Hello Margarita!
None of this is LLM written, I hope this is worth your time :)We spoke in 2024 when I applied for a role at Supabase, which was a great experience, and I've followed you since!
To save you some time, just in case you remember - this was our last message in June, and here's my LinkedIn profile.
I just saw your LinkedIn post:
I'd like to offer free 20-min career chats to my work friends or people who work in open source
I don't work in OSS, but here's one reason why this will be worth your time:
I know feedback from you is very valuable, and can change the course of my career. And this is nothing new - I've been bugging you about it ever since our interview :P
Me, tldr:
I've been in tech for about 7 years now - and I love it! I'm chock full of side projects that I work on at nights and weekends, all with different frameworks/tech etc.
I aim to reduce my space of "unknown-unknowns" with my side projects, which helps me make much better decisions at work.
I'm a founding engineer/lead at a fintech right now.
I care about the end user experience - is what I build actually helping people? To that end, I've worn all the hats I can wear.
The problem:
Although I see myself building, surfing on the cutting edge of tech, burning the midnight oil: I don't know how to break into the premier companies.
Every hire I see (even in the auth engineer role I tried at Supabase for) seems to have prior experience at a kick-ass company, and that gives them a ticket into the world of exciting companies.
I'm not sure yet about:
- If that's right
- What I need to improve to break into those companies
- How to quantify this
Considering you have tons of experience at that level, any pointers you give me would be great (and I will work on it!)
Quick time travel:
Here's my journey from a Mechanical Engineering degree to lead at an AI startup:
| readmaxxing | reading O'Reilly Java The Complete Reference (1k+ pages) end to end to learn to code. First of many books. |
| formal backend | becoming a reliable backend dev at an enterprise that served thousands of users, millions of endpoints (we had on-premise customers, and used "make no mistakes" long before claude) |
| formal backend++ | leading teams at the enterprise co, 10k+ dev org; being the point of contact for security reviews and guidance |
| security++ | wrote our 0-day playbook, reached consensus on DRIs (ah, enterprise), presented security findings to 500+ devs |
| back to 0 | leaving all my social capital at the bigCo to join a then-nameless startup as founding engg |
| formal tech++ | do literally everything at the startup I had teams in bigCo for - infra, backend, deployment, sec, etc |
| formal non-tech | all the while talking to sales/support tech to make their lives easier with bots, automation, browser extensions |
| desktop apps | building cross-platform desktop apps (ElectronJS), native desktop apps (MacOS) on the side |
| devops | volunteering to do devOps on AWS for random people on Discord during covid (a watch party app. I had never used AWS before) |
| mobile apps | attempting to build mobile apps (Android, failed for lack of research before implementation) |
| ai ai ai | literally staying on the bleeding edge of AI so I have a dependable workflow for myself (I strongly believe everyone needs to shape their own tools when it comes to AI adoption) |
| whatsapp bot | building an AI assistant as a TUI app, and then a whatsapp-first product till Meta blocked my primary account :( |
| framework mania | building random apps with Svelte, React, AstroJS just to try them out |
| homeserver phase | setting up my homeserver to run claude code on my phone + set up backups with Immich etc |
| browser extension | releasing a Firefox extension to preview fonts live on websites bc I was so obsessed with fonts (just look at my website) |
| ai pilled | building a real-time security monitoring solution with Golang (I don't know Go, but it was the best tool for the job) |
| beware salesforce | building a PRM for myself because I keep forgetting important events (also finds cool people on Hackernews for me) |
Trivia on Supabase and Mastra:
I used Supabase pretty early on, and my question on Supabase remains my highest voted question on Stackoverflow.
I was baited by one of Sam's posts into...insulting him (I absolutely hate "COMMENT I_LOVE_AI TO GET FREE EBOOK!!!" posts).
I did apologize later though, so don't hold it against me x(
I tried Mastra last year:
Unfortunately it didn't go as well as I hoped (judging from my comment msgs 😬)
But there's been so many advances in the past year that there's prob a world of difference now.
Anyway... looking forward to meeting you!