_var.value my_var > 0 my_var != undefined {
"id": "example",
"value": 1,
} Query Editor Has No Linting That’s right, Retool’s query editor (at least for MongoDB) is no better than shell. No warnings on syntax, types, operations, etc.. I had to write and run my queries in Compass and then paste them into Retool. Otherwise, it was a tedious trial and error made worse by the editor not displaying the actual error. See below. Query Errors are Unhelpful Some query errors are hidden; if you have an error in your DB query, Retool will just show a “Error” message and not tell you what is causing it. You will need to go into the browser’s inspector and check the JS or Network logs — now you need two monitors. Limited Federated Login Users can log in to your app with GMail or create a custom login with their email address. The options are sadly limited, but the Enterprise plan supports SSO. https://docs.retool.com/org-users/concepts/user-authentication Mongo Specific Issues Retool does not handle nested JSON, i.e., you can’t display a nested JSON object in a table column. You need to flatten the nested JSON before sending it to the UI. Retool can’t create a form from MongoDB collections (unlike SQL/PSQL). You would use this to create an update or create a form. A workaround is to query that collection, create a table from the results of that query, and then create a form from that table. The table will create columns with appropriate types, and the form will turn those types into input types. Finally, point the table’s submit event to the MongoDB query. Retool uses MongoDB’s Extended JSON V2 with no backward compatibility for V1. Your V1 queries may not work in Retool without a migration. Dates are not automatically converted — this may not be just a MongoDB issue. Maybe I’m expecting too much but I thought this would be handled by Retool’s parser (activated by the double curly brackets). To convert JS dates to MongoDB dates: { "$date": {{ (new Date()).toISOString() }} } https://retool.com/integrations/mongodb Extended JSON V2 — https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/reference/mongodb-extended-json/ Highlights Supports Multiple DBs I’ve tried only MongoDB, but the SQL support seems even better. Most generic queries are built in — no coding needed. You will need to transform the result if it contains nested JSON. Retool lets you add transformations right after the query and return the transformer’s output as the result. Plus, it has specific places to put success and error handlers — I recommend using this to print out error messages while you are working on the query; you won’t need to depend on the flaky default error display mechanism. Unfortunately, they don’t offer an abstraction layer on top of the DBs — you will need to write separate SQL, NoSQL, etc., queries for each DB. https://docs.retool.com/data-sources/concepts/resources#integrations Create Tables Directly from DB/API Responses Once you have a query and the necessary transformations, you can pipe them into a table during the table creation process, and Retool will create a table with the correct number of columns. The column data types are not always perfect, but they are close enough, and it is easy to change them later, e.g., if you need filtering to work, etc. https://docs.retool.com/apps/web/guides/components/table#load-data-in-a-table Create Forms from DB/API Responses You can also create a form from an insert query. Retool will see the needed parameters and translate them as best as possible to equivalent input types. It handles int, strings, and dates well — struggles with enums. But again, easy to change and much faster than coding from scratch. Sadly, this is not supported in MongoDB, but you can create a form from a table and this work around will generate a form that has the correct types for your insert query: Create the get query. Create the table from the get query. Create the form from the table. Point the form submit the event to insert query. That is the workaround I used, and I may write about it if anyone is interested. https://docs.retool.com/apps/web/guides/components/forms#generate-the-inputs Pre-built Scripts for Common Tasks Retool has pre-built solutions for common tasks: Copy/Paste Show/Hide Show Notifications Etc. Add a button to the page, click “+” in the “Event Handlers” section, and select the “Action” dropdown. Auto-refactors When you change a variable name, data field name, UI ID, etc., the editor updates all the dependencies. This single feature makes working in Retool a pleasure. You never have to worry about accidentally breaking something. The editor will refactor for you or prevent you from making the change. User Role System There’s a built-in user role system with groups and permissions. You can control which pages can be visited, queries run, etc. But this is only available on their Business ($50 / month per standard user, $15 / month per end-user) and Enterprise plans. The free plan only allows you to specify who is an admin, can edit the app, and is a regular user. Version Control Every change you make is tracked in a release/history tab. You can scroll through that tab and revert to prior versions. The downside is that the commits in this tab have vague names. It is hard to tell which commit did what. Even harder to tell how many changes are in each commit since it seems Retool randomly saves the state of the app. This is nice to have, but the bare minimum. The release feature, which is not in the free version of Retool, allows you to create releases, compare diffs between releases, and revert to releases. That’s what you probably want to use for rollbacks and version control. https://community.retool.com/t/view-changes-in-history-tab/13377 https://docs.retool.com/apps/management/guides/releases-and-history Verdict It was a good decision to build our admin control panel in Retool. I got something off the ground quickly without taking time from more important projects. My only regret is the lack of testing and not going in with a testing plan. I built it without TDD — the excuse I told myself was that this wouldn’t work, and I’ll be scrapping it in an hour. Without TDD, my experience was stressful and uncertain. But we just finished the test suite in Playwright, and it is running and working in CI. Writing the test suite did take much longer than expected due to UI not being test-friendly—I had an intern do it and it took them two weeks. All in all, I recommend Retool. Featured Photo by Tina Nord — https://www.pexels.com/@nord6/ This article also appears . here

Retool Review - Can Lowcode Become Production Ready?

Before Retool, our co-founders tried to build a Venmo competitor but failed to reach product-market fit. While their first product didn't work out, they came away with an important lesson: great internal tooling can help startup founders fill early product gaps and speed up manual work. The only issue was that building these tools was too slow and repetitive. So they decided to build a better solution. Today, Retool helps thousands of startups like Brex and DoorDash build custom internal tools without wasting time on redundant work. Retool helps early-stage teams operate fast without all the restrictions that come with spreadsheets, SaaS tools, or manual workarounds. We believe great tooling can help startups focus on building better products. That's why we're excited to announce that Retool is now free for early-stage startups. Get your free credits now → Introducing Retool for Startups It's easy to solve less critical work with out-of-the-box tools. But what about the internal tools that are core to your business? We see a lot of technical founders and engineers spend a lot of time building (and rebuilding) the same tools: Tools that into a single customer view Tools that into fully-featured apps for your team Tools that help non-technical teammates join product and Stripe data convert manual workflows read and write to your database , and distracts your team from focusing on your core product. But building from scratch can take weeks Retool gives technical founders a head start. You can use pre-built UI components, database integrations, APIs, and advanced features (like access control) to create any CRUD app, dashboard, or tool you want. It enables your team to solve problems fast and get back to building your core product. Retool for Startups gives early-stage startups to the advanced features on our and plans (up to $1200 total value). up to 12 months of free access Startup Pro We also know that great internal tooling requires the right stack, so we've partnered with AWS, MongoDB, Segment, and more to give you powerful options at the best possible price— . totaling over $160,000 in software discounts We first adopted Retool to build out our internal tools for customer success at neo.tax, but we soon discovered lots of other use cases for it: internal company-wide demos, quick product mock-ups, and ad-hoc data analysis. We now consider Retool a core part of our software stack. Thanks to Retool’s startup credits, we can maximize our time on our most important company objectives. It’s an absolute win-win for everyone! Firas Abuzaid, co-founder and CTO at neo.tax Who counts as an early-stage startup? Our early-stage discounts are available to startups that : meet both of the following criteria Launched less than 5 years agoRaised less than $10M in funding Not sure if you qualify? . If you are affiliated with any of the venture funds or accelerators below, you can also reach out to them directly to receive an exclusive referral code for even more Retool credits on top of our standard deal: Apply anyways Sequoia Capital Techstars Antler Y Combinator Don’t see your venture fund or accelerator? Tell them to . apply to be a Retool Startup Partner here Get started Don't let internal tooling be a roadblock in shipping your product. Use Retool to build every process and tool you need to grow faster. Get your free credits now → If you liked this, share it on , , , or . Twitter HackerNews LinkedIn Reddit

Retool for Startups: Early-stage startups can now build internal tools for free

Building a product is often the most challenging part of building a startup. That’s why lots of founders want to rid themselves of it by outsourcing this to other companies. And there’s nothing wrong with that if you’ve got the time and the money. Dev shops are great in terms of experience having built hundreds of similar or even identical projects from scratch, they know what you’re coming for. It also means that Is there this kind of technology? The short answer is no. The better answer is we’re building it right this second. Let’s first dive into the available options there are. This is for complicated projects when you’ve really got something robust going on and can’t find other sustainable solutions in the long run. But if your thing pretty much copies another idea (and there’s nothing wrong with that, the best ideas are stolen) then it’s not necessary at all. So, if you’re pitching a “next Uber/Instagram/Airbnb/…” or anything else you’re going to replicate to your investors, don’t ask for 250$k for development, Believe it or not, developers can write less code and get the same results. Why is your dev shop not interested in that? You guessed it, they can’t charge you as much. It’s as simple as that. If you’re a tech founder it’s the perfect one for you, though. Learn how a low-code platform works, or two. Low-code platforms: , , , No-code is the easiest and the fastest alternative to them all. Or, at least, that’s what the belief is. Sure, you can use drag-and-drop solutions for your early versions/prototypes/MVP but if you need something a little more sophisticated then the learning curve is fairly steep. Have you noticed that there are actually not so many Webflow developers? I mean, good Webflow developers. While no-code is sustainable for the idea validation stage and maybe a little bit further along, it won’t carry you through the rapid growth stage. And you’ll eventually have to scratch all your beautiful work and go to custom code. No-code platforms: , , , If you’re selling something online, there’s Shopify, Gumroad, WooCommerce, and even Wix. All you need is a few hours away from Netflix and you have an online business. And these are great at what they do. They are limited but you get enough features to get you going, you’re supported, safe, and pretty much self-explanatory. Platforms: , , , Or white label, if you will. Building a taxi app? There’s probably something on the market, buy it, stick your brand name on it and you’re good to go. Will it give you the freedom to grow and add innovative ideas? Probably not. Will it still be fine if your competitive advantage is exceptional service or a unique business model? Yes. with the right technology at hand, they’d be able to reuse parts or even projects almost to the “T” for other projects. 1. Custom code you can do it way cheaper. 2. Low-code It’ll make you way more efficient and give you all the control over your project. Caspio Retool Creatio OutSystems 3. No-code Because you’ve got to learn a lot. A LOT. And then once you’ve learned it all, you hit the ceiling. XPODA Bubble Lansa Airtable 4. Platforms You just need to play by their rules. Shopify Gumroad WooCommerce Wix 5. Out of the box Out of the box: , Twilio Cyclr 6. Mars Choosing among the above options might not be an easy task. Especially if you are a first-time startup maker. But fear not! There is a tool that combines the benefits of all the previous items – Mars. Mars is an open-source platform for making web and mobile apps. It gives you flexibility on demand. You get access to the custom code only when you want to implement a specific feature. As for the regular functionalities, such as login page, payments, cart, dropdown menu, footer, photo galleries, and profile page, you can plug them into your startup with little-to-zero coding knowledge. This makes Mars the perfect tool for making MVP: you are building fast most of the time, and you go to custom code only to make unique changes. You’re saving time but you’re not trading anything away for that. However, there is a disadvantage to using the platform. It is a new technology and it lacks good documentation. The learning curve may be a little steep, especially for a complete beginner. But once you get used to Mars, you will be able to build complex applications such as Airbnb, UBER, and Instagram amazingly easily. The tool: . Mars

Low-code vs No-code: Selecting the Best Stack For Your Startup

On the runway towards the launch, working at startups includes a lot of putting out one fire after the other. You squash a bug when a user reports it. Speed up the product when someone complains. Roll out a feature when there’s a definite demand. It’s so important to keep the momentum and build what the users want. But once you spot the sweet product-market fit, you can no longer not worry about crossing the metaphoric bridge. Beta testing is over. Users like and want your product. Now it’s time to level up. That means it’s time for proactive action, not just reaction. Of course, it’s impossible to get everything right in the first rollout. But being on the backfoot is worse than floating a slightly faulty first impression.  To ready ourselves for the launch, we at launched a mission—internally named Project Apollo. OSlash Project Apollo “One small step for OSlash, a giant leap for productivity” We wanted to make sure that when we open the gates to the public, we avoid nasty surprises, and that nobody dies. Of course, that’s asking a lot but a team can try. Our objectives were clear: Build a baseline for our current systems’ performance Prepare for widening service limits Build an observability platform Design a process for incident management & identifying SLOs To meet the objectives, we divided the engineering team into three groups of people selected at random. The teams worked towards the success of the mission along with performing their everyday tasks. It was not an easy task, yet one they couldn’t have done better. Squad 1 - Performance Squad The objective of this group was to answer the question “How many users can our platform serve today?”. With this answer, we gained two new abilities — identifying performance degradations and capacity planning for expected traffic surges (like, well, a product launch!). For most engineering systems, the usual metrics for quantifying performance are: 🛎 Availability Availability is a measure of how much time we’re available to respond to a request. This is usually expressed in the percentage of uptime in a given year. ⏱ Latency Latency is a measure of how long it takes for a request to get a response. This is often measured between different layers (for example, API gateway ↔ Lambda),  usually expressed in 95th or 99th percentiles. 🚛 Throughput Throughput is a measure of how many requests can be handled. This is usually expressed in rps (requests per second). 🪖 Durability Durability is a measure of the data we’re looking for always being there. This is usually a function of the database we use. For example, see DynamoDB’s durability promise. ✅  Correctness Correctness is a measure of the system always returning the expected result. To get these numbers straight to our dashboard, the performance squad decided to measure different aspects of performance by breaking them down into parts. Part I: Measure How Fast the Current System Is To do that, the squad ​​employed that tells us exactly how our users are experiencing our product. Firebase Performance Monitor It returns: Load Time Wait Time Regional Delays Performance in Wifi, 4G networks, etc. The squad complemented Firebase with to delve further into the exact user experience. Sentry returns the amount of time taken in different parts of our product. Sentry Performance Tracing Let’s say a user requests a shortcut -> o/roadmap. Sentry returns: the time it takes for the server to find it the time it takes for the network to deliver it the time it takes for the browser to redirect it on the client-side ‍ Part II: Identify the Bottlenecks We split every touchpoint in the product into smaller chunks known as transactions to easily calculate how much time a transaction takes to complete. Any transaction that takes more than 1.2 seconds to complete leads to user misery. Identifying such transactions gave us a fine-grain analysis of all the potential bottlenecks. The bottlenecks were identified using the which returns the following: Sentry User Misery Score How many times a given operation occurs in a minute Transactions per minute: Measured in P50, P95, P99 Latency: - 50% of the operations finish in this time (average speed) P50 - 5% of the operations take this much time on the slower side (worst speed) P95 Part III: Keep an Eye on the Speedometer Another tool that we set up to monitor all our lambda functions, including the time taken to complete a transaction, is Lumigo By tagging every prod release appropriately, we are able to ensure that the performance doesn’t degrade over time. Part IV: Ensure Preparedness For Incoming Traffic Once our product is launched, in the best-case scenario, we should expect a sudden spike in traffic. To be sure we don’t falter at this crucial juncture, the squad helped us answer two crucial questions: How many simultaneous users can our product handle? More users will lead to more requests to our servers leading to HTTP 429 error How fast will our servers be when the number of users is high? A transaction that was taking 40ms in regular condition might take 400ms in high-traffic scenarios. This meant that we needed to figure out the threshold for the essential transactions in this situation ‍ Load Testing with Vegeta is a tool that allows teams to simulate heavy traffic. If you are gearing towards a big launch or PR, it is highly recommended to simulate every condition to see that the product does not break anywhere. With Vegeta, we were able to figure out how much time the most frequent transactions took in peak traffic conditions. Vegeta Part V: Fix the low-hanging fruits With the help from Sentry and the data obtained from Vegeta, the squad made it possible for the engineering team to immediately fix the issues that instantly made the product faster for all users. Also, by linking all issues in Linear to Sentry, we were able to ensure that the fixed issues don’t show up in production. Squad 2 — Observability Squad Observability is being able to quickly find anything you want about a system. In other words, observability is a bunch of systems like error trackers, uptime monitoring systems, log aggregators, and tracers, all giving a bird’s eye view of all system components at any given point in time. Observability is also different from monitoring  — monitoring will tell you about errors (that you already know of but haven’t fixed yet) that happen again; observability, on the other hand, can give you more real-time information and help you predict faults. We wanted to ensure that the observability system is our single source of truth for all platform events (errors, alerts, system & app metrics) and that it helps us quickly jump to a particular flow or transaction to help debug and fix issues. Basic building blocks 1. 🐞 Error Alerting We’ve been using Sentry for tracking all errors. How can we better leverage Sentry’s capabilities? Enable and set up source maps so errors are readable. Use appropriate levels to mark the severity of the issue. Identify users so we can identify deeper patterns. Set up Slack alerts for high-severity alerts. 2. 🔄 Tracing Tracing is generating a unique ID that can be used to identify a transaction across systems. For example, when a user initiates an action, the initial request that is sent to the backend should have a unique ID (called a trace ID) that is propagated across all discrete systems. This way, if we search for, say request ID req-abc-123, we should be able to trace it from the extension to the backend and back to the extension, and finally to the user. Tools & platforms (search term: “distributed tracing”) include [Jaeger]( Tracing), , , and . Sentry errors can also be enriched with this tracing metadata. https://🔄 Honeycomb AWS X-Ray OpenTracing 3. 📡 Status Page Set up a status page (can be private too) so we know all systems are operational. 4. 📊 Dashboard A company-wide real-time dashboard with the most important metrics (like total installs, total active users, daily users signups,  the total number of Shortcuts created, overall system throughput, error rate, number of extension installs, etc.) are incredibly useful for a number of reasons: Throw it on a giant display in the center of the office and everyone gets around to watch and celebrate big milestones (like say, the 1000th user). Everyone knows what the most important goals for the company are. Easier to notice anomalies and take corrective action. Product and engineering teams came together to identify important metrics for both teams and build an interactive dashboard together. To make sure the dashboard is built super fast, the Observability Squad used . Retool With Retool, we’ve unearthed some great insights into the product. Each time a crucial number sees a sudden spike or an expected uptick, our hearts collectively skip a beat. ‍ Squad 3 — Incident Management & Preparedness Squad Incident management is a set of definitions and rules that answer the following questions — What exactly happens when an incident (could be an error, a security breach, or downtime) happens? Who or which team is the first responder? Who takes responsibility for coordinating various teams in responding to the incident? How long can a bug take to fix before it is escalated? Who will respond to incidents on non-working days? How much is reasonable pay for on-call duty? What is the template for a responsible disclosure or an RCA? To make sure there is a process in place that can answer every question, the Incident Squad created playbooks that followed a carefully laid-out set of steps. Step I: Categorization & Severity of issues ‍ Step II: Service-Level Agreements according to SOC-2 Severity critical: 3 business days Severity high: 30 days Severity moderate: 60 days Severity low: 180 days ‍ Step III: Define SLAs according to OSlash Security Within 1 week of being reported Critical (S0): Within 1-2 weeks of being reported High (S1): : Within 2-3 weeks of being reported Medium (S2) Within 3-4 weeks of being reported Low (S3): To make the whole process seamless, the incident squad ended up trying out a bunch of tools for issue monitoring such as PageDuty, Opsgenie, VictorOps, and Incident.io In our personal experience, ticked all the boxes we were looking for. incident.io After classifying all issues depending on the level of severity, the incident squad went on to describe how all issues will be communicated to the users, who will stay on call and how that person be monetarily compensated for the extra hours put in. If you are looking at building your own version of Project Apollo, here are a few key tips that might prove helpful: 1. Document Everything Don’t worry about where to put them or how they should be laid out. Just document everything. 2. Checkpoint Daily Catch-up daily over squad standups, and feel free to go as deep and for as long as you want. Keep your eyes on the prize and make sure you are achieving your squad goals on a day-to-day basis. 3. Prefer No-code and Managed Solutions Prefer no-code and managed solutions. Prefer tools that are already battle-tested over building something on your own. 4. Accommodate Existing Priorities Keep your everyday tasks at a higher priority and work on the project for a couple of hours daily. 5. Find Consensus with Help from Senior Folks. If the squad members cannot come to an agreement, consult with the senior folks; they’ll help by asking more questions, inviting more discussion, and helping find common ground between what’s best for the team and the company. 6. Think Critically. Ask questions like “should we even do this?”. A squad coming to a “we don’t need this at all” conclusion is still okay if they can back it up with data. The entire mission took us two weeks to complete. In hindsight, to lessen the burden on the already stressed engineering team, we could have earmarked a couple more weeks for the activity. We hope you found value in our experience. We wish to find you next to us as we travel. First published here

A Guide To Launching Battle-tested Apps For Engineering Teams

You know an emerging technology is getting real when Big Tech firms try to own it. That's what’s happening as Salesforce attempts to seize leadership of the autonomous AI agents market. AI agents are intelligent systems designed to perform tasks autonomously. At its annual Dreamforce event, Salesforce introduced AgentForce, its autonomous AI agent for the workplace. Afterward, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff became awfully busy attacking the value of large language models (LLMs) and taking shots at Microsoft for good measure. To wit: He recently said LLM-based generative AI assistants, such as Microsoft Copilot, are overhyped. On the Rapid Response podcast, he said, “We may have heard from these AI priests and priestesses of these LLM model companies and Microsoft and others about AI curing cancer and climate change, and we all have to plug into these nuclear power plants to get these data centers. None of this is true.” And After Microsoft said it will allow organizations to create their own autonomous AI agents within the Copilot Studio platform, Benioff issued a brutal take-down on X: "Microsoft rebranding Copilot as 'agents'? That's panic mode. Let's be real — Copilot's a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence." https://x.com/Benioff/status/1849506221931287013?embedable=true Why would a busy CEO of a multi-billion dollar global Big Tech company lash out at LLMs and Microsoft? Because Benioff knows how important AI agents are becoming. This means: He wants to move the conversation about AI away from LLMs and toward AI agents.


He sees Microsoft’s foray into AI agents as a threat. If he didn’t, he would have ignored Microsoft’s announcement. In doing so, he underlined the importance of AI agents. And propped Microsoft up. The Importance of AI Agents The market for autonomous AI agents is experiencing rapid growth.  The AI agents market is expected to expand from $5.1 billion in 2024 to $47.1 billion by 2030, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 44.8%. Salesforce wants a piece of that market. But the numbers don’t quite capture their potential impact. In fact, AI agents have become a hot topic representing a significant leap in the AI ecosystem. Unlike traditional AI systems that react to commands, AI agents can proactively pursue objectives, learn from their experiences, and even interact with other agents and humans in complex ways. As a result, AI agents may do mundane, tedious tasks that people don’t want to do – like data entry, managing calendars, automating the creation of reports, and a lot more. In other words, what AI has been promising all along. This autonomy has sparked both excitement and apprehension. Venture capitalist Jeremiah Owyang has speculated that AI agents will upend websites because businesses will need to figure out how to re-tool their sites for AI agents doing web searches instead of people. Chris Mattmann, NASA JPL’s former chief technology and innovation officer, echoes the concerns of many by asking if we’re ready for a world in which AI functions without human oversight. Gartner has identified “Agentic AI” as a top tech trend for 2025, emphasizing its potential to transform enterprise operations. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. However, Gartner warns of the need for governance to prevent risks such as bias and privacy issues. Gartner stresses the importance of establishing guardrails to ensure AI aligns with human values and intentions. Marc Benioff versus Microsoft This brings us back to Marc Benioff. He has read the tea leaves. He sees autonomous agents as the future, and he’s placed his bets accordingly. Salesforce has embedded itself in 150,000 organizations. When you’re so deeply embedded across corporate America, your product becomes a Trojan Horse for new technology. For instance, Salesforce AgentForce will deploy autonomous AI agents that enhance customer service, sales, marketing, and commerce operations. Need to automate routine tasks such as answering customer inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns? Hey, there’s an agent for that – AgentForce. Need a more efficient way to get data-driven insights from Salesforce? Well, AgentForce uses the Atlas Reasoning Engine to analyze data, make decisions, and execute tasks autonomously. Microsoft isn’t taking all of this sitting down. On October 21, Microsoft announced: The ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio.
The introduction of 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build capacity for sales, service, finance and supply chain functions. Here’s the heady way that Microsoft described on its blog the potential impact of AI agents: Copilot isyour AI assistant — it works for you — and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents, and they’ll do everything from accelerating lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain. In effect, Microsoft is going to war with its own Trojan Horse: 60 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Microsoft 365 Copilot (per Microsoft). Microsoft CEO has avoided a war of words with Benioff. Instead, he’s relying on Jared Spataro to answer Benioff’s dismissive remarks by telling CRN, “Every customer is at a different place in their journey, but overall we are hearing something quite different from our Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers . . . Last quarter alone, we saw a customer increase of over 60 percent, and daily users have more than doubled – a clear indicator of Copilot's value in the market.” Marc Benioff versus LLMs I don’t know how the war between Salesforce and Microsoft will turn out. However, I believe Benioff is wrong to attack LLM-based AI applications that are based on human prompts. ChatGPT has been in the market for only two years, and already the off-the-shelf generative AI products based on LLMs are changing our lives. In addition, we’re still in the early days of businesses developing their own generative AI models based on private data. Consider two industries that affect all of us: financial services and healthcare. Financial services: LLMs are changing how financial services do their work, with firms like BlackRock using them to analyze market data and identify investment opportunities. BlackRock’s systematic active equity team uses LLMs to process vast datasets, uncovering patterns that traditional methods might miss. Hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, managing a $19 billion portfolio, uses LLMs in its AIA Platform for complex tasks like market research.
Healthcare: hospitals are figuring out how to use LLMs to improve efficiency across the board, from streamlining emergency room intake to improving clinical care. For example, HCA Healthcare in Tennessee is integrating LLMs into its hospitals, focusing on improving time-consuming tasks like documenting notes from conversations with patients during visits. The above examples illustrate how technology changes the world: one task at a time. Sometimes in visible ways. Oftentimes behind the scenes.Benioff is correct to pressure tech firms to improve LLM-based AI models. They make mistakes and face criticism over issues like bias and intellectual copyright. But on the other hand, so do AI agents. It’s vital to train them properly and keep humans in the loop to correct errors and prevent bias. But he is overlooking the fact that LLMs learn from their mistakes. They improve. Quickly. If anything, the impact of what LLMs can and will do is understated. You know an emerging technology is getting real when Big Tech firms try to own it. That's what’s happening as Salesforce attempts to seize leadership of the autonomous AI agents market. AI agents are intelligent systems designed to perform tasks autonomously. At its annual Dreamforce event, Salesforce introduced AgentForce, its autonomous AI agent for the workplace . Afterward, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff became awfully busy attacking the value of large language models (LLMs) and taking shots at Microsoft for good measure. To wit: its autonomous AI agent for the workplace its autonomous AI agent for the workplace He recently said LLM-based generative AI assistants, such as Microsoft Copilot, are overhyped. On the Rapid Response podcast, he said, “We may have heard from these AI priests and priestesses of these LLM model companies and Microsoft and others about AI curing cancer and climate change, and we all have to plug into these nuclear power plants to get these data centers. None of this is true.” He recently said LLM-based generative AI assistants, such as Microsoft Copilot, are overhyped. On the Rapid Response podcast, he said, “We may have heard from these AI priests and priestesses of these LLM model companies and Microsoft and others about AI curing cancer and climate change, and we all have to plug into these nuclear power plants to get these data centers. None of this is true.” And After Microsoft said it will allow organizations to create their own autonomous AI agents within the Copilot Studio platform, Benioff issued a brutal take-down on X: "Microsoft rebranding Copilot as 'agents'? That's panic mode. Let's be real — Copilot's a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence." And After Microsoft said it will allow organizations to create their own autonomous AI agents within the Copilot Studio platform, Benioff issued a brutal take-down on X : "Microsoft rebranding Copilot as 'agents'? That's panic mode. Let's be real — Copilot's a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence." create their own autonomous AI agents create their own autonomous AI agents brutal take-down on X brutal take-down on X https://x.com/Benioff/status/1849506221931287013?embedable=true https://x.com/Benioff/status/1849506221931287013?embedable=true Why would a busy CEO of a multi-billion dollar global Big Tech company lash out at LLMs and Microsoft? Because Benioff knows how important AI agents are becoming. This means: He wants to move the conversation about AI away from LLMs and toward AI agents. He sees Microsoft’s foray into AI agents as a threat. If he didn’t, he would have ignored Microsoft’s announcement. He wants to move the conversation about AI away from LLMs and toward AI agents. He wants to move the conversation about AI away from LLMs and toward AI agents. He sees Microsoft’s foray into AI agents as a threat. If he didn’t, he would have ignored Microsoft’s announcement. He sees Microsoft’s foray into AI agents as a threat. If he didn’t, he would have ignored Microsoft’s announcement. In doing so, he underlined the importance of AI agents. And propped Microsoft up. Microsoft The Importance of AI Agents The Importance of AI Agents The market for autonomous AI agents is experiencing rapid growth.  The AI agents market is expected to expand from $5.1 billion in 2024 to $47.1 billion by 2030, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 44.8% . Salesforce wants a piece of that market. compound annual growth rate of 44.8% But the numbers don’t quite capture their potential impact. In fact, AI agents have become a hot topic representing a significant leap in the AI ecosystem. Unlike traditional AI systems that react to commands, AI agents can proactively pursue objectives, learn from their experiences, and even interact with other agents and humans in complex ways. As a result, AI agents may do mundane, tedious tasks that people don’t want to do – like data entry, managing calendars, automating the creation of reports, and a lot more. In other words, what AI has been promising all along. This autonomy has sparked both excitement and apprehension. Venture capitalist Jeremiah Owyang has speculated that AI agents will upend websites because businesses will need to figure out how to re-tool their sites for AI agents doing web searches instead of people. Chris Mattmann, NASA JPL’s former chief technology and innovation officer, echoes the concerns of many by asking if we’re ready for a world in which AI functions without human oversight . upend websites upend websites ready for a world in which AI functions without human oversight ready for a world in which AI functions without human oversight Gartner has identified “Agentic AI” as a top tech trend for 2025 , emphasizing its potential to transform enterprise operations. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. However, Gartner warns of the need for governance to prevent risks such as bias and privacy issues. Gartner stresses the importance of establishing guardrails to ensure AI aligns with human values and intentions. top tech trend for 2025 Marc Benioff versus Microsoft Marc Benioff versus Microsoft This brings us back to Marc Benioff. He has read the tea leaves. He sees autonomous agents as the future, and he’s placed his bets accordingly. Salesforce has embedded itself in 150,000 organizations . When you’re so deeply embedded across corporate America, your product becomes a Trojan Horse for new technology. For instance, Salesforce AgentForce will deploy autonomous AI agents that enhance customer service, sales, marketing, and commerce operations. 150,000 organizations 150,000 organizations Need to automate routine tasks such as answering customer inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns? Hey, there’s an agent for that – AgentForce. Need a more efficient way to get data-driven insights from Salesforce? Well, AgentForce uses the Atlas Reasoning Engine to analyze data, make decisions, and execute tasks autonomously. Microsoft isn’t taking all of this sitting down. On October 21, Microsoft announced : announced announced The ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio. The introduction of 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build capacity for sales, service, finance and supply chain functions. The ability to create autonomous agents with Copilot Studio. The introduction of 10 new autonomous agents in Dynamics 365 to build capacity for sales, service, finance and supply chain functions. Here’s the heady way that Microsoft described on its blog the potential impact of AI agents: Copilot isyour AI assistant — it works for you — and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents, and they’ll do everything from accelerating lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain. Copilot is your AI assistant — it works for you — and Copilot Studio enables you to easily create, manage and connect agents to Copilot. Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world . Every organization will have a constellation of agents — ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous. They will work on behalf of an individual, team or function to execute and orchestrate businesses process. Copilot is how you’ll interact with these agents, and they’ll do everything from accelerating lead generation and processing sales orders to automating your supply chain. your agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world In effect, Microsoft is going to war with its own Trojan Horse: 60 percent of the Fortune 500 are using Microsoft 365 Copilot (per Microsoft). Microsoft CEO has avoided a war of words with Benioff. Instead, he’s relying on Jared Spataro to answer Benioff’s dismissive remarks by telling CRN , “Every customer is at a different place in their journey, but overall we are hearing something quite different from our Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers . . . Last quarter alone, we saw a customer increase of over 60 percent, and daily users have more than doubled – a clear indicator of Copilot's value in the market.” telling CRN telling CRN Marc Benioff versus LLMs Marc Benioff versus LLMs I don’t know how the war between Salesforce and Microsoft will turn out. However, I believe Benioff is wrong to attack LLM-based AI applications that are based on human prompts. ChatGPT has been in the market for only two years, and already the off-the-shelf generative AI products based on LLMs are changing our lives. In addition, we’re still in the early days of businesses developing their own generative AI models based on private data. Consider two industries that affect all of us: financial services and healthcare. Consider two industries that affect all of us: financial services and healthcare. Financial services: LLMs are changing how financial services do their work, with firms like BlackRock using them to analyze market data and identify investment opportunities. BlackRock’s systematic active equity team uses LLMs to process vast datasets, uncovering patterns that traditional methods might miss. Hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, managing a $19 billion portfolio, uses LLMs in its AIA Platform for complex tasks like market research. Healthcare: hospitals are figuring out how to use LLMs to improve efficiency across the board, from streamlining emergency room intake to improving clinical care. For example, HCA Healthcare in Tennessee is integrating LLMs into its hospitals, focusing on improving time-consuming tasks like documenting notes from conversations with patients during visits. Financial services: LLMs are changing how financial services do their work, with firms like BlackRock using them to analyze market data and identify investment opportunities. BlackRock’s systematic active equity team uses LLMs to process vast datasets, uncovering patterns that traditional methods might miss. Hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, managing a $19 billion portfolio, uses LLMs in its AIA Platform for complex tasks like market research. Healthcare: hospitals are figuring out how to use LLMs to improve efficiency across the board, from streamlining emergency room intake to improving clinical care. For example, HCA Healthcare in Tennessee is integrating LLMs into its hospitals, focusing on improving time-consuming tasks like documenting notes from conversations with patients during visits. The above examples illustrate how technology changes the world: one task at a time. Sometimes in visible ways. Oftentimes behind the scenes. Benioff is correct to pressure tech firms to improve LLM-based AI models. They make mistakes and face criticism over issues like bias and intellectual copyright. But on the other hand, so do AI agents. It’s vital to train them properly and keep humans in the loop to correct errors and prevent bias. But he is overlooking the fact that LLMs learn from their mistakes. They improve. Quickly. If anything, the impact of what LLMs can and will do is understated.

Why Salesforce and Microsoft Are Battling for the Future of AI Agents

Proč Salesforce a Microsoft bojují o budoucnost AI agentů

Warum Salesforce und Microsoft um die Zukunft der KI-Agenten kämpfen

Por qué Salesforce y Microsoft luchan por el futuro de los agentes de IA

چرا Salesforce و Microsoft برای آینده نمایندگان هوش مصنوعی می جنگند؟

Salesforce と Microsoft が AI エージェントの未来をめぐって争う理由

Pourquoi Salesforce na Microsoft Bazali Kobunda pona Avenir ya ba Agents ya AI

Почему Salesforce и Microsoft борются за будущее агентов ИИ

Prečo Salesforce a Microsoft bojujú o budúcnosť agentov AI

Varför Salesforce och Microsoft kämpar för framtiden för AI-agenter

Salesforce ve Microsoft Neden Yapay Zeka Temsilcilerinin Geleceği İçin Mücadele Ediyor?

Kutheni iSalesforce kunye neMicrosoft zisilwela ikamva leearhente ze-AI

Kungani i-Salesforce ne-Microsoft Balwela Ikusasa Lama-AI Agents

It’s 2024, and we cannot go a second without being reminded of AI. It’s everywhere! YouTube channels, newsletters, gurus, and experts promise to dispel AI’s magic, bring you insights from behind the curtain, and tell you how to make money. Precedence Research projects the global artificial intelligence (AI) market to reach USD 2.5 trillion by 2032. Remember when the metaverse was the “Next Big Thing”? Facebook rebranded to Meta in 2021, pouring over $10 billion into developing metaverse-related technologies. Companies followed suit, investing billions, promising a new reality just around the corner. Your son will most certainly live there, and your daughter must prepare her virtual resume for her virtual job, for which she will be paid in virtual money! Right around that time, NFTs were taking the world by storm. Wherever you turned, you couldn’t avoid those boring Bored Apes, childish penguins, and all kinds of ugly “art” meets tech hailed as the new revolution, selling for millions with the involvement of major celebrities like Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon, and Justin Bieber. We heard it all: crypto will go to the moon, AR/VR will redefine gaming and virtual experiences, and blockchain promises a decentralized world for everyone. Now, the buzz has shifted to AI. Suddenly, everyone is an AI expert, launching newsletters, starting YouTube channels, and offering courses, consultations, and quick-fix solutions to leverage AI for success. The list is endless, but the promise is more or less the same: a metaphorical mattress where your dreams and dollars can multiply and live happily ever after! From the infamous “Here in My Garage” Tai Lopez to the convicted financial criminal Jordan Belfort, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” these false prophets, while predictable, often cannot predict anything. They emerge when a new technology gains traction, positioning themselves as pioneers despite having no real contribution, minimal experience, and shallow knowledge. But the imposter’s playbook is highly effective: find a trending topic, declare expertise, hype it to the moon, and capitalize on the craze. They hide behind flashy creatives, fun memes, big buzzwords, and exaggerated claims, building their brand over the broken dreams of their misguided followers. Desperate for quick gains, their audience hangs on their sophisticated words and grand promises while drowning themselves in losses. The Real Cost Misdirected investments, wasted time, and shattered expectations are common outcomes of following the imposters of tech. If you missed investing in Nvidia and want to catch the next OpenAI, don’t worry. They ease your FOMO and quickly turn it up with “follow me and subscribe to my newsletter, where I reshare news headlines and pretend I got secret insider knowledge from the founders.” These self-proclaimed gurus rarely provide the sustainable, actionable insights necessary for genuine success. After all, they have invested all their time in branding, outreach, and spamming your feed while the real experts are busy learning, building, and innovating. Most of the time, you are oblivious to what’s happening behind the scenes and their shady dealings under the table. A class action lawsuit, filed in December of 2022, alleges Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities conspired in a “vast scheme” to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape NFTs and enrich themselves, the crypto payments company they used to get the apes, MoonPay, and the company that made the Bored Apes, Yuga Labs. Celebrities like Tom Brady, Larry David, and Kevin O’Leary may have been responsible for billions of dollars in damages and losses by lending their credibility to the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. But they are not the cause, they are a symptom of a meme culture that rewards bombastic claims and a decrepit media industry vying for access, offering little if any, pushback. “At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth.” Elon Musk claimed at the TED Conference on April 2022. These so-called experts often follow a familiar pattern. They emerge when a new technology gains traction, positioning themselves as pioneers despite having minimal experience or knowledge. They rely on flashy presentations, buzzwords, and exaggerated claims to build their brand. Their success hinges not on the depth of their understanding but on their ability to captivate an audience desperate for quick gains. Dream outcomes, unnecessary innovations, cookie-cutter solutions, and a few things that may have worked once but nothing you can use to achieve or replicate success in a rapidly evolving, highly unpredictable tech landscape. How to Spot a Genuine Expert So, how do you distinguish between a real expert and an imposter? Look for substance over style. True experts demonstrate a deep understanding of their field through consistent, valuable contributions. They acknowledge the complexities and limitations of the technology rather than presenting it as if it’s some kind of magical wowoo dust, when sprinkled on anything it would make it bigger, better, cheaper, and available for everyone! People like Andrew Ng, who consistently provides valuable insights and has a proven track record in AI, or Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, continue to contribute meaningfully to technology discussions. They are educators, scientists, builders, innovators, and value creators who prioritize your growth. A genuine expert will: Provide In-Depth Knowledge: They offer detailed, nuanced explanations rather than oversimplified, sensationalist claims.
Acknowledge Uncertainties: They admit the limitations and challenges of the technology, presenting a balanced view.
Show Proven Experience: They have a track record of working in the field, backed by tangible results and peer recognition.
Focus on Your Growth: They aim to educate and empower you, not just sell you a product, service, or newsletter subscription. The AI Malaise AI, like every technology before it, is transformative, but it’s not magic. It holds great potential in its ability to augment human capabilities. But most of the headlines about taking over the world, doing our jobs, and the rosy future waiting for us as soon as we reach the singularity are nothing more than words with nothing to substantiate it. Just like the headlines on blockchain taking over every database and crypto replacing every currency and rendering banks irrelevant! If you’re truly interested in the reality behind the fog of headlines meant to sell ads, focus on understanding the principles, limitations, and practical applications of technologies like AI. Invest your time in learning before gambling your money away. Seek reputable sources and mentors who prioritize your development. Stay curious, stay skeptical, and let your genuine pursuit of knowledge guide you to real opportunities and growth. Question the credentials of those who claim expertise and seek out diverse perspectives. The true promise of AI, or any technology, lies in its ability to empower you, not in the empty promises of fast money. If anything, the past few years have shown us that there is always another trend and, with it, a chance to ride the waves of change. Let the hype fade, and let your curiosity and commitment to building yourself up guide you to genuine opportunities and real growth. Resources: Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024
Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena
Future Today Institute • 2024 Tech Trends Report
A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes
Record-breaking sale of Beeple's NFT artwork seems shady AF
Why Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Jimmy Fallon and other celebrities are getting sued over crypto
Former FTX spokesman Kevin O’Leary defends endorsement of Bankman-Fried’s crypto firm It’s 2024, and we cannot go a second without being reminded of AI. It’s everywhere! YouTube channels, newsletters, gurus, and experts promise to dispel AI’s magic, bring you insights from behind the curtain, and tell you how to make money. Precedence Research projects the global artificial intelligence (AI) market to reach USD 2.5 trillion by 2032. Precedence Research Remember when the metaverse was the “Next Big Thing” ? Facebook rebranded to Meta in 2021, pouring over $10 billion into developing metaverse-related technologies. Companies followed suit, investing billions, promising a new reality just around the corner. Your son will most certainly live there, and your daughter must prepare her virtual resume for her virtual job, for which she will be paid in virtual money! “Next Big Thing” Right around that time, NFTs were taking the world by storm. Wherever you turned, you couldn’t avoid those boring Bored Apes, childish penguins, and all kinds of ugly “art” meets tech hailed as the new revolution, selling for millions with the involvement of major celebrities like Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon, and Justin Bieber. “art” We heard it all: crypto will go to the moon, AR/VR will redefine gaming and virtual experiences, and blockchain promises a decentralized world for everyone. Now, the buzz has shifted to AI. Suddenly, everyone is an AI expert, launching newsletters, starting YouTube channels, and offering courses, consultations, and quick-fix solutions to leverage AI for success. The list is endless, but the promise is more or less the same: a metaphorical mattress where your dreams and dollars can multiply and live happily ever after! From the infamous “Here in My Garage” Tai Lopez to the convicted financial criminal Jordan Belfort, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” these false prophets, while predictable, often cannot predict anything. They emerge when a new technology gains traction, positioning themselves as pioneers despite having no real contribution, minimal experience, and shallow knowledge. But the imposter’s playbook is highly effective: find a trending topic, declare expertise, hype it to the moon, and capitalize on the craze. “Here in My Garage” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” They hide behind flashy creatives, fun memes, big buzzwords, and exaggerated claims, building their brand over the broken dreams of their misguided followers. Desperate for quick gains, their audience hangs on their sophisticated words and grand promises while drowning themselves in losses. The Real Cost Misdirected investments, wasted time, and shattered expectations are common outcomes of following the imposters of tech. If you missed investing in Nvidia and want to catch the next OpenAI, don’t worry. They ease your FOMO and quickly turn it up with “follow me and subscribe to my newsletter, where I reshare news headlines and pretend I got secret insider knowledge from the founders.” “follow me and subscribe to my newsletter, where I reshare news headlines and pretend I got secret insider knowledge from the founders.” These self-proclaimed gurus rarely provide the sustainable, actionable insights necessary for genuine success. After all, they have invested all their time in branding, outreach, and spamming your feed while the real experts are busy learning, building, and innovating. Most of the time, you are oblivious to what’s happening behind the scenes and their shady dealings under the table. A class action lawsuit, filed in December of 2022, alleges Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities conspired in a “vast scheme” to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape NFTs and enrich themselves, the crypto payments company they used to get the apes, MoonPay, and the company that made the Bored Apes, Yuga Labs. “vast scheme” Celebrities like Tom Brady, Larry David, and Kevin O’Leary may have been responsible for billions of dollars in damages and losses by lending their credibility to the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. But they are not the cause, they are a symptom of a meme culture that rewards bombastic claims and a decrepit media industry vying for access, offering little if any, pushback. “At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth.” Elon Musk claimed at the TED Conference on April 2022. “At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth.” Elon Musk claimed at the TED Conference on April 2022. These so-called experts often follow a familiar pattern. They emerge when a new technology gains traction, positioning themselves as pioneers despite having minimal experience or knowledge. They rely on flashy presentations, buzzwords, and exaggerated claims to build their brand. Their success hinges not on the depth of their understanding but on their ability to captivate an audience desperate for quick gains. Dream outcomes, unnecessary innovations, cookie-cutter solutions, and a few things that may have worked once but nothing you can use to achieve or replicate success in a rapidly evolving, highly unpredictable tech landscape. How to Spot a Genuine Expert So, how do you distinguish between a real expert and an imposter? Look for substance over style. True experts demonstrate a deep understanding of their field through consistent, valuable contributions. They acknowledge the complexities and limitations of the technology rather than presenting it as if it’s some kind of magical wowoo dust, when sprinkled on anything it would make it bigger, better, cheaper, and available for everyone! People like Andrew Ng, who consistently provides valuable insights and has a proven track record in AI, or Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, continue to contribute meaningfully to technology discussions. They are educators, scientists, builders, innovators, and value creators who prioritize your growth. A genuine expert will: Provide In-Depth Knowledge: They offer detailed, nuanced explanations rather than oversimplified, sensationalist claims. Acknowledge Uncertainties: They admit the limitations and challenges of the technology, presenting a balanced view. Show Proven Experience: They have a track record of working in the field, backed by tangible results and peer recognition. Focus on Your Growth: They aim to educate and empower you, not just sell you a product, service, or newsletter subscription. Provide In-Depth Knowledge: They offer detailed, nuanced explanations rather than oversimplified, sensationalist claims. Provide In-Depth Knowledge: Acknowledge Uncertainties: They admit the limitations and challenges of the technology, presenting a balanced view. Acknowledge Uncertainties: Show Proven Experience: They have a track record of working in the field, backed by tangible results and peer recognition. Show Proven Experience: Focus on Your Growth: They aim to educate and empower you, not just sell you a product, service, or newsletter subscription. Focus on Your Growth: The AI Malaise AI, like every technology before it, is transformative, but it’s not magic. It holds great potential in its ability to augment human capabilities. But most of the headlines about taking over the world, doing our jobs, and the rosy future waiting for us as soon as we reach the singularity are nothing more than words with nothing to substantiate it. Just like the headlines on blockchain taking over every database and crypto replacing every currency and rendering banks irrelevant! If you’re truly interested in the reality behind the fog of headlines meant to sell ads, focus on understanding the principles, limitations, and practical applications of technologies like AI. Invest your time in learning before gambling your money away. Seek reputable sources and mentors who prioritize your development. Stay curious, stay skeptical, and let your genuine pursuit of knowledge guide you to real opportunities and growth. Question the credentials of those who claim expertise and seek out diverse perspectives. The true promise of AI, or any technology, lies in its ability to empower you, not in the empty promises of fast money. If anything, the past few years have shown us that there is always another trend and, with it, a chance to ride the waves of change. Let the hype fade, and let your curiosity and commitment to building yourself up guide you to genuine opportunities and real growth. Resources: Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024 Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena Future Today Institute • 2024 Tech Trends Report A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes Record-breaking sale of Beeple's NFT artwork seems shady AF Why Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Jimmy Fallon and other celebrities are getting sued over crypto Former FTX spokesman Kevin O’Leary defends endorsement of Bankman-Fried’s crypto firm Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024 Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024 Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena Artificial Intelligence in the News: How AI Retools, Rationalizes, and Reshapes Journalism and the Public Arena Future Today Institute • 2024 Tech Trends Report Future Today Institute • 2024 Tech Trends Report A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes A twisted tale of celebrity promotion, opaque transactions and allegations of racist tropes Record-breaking sale of Beeple's NFT artwork seems shady AF Record-breaking sale of Beeple's NFT artwork seems shady AF Why Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Jimmy Fallon and other celebrities are getting sued over crypto Why Tom Brady, David Ortiz, Jimmy Fallon and other celebrities are getting sued over crypto Former FTX spokesman Kevin O’Leary defends endorsement of Bankman-Fried’s crypto firm Former FTX spokesman Kevin O’Leary defends endorsement of Bankman-Fried’s crypto firm

The Imposters of Tech

টেক ইম্পোস্টারস

Die Hochstapler der Technik

Los impostores de la tecnología

Les imposteurs de la technologie

तकनीक के धोखेबाज

テクノロジーの偽者

기술 사기꾼

Os impostores da tecnologia

Самозванцы технологий

Teknolojinin Sahtekarları

Những kẻ mạo danh công nghệ

科技的冒名顶替者

While three-dimensional (3D) printing — also known as additive manufacturing — has been a staple in hobbyists’ lives for years, its popularity in industrial applications is rapidly rising. As more companies leverage it, its impact on logistics becomes clear. Will this technology permanently affect supply chains? The Role of 3D Printing in Supply Chains 3D printing’s primary role in supply chains revolves around manufacturing. Many manufacturers use it for small-batch or custom orders because of its fast turnaround time. Its popularity in warehousing and distribution is rising, too, since it’s a relatively versatile technology. Logistics companies use it to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds. While many people associate 3D printing products and services with do-it-yourself projects and fun, worthless trinkets, it’s not just for consumers. In the logistics sector, its penetration rate is high — which isn’t surprising, given its global market value is set to reach $35.6 billion in 2024, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 22.5% from 2020 to 2024. Since this technology can accelerate typical production and backend processes, it has become a large part of logistics. Already, 74% of supply chain companies report spending $5-$10 million on additive manufacturing technology, and another 18% spend up to $50 million. As its penetration rate increases and investments grow, decision-makers will uncover new use cases. How Logistics Companies Can Use This Technology Manufacturers use 3D printing to shift from mass production to on-demand. For example, medical equipment manufacturers use it to craft tailor-made prosthetics. Some facilities have established local hubs where they produce, assemble, and ship products from decentralized centers instead of relying on distributors to distribute from one central location. 3D printers use filaments, powders, resins, or liquids to turn a computer-aided design (CAD) file stored in the cloud or on an on-premises data storage system into a finished product. Manufacturers use industrial versions for large-scale, custom-built, or small-batch projects. In warehousing, workers can use 3D printers to make safety equipment like hard hats, disposable gloves, or ergonomic inserts to make material handling less risky. They’ve been introduced into most personal protective equipment domains because they’re fast, accurate, and require no human contact. Distributors are also using this technology to improve communication and shorten shipping times. For example, they can use it to make visual aids displaying their building’s layout or network’s flow. They can also use it for packaging and inserts to reduce the likelihood of product damage during distribution. While manufacturers use 3D printing the most — and, arguably, have the most significant impact — warehouse workers and distributors also utilize it. Even though it’s not as pervasive in those areas, its presence is still impactful. The Pros of Using 3D Printing in Logistics Logistics companies using additive manufacturing benefit from reduced lead times — meaning they shorten the time between the beginning and end of a process. Manufacturers produce goods sooner, and warehouse workers cut unexpected downtime short by replacing parts faster. This high-efficiency approach is built for on-demand production. Another pro is waste reduction — modern printers use material precisely. If any excess is left over, it can be reused in future projects. On top of being cost-effective, it’s also sustainable. Research shows it could reduce supply chain carbon emissions because it’s less energy-intensive than traditional manufacturing processes. 3D printing is an affordable alternative to many standard logistics tools. For example, it can optimize tooling and retooling — which accounts for up to 93.5% of manufacturing expenses — by producing molds, equipment, gear, and fixtures for production. Its cost-saving effects extend to warehousing and distribution. Warehouses save on inventory space and carrying costs since their “parts” are CAD files stored in the cloud and printed immediately on-site. Distributors spend less on transportation because decentralized facilities require shorter trips. If they use 3D-printed packaging and inserts custom-fit to specific products, they may receive fewer damage-related returns. The Cons of Using 3D Printing in Logistics Many decision-makers are unfamiliar with the implications of adopting new technology. They often misjudge its ripple effects, not considering how those outside their department might be affected. If they don’t understand how to integrate it seamlessly — or why they’re utilizing it in the first place — their efforts could lead to failure. Another one of 3D printing’s biggest cons is the upfront investment cost. While the average hobbyist can get a printer for a few hundred dollars, industrial-grade versions are more expensive. They start at about $5,000 and reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. If manufacturers want enough to meet demand, they have to pay up. While a potentially multi-million dollar investment might seem doable to outsiders without knowledge of the sector, the reality is different. According to the Small Business Administration, 99% of all manufacturing enterprises in the U.S. are small manufacturers. The approximately 600,000 small manufacturers make $1 trillion in gross revenue, so they each walk away with roughly $1,700,000 annually — meaning the commitment to additive manufacturing technology is a monumental decision. Investing in multiple machines could adversely affect their long-term resiliency and growth. Data breaches are another concern. Bad actors could reverse engineer designs or hack cloud platforms to steal intellectual property, making CAD files free for public use. Consequently, hobbyists could produce or distribute homemade copies, significantly impacting sales. The downside of adopting user-friendly technology is that it may be too accessible to consumers. How 3D Printing Technology Impacts Supply Chains 3D printing has several major impacts on supply chains, each with unique implications. 1. Increases Resiliency Against Upstream Disruptions About 47% of supply chain leaders agree they’re vulnerable to upstream disruption, with most naming rising material costs, customers’ timing expectations, and rising freight expenses as leading challenges. 3D printing technology’s cost-effectiveness and rapid production rate could resolve these pain points, making logistics companies more resilient. 2. Requires a Comprehensive Shift to Decentralization While decentralized production isn’t the norm yet, it’s quickly catching on. For it to take off, companies would need to switch to a decentralized logistics network, cutting out most distribution centers and centralized warehouses. Local production, assembly, and delivery hubs would make large parts of the existing supply chain infrastructure obsolete. 3. Reduces Lead Times and Accelerates Time to Market Manufacturers, warehouses, and distributors can use this technology to streamline production and reduce downtime, enabling them to bring products to market sooner and make deliveries faster. Supply chains operating at higher speeds improve customer satisfaction and help businesses meet demand. 4. Provides a Workaround for Rising Supply Chain Costs 3D printers can work with just about any material — including metals, foods, wood, textiles, plastics, and ceramic — making them the ideal workaround for rising costs. Logistics businesses integrating them will save money, enabling them to contribute more funds toward process optimization or research and development. The Transformative Power of 3D Printing Technology 3D printing is fast, precise, and cost-effective — the three qualities every logistics company strives for. Its impressive market value and penetration rate prove its popularity will likely continue rising, indicating its impact will broaden. Eventually, it could reshape supply chains permanently. While three-dimensional (3D) printing — also known as additive manufacturing — has been a staple in hobbyists’ lives for years, its popularity in industrial applications is rapidly rising. As more companies leverage it, its impact on logistics becomes clear. Will this technology permanently affect supply chains? The Role of 3D Printing in Supply Chains 3D printing’s primary role in supply chains revolves around manufacturing. Many manufacturers use it for small-batch or custom orders because of its fast turnaround time. Its popularity in warehousing and distribution is rising, too, since it’s a relatively versatile technology. Logistics companies use it to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds. While many people associate 3D printing products and services with do-it-yourself projects and fun, worthless trinkets, it’s not just for consumers. In the logistics sector, its penetration rate is high — which isn’t surprising, given its global market value is set to reach $35.6 billion in 2024, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 22.5% from 2020 to 2024. is set to reach $35.6 billion Since this technology can accelerate typical production and backend processes, it has become a large part of logistics. Already, 74% of supply chain companies report spending $5-$10 million on additive manufacturing technology, and another 18% spend up to $50 million. As its penetration rate increases and investments grow, decision-makers will uncover new use cases. 74% of supply chain companies How Logistics Companies Can Use This Technology Manufacturers use 3D printing to shift from mass production to on-demand. For example, medical equipment manufacturers use it to craft tailor-made prosthetics. Some facilities have established local hubs where they produce, assemble, and ship products from decentralized centers instead of relying on distributors to distribute from one central location. 3D printers use filaments, powders, resins, or liquids to turn a computer-aided design (CAD) file stored in the cloud or on an on-premises data storage system into a finished product. Manufacturers use industrial versions for large-scale, custom-built, or small-batch projects. In warehousing, workers can use 3D printers to make safety equipment like hard hats, disposable gloves, or ergonomic inserts to make material handling less risky. They’ve been introduced into most personal protective equipment domains because they’re fast, accurate, and require no human contact. most personal protective equipment domains Distributors are also using this technology to improve communication and shorten shipping times. For example, they can use it to make visual aids displaying their building’s layout or network’s flow. They can also use it for packaging and inserts to reduce the likelihood of product damage during distribution. While manufacturers use 3D printing the most — and, arguably, have the most significant impact — warehouse workers and distributors also utilize it. Even though it’s not as pervasive in those areas, its presence is still impactful. The Pros of Using 3D Printing in Logistics Logistics companies using additive manufacturing benefit from reduced lead times — meaning they shorten the time between the beginning and end of a process. Manufacturers produce goods sooner, and warehouse workers cut unexpected downtime short by replacing parts faster. This high-efficiency approach is built for on-demand production. Another pro is waste reduction — modern printers use material precisely. If any excess is left over, it can be reused in future projects. On top of being cost-effective, it’s also sustainable. Research shows it could reduce supply chain carbon emissions because it’s less energy-intensive than traditional manufacturing processes. 3D printing is an affordable alternative to many standard logistics tools. For example, it can optimize tooling and retooling — which accounts for up to 93.5% of manufacturing expenses — by producing molds, equipment, gear, and fixtures for production. Its cost-saving effects extend to warehousing and distribution. up to 93.5% of manufacturing expenses Warehouses save on inventory space and carrying costs since their “parts” are CAD files stored in the cloud and printed immediately on-site. Distributors spend less on transportation because decentralized facilities require shorter trips. If they use 3D-printed packaging and inserts custom-fit to specific products, they may receive fewer damage-related returns. The Cons of Using 3D Printing in Logistics Many decision-makers are unfamiliar with the implications of adopting new technology. They often misjudge its ripple effects , not considering how those outside their department might be affected. If they don’t understand how to integrate it seamlessly — or why they’re utilizing it in the first place — their efforts could lead to failure. often misjudge its ripple effects Another one of 3D printing’s biggest cons is the upfront investment cost. While the average hobbyist can get a printer for a few hundred dollars, industrial-grade versions are more expensive. They start at about $5,000 and reach hundreds of thousands of dollars. If manufacturers want enough to meet demand, they have to pay up. start at about $5,000 While a potentially multi-million dollar investment might seem doable to outsiders without knowledge of the sector, the reality is different. According to the Small Business Administration, 99% of all manufacturing enterprises in the U.S. are small manufacturers. 99% of all manufacturing enterprises The approximately 600,000 small manufacturers make $1 trillion in gross revenue, so they each walk away with roughly $1,700,000 annually — meaning the commitment to additive manufacturing technology is a monumental decision. Investing in multiple machines could adversely affect their long-term resiliency and growth. Data breaches are another concern. Bad actors could reverse engineer designs or hack cloud platforms to steal intellectual property, making CAD files free for public use. Consequently, hobbyists could produce or distribute homemade copies , significantly impacting sales. The downside of adopting user-friendly technology is that it may be too accessible to consumers. could produce or distribute homemade copies How 3D Printing Technology Impacts Supply Chains 3D printing has several major impacts on supply chains, each with unique implications. 1. Increases Resiliency Against Upstream Disruptions About 47% of supply chain leaders agree they’re vulnerable to upstream disruption, with most naming rising material costs, customers’ timing expectations, and rising freight expenses as leading challenges. 3D printing technology’s cost-effectiveness and rapid production rate could resolve these pain points, making logistics companies more resilient. 47% of supply chain leaders 2. Requires a Comprehensive Shift to Decentralization While decentralized production isn’t the norm yet, it’s quickly catching on. For it to take off, companies would need to switch to a decentralized logistics network, cutting out most distribution centers and centralized warehouses. Local production, assembly, and delivery hubs would make large parts of the existing supply chain infrastructure obsolete. 3. Reduces Lead Times and Accelerates Time to Market Manufacturers, warehouses, and distributors can use this technology to streamline production and reduce downtime, enabling them to bring products to market sooner and make deliveries faster. Supply chains operating at higher speeds improve customer satisfaction and help businesses meet demand. 4. Provides a Workaround for Rising Supply Chain Costs 3D printers can work with just about any material — including metals, foods, wood, textiles, plastics, and ceramic — making them the ideal workaround for rising costs. Logistics businesses integrating them will save money, enabling them to contribute more funds toward process optimization or research and development. The Transformative Power of 3D Printing Technology 3D printing is fast, precise, and cost-effective — the three qualities every logistics company strives for. Its impressive market value and penetration rate prove its popularity will likely continue rising, indicating its impact will broaden. Eventually, it could reshape supply chains permanently.

How 3D Printing Is Impacting Supply Chains

কিভাবে 3D প্রিন্টিং সাপ্লাই চেইনকে প্রভাবিত করছে

Wie sich der 3D-Druck auf Lieferketten auswirkt

Cómo la impresión 3D está afectando las cadenas de suministro

Comment l’impression 3D affecte les chaînes d’approvisionnement

3D प्रिंटिंग आपूर्ति श्रृंखलाओं को कैसे प्रभावित कर रही है

3Dプリントがサプライチェーンに与える影響

3D 프린팅이 공급망에 미치는 영향

Como a impressão 3D está impactando as cadeias de suprimentos

Как 3D-печать влияет на цепочки поставок

3D Baskı Tedarik Zincirlerini Nasıl Etkiliyor?

In 3D đang tác động đến chuỗi cung ứng như thế nào

3D 打印如何影响供应链

When James Cameron first teased Terminator 2 back in the day, it was through a 90-second teaser that showed an automated robot factory pumping out endless rows of robots, ending with a shot of Arnold as the build process completed. Pure pulp fiction. Or was it? Fast forward to 2024, and we are now entering the era of the hyperfactory, where the main body of cars is autonomously assembled every 76 seconds. No, that’s not a mistype because Xaoimi, the smartphone OEM, has entered the electric vehicle arena with the SU7 and with it, a factory setup that is 91% automated with 400 robots armed with HD cameras and can operate in the dark. It reminds me of the time I spent on stage at the Big Data Expo in China with the chairman of Foxconn, and we debated the merits of running a smartphone factory with the lights off — because who needs lights when it’s just the robots running the show? The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.
— Warren Bennis Watching the keynote reveal is an eye-opening vision of the future of manufacturing but not in the way you think. “We have 269 welding machines to achieve 100% automated production and have the 36 robots to achieve 0.5 millimeters of assembly precision” “…industry leading seven axis coating robots with 70,000 RPM, it can make the paint coverage extremely fine balanced. This produces a natural flat and smooth finish..” “AMR robots that can replace forklifts/internal transport around the factory…” The best part is that the cars can then drive themselves off the factory line with the autopilot software that the company has introduced. In all, it’s a fascinating look at the future of car manufacturing. But there’s something else to consider. We are looking at the precursor of mass-produced, highly automated robot and drone production, something that I can’t help but compare to that dystopian movie. Because, let’s face it, everything is starting to point towards it. We have major AI players all rushing to give their hyperbolic algorithms some form of physical embodiment to contextually understand the world around them in a new dimension. The idea that military, DARPA, or even startup funding won’t find its way to a hyperfactory of this kind is ludicrous because they’ll be eyeing this up as a way to mass-produce killer drones and robotic tech in the blink of an eye if it means flooding the market with robotic slaves. One of the best (read: accurate) dystopian movies of the future to this day is Elysium by Neill Blomkamp, but even then, his vision of a robotic factory is forcing human labor to manufacture the military machines that take the piss on a daily basis. It just won’t be like that. It’s time to pay close attention to other industries for clues as to how stuff like Terminator or The Matrix could feasibly come true — our hubris in automating the human out of every job role and process will ultimately lead us to a path where automation can be easily retooled and reprogrammed to manufacture something else. And it won’t be a Roomba. When James Cameron first teased Terminator 2 back in the day, it was through a 90-second teaser that showed an automated robot factory pumping out endless rows of robots, ending with a shot of Arnold as the build process completed. Pure pulp fiction. Or was it? Fast forward to 2024, and we are now entering the era of the hyperfactory, where the main body of cars is autonomously assembled every 76 seconds. Fast forward to 2024, and we are now entering the era of the hyperfactory , where the main body of cars is autonomously assembled every 76 seconds. hyperfactory No, that’s not a mistype because Xaoimi, the smartphone OEM, has entered the electric vehicle arena with the SU7 and with it, a factory setup that is 91% automated with 400 robots armed with HD cameras and can operate in the dark. It reminds me of the time I spent on stage at the Big Data Expo in China with the chairman of Foxconn, and we debated the merits of running a smartphone factory with the lights off — because who needs lights when it’s just the robots running the show? It reminds me of the time I spent on stage at the Big Data Expo in China with the chairman of Foxconn, The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. — Warren Bennis The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. — Warren Bennis — Warren Bennis Watching the keynote reveal is an eye-opening vision of the future of manufacturing but not in the way you think. keynote reveal keynote reveal “We have 269 welding machines to achieve 100% automated production and have the 36 robots to achieve 0.5 millimeters of assembly precision” “…industry leading seven axis coating robots with 70,000 RPM, it can make the paint coverage extremely fine balanced. This produces a natural flat and smooth finish..” “AMR robots that can replace forklifts/internal transport around the factory…” The best part is that the cars can then drive themselves off the factory line with the autopilot software that the company has introduced. In all, it’s a fascinating look at the future of car manufacturing. But there’s something else to consider. We are looking at the precursor of mass-produced, highly automated robot and drone production, something that I can’t help but compare to that dystopian movie. We are looking at the precursor of mass-produced, highly automated robot and drone production, something that I can’t help but compare to that dystopian movie. that dystopian movie. Because, let’s face it, everything is starting to point towards it. We have major AI players all rushing to give their hyperbolic algorithms some form of physical embodiment to contextually understand the world around them in a new dimension. The idea that military, DARPA, or even startup funding won’t find its way to a hyperfactory of this kind is ludicrous because they’ll be eyeing this up as a way to mass-produce killer drones and robotic tech in the blink of an eye if it means flooding the market with robotic slaves. The idea that military, DARPA, or even startup funding won’t find its way to a hyperfactory of this kind is ludicrous because they’ll be eyeing this up as a way to mass-produce killer drones and robotic tech in the blink of an eye if it means flooding the market with robotic slaves. One of the best ( read: accurate ) dystopian movies of the future to this day is Elysium by Neill Blomkamp, but even then, his vision of a robotic factory is forcing human labor to manufacture the military machines that take the piss on a daily basis. It just won’t be like that. read: accurate It’s time to pay close attention to other industries for clues as to how stuff like Terminator or The Matrix could feasibly come true — our hubris in automating the human out of every job role and process will ultimately lead us to a path where automation can be easily retooled and reprogrammed to manufacture something else. And it won’t be a Roomba.

Skynet Is Not the One You Should Be Fearing - Fear Your Favourite Car Manufacturer Instead

Seamless integration of tools and data sources has become the cornerstone of efficiency and innovation. HubSpot stands as a prominent figure for all things Sales and Marketing. However, in this blog, we . delve into how HubSpot data finds applications in custom business operations lying outside its out-of-the-box capabilities We'll explore how integration empowers developers to craft bespoke tools that merge HubSpot data with that of other sources, enhancing operational efficiency across enterprises. low-code The Need for Custom Operational Efficiency Tools Companies today are driven by the need for seamless data integration across diverse tools. of Frendy Fashion. Their customer success representatives must pull data from HubSpot, Zendesk, and Stripe for every return/refund query, creating a consolidated profile to process requests. This process consumes significant time and hampers query resolution speed. Integrating these data sources into a single point of truth can expedite response times and enhance customer experiences. Consider this hypothetical case The Versatility of HubSpot Data The integration of HubSpot's data with various tools empowers companies to optimize operations, refine customer interactions, and boost efficiency. Consider these use cases: : Join HubSpot data with marketing analytics platforms to track and measure the success of campaigns. This provides valuable insights into the and channels. Marketing Campaign Insights effectiveness of different marketing strategies : Combine with financial and sales data through integration to generate accurate sales forecasts. This , and setting achievable sales targets. Sales Forecasting HubSpot's CRM data aids in strategic planning, resource allocation : Link HubSpot with an e-commerce platform to gain a comprehensive view of customer behavior. This integration can help , and optimize the customer journey. E-commerce Integration tailor marketing efforts, offer personalized product recommendations : Integrate HubSpot with event management tools to seamlessly manage event registrations, track attendance, and automate follow-up communication. This . Event Management enhances lead nurturing and engagement after events : Connect HubSpot with supply chain systems to , shipping information, and inventory availability. This ensures accurate and timely communication to customers. Supply Chain Management provide real-time updates on order statuses : Integrate HubSpot with financial systems to gain . This integration supports credit control, risk assessment, and financial decision-making. Financial Insights insights into customer transaction history and payment status : Integrate HubSpot with customer support ticketing systems and communication tools. This integration allows customer support representatives to , enabling them to provide more personalized and effective support. It also facilitates seamless coordination among support teams and enhances issue resolution speed. Enhanced Customer Support access comprehensive customer profiles, purchase histories, and interactions The Landscape of HubSpot Integration : HubSpot readily connects with tools that enhance marketing and sales efforts. Yet, as businesses evolve, so do their operational needs. The demand for , project management systems, e-commerce platforms, and beyond. To cater to these diverse demands, we must look beyond the boundaries of native integrations. Native Integrations with HubSpot personalized experiences necessitates connections with specialized tools : Imagine your marketing team gathering invaluable insights from HubSpot, syncing seamlessly with your custom analytics dashboard. Or your sales teams leveraging HubSpot data in real-time to execute targeted strategies that resonate with potential clients. These scenarios often demand more than standard integrations can provide. While HubSpot effortlessly links with several tools, the complexity of that transcends these connections. Challenges of Complex Integrations business operations demands a level of customization and precision Unlocking Potential With Low-Code Integration: Why Developers Need More Going back to Frendy Fashion’s story. The gap is clear, however, developer bandwidth remains a critical issue, so internal ops requirements take a backseat. That’s where low-code integration comes in to connect disparate data sources, designing a custom interface and giving the CSRs a personalized app to resolve queries faster. Developer Constraints and Complex Integrations While HubSpot offers a plethora of features, not every team has the luxury of time and resources to embark on extensive internal tool development. Often, the demands of customer-facing operations take precedence, leaving little room for additional development work. Moreover, building tools that seamlessly integrate HubSpot's data with other systems can be intricate and time-consuming, requiring specialized developer expertise. Enter Low-Code Development Low-code tools streamline integration and app development with a visual interface to build custom tools. Low-code platforms offer pre-built UI components and ready connectors to databases and applications like SQL database, Airtable, Google Sheets, HubSpot, Trello, Zendesk, Stripe, and more; automating user authentication and data handling. Low-code platforms simplify development, bringing in an abstraction layer while reducing the need for extensive coding, and offer pre-built connectors, user management, security, and automation blocks. They handle updates and scalability, making maintenance easier. While custom integrations provide tailored solutions, low-code tools excel in speed, simplicity, and accessibility, making them a preferable choice for organizations seeking quicker integration deployment without the hassles of handling dependencies on libraries, frameworks, and intensive development resources. Real-Life Success Stories: Low-Code Integration in Action : A financial services company seamlessly connects HubSpot with its client database using low-code. This integration automates client onboarding, ensuring data consistency across platforms and delivering a personalized experience from the get-go. Personalized Client Onboarding : An e-commerce retailer integrates HubSpot with its customer support system. This low-code integration captures customer interactions across platforms, providing the sales and support teams with a unified customer view that enhances engagement and support efficiency. Holistic Customer Insights : A marketing agency combines HubSpot with its social media scheduling tool through low-code. By syncing HubSpot's lead data with social media schedules, the agency orchestrates targeted campaigns based on real-time insights. Automated Social Media Campaigns : An education institution integrates HubSpot with its accounting software via low-code. This integration automates the process of tracking payments, ensuring timely follow-ups and accurate financial management. Effortless Financial Tracking : An event planning company integrates HubSpot with its event management platform using low-code. Attendee data flows seamlessly between systems, enabling targeted communication and an enhanced event experience. Personalized Event Management : A data-driven marketing team integrates HubSpot with its data analytics tool via low-code. This integration empowers the team to create highly targeted campaigns based on real-time customer behavior insights. Insights-Driven Marketing These examples showcase the power of integrating HubSpot with multiple tools and data sources to build custom solutions that enhance efficiency, customer engagement, and decision-making across various business functions. Types of Low-Code Tools to Consume HubSpot (and Other) APIs BPM Workflow tools – , , Kissflow Pipefy Workato In the automation tools category, processes are defined by triggers, actions, and well-defined stages. Tools like Kissflow, and Workato are pretty popular for their workflow capabilities. These platforms are industry-agnostic, driving business process workflows for simple to complex processes. Integration platforms – , , Zapier Make Tray Integration platforms include the likes of Zapier, Tray, Make (previously Integromat), etc. Zapier, in particular, has done an impressive job at providing ready-to-use zaps for non-coders to get their hands dirty with marketing integrations. All-in-one platforms (App builders) – , , DronaHQ Glide Monday You also get platforms that provide a host of more capabilities such as creative designing, UI capabilities, integration using APIs, user access management, distribution management, and of course, automation capabilities to run trigger-based workflows. Platforms include  DronaHQ, Bubble, Glide, Retool (each offering its own set of specialties), and more. The Uniqueness of Custom Solutions In the ever-evolving landscape of business technology, the synergy between HubSpot and low-code integration stands as a testament to innovation. While HubSpot's rich features empower businesses, custom operational efficiency tools often require a higher level of personalization. The constraints of developer availability and complex integrations can hinder progress. This is where low-code development shines, democratizing the creation of custom tools and bridging the gap between HubSpot's capabilities and unique business needs. By embracing low-code development, businesses can empower teams to swiftly build tools that streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and unlock the full potential of HubSpot's data-rich environment.

Stories, News & Mentions about RETOOL

Retool’s Stories on HackerNoon

Retool's News & Mentions