J.I. Cruz

After a hiatus from posting, I'm excited to share a small project I've been working on. This is a web app (PWA) designed to assist in organizing and planning events/services at the Presbyterian Church of Estreito (IPE), where I'm a member. It also helps manage the song repertoire for our worship team, of which I'm also a part. It was the first project where I actually decided to have the experience of creating an application from scratch, without worrying too much about good practices or code standards (although it's not a total mess 😅), developing it quickly, using technologies that bring more agility and also several ready-made components. The idea for the project had been in my mind for a while and so I took advantage of part of 2 weeks of my last vacation to put the idea into practice, focusing on meeting the functionalities that we use most in our daily life. From a technical perspective, I utilized TypeScript with NextJS to leverage API routes and Server-Side Rendering (SSR). For styling and components, I employed TailwindCSS and Shadcn/ui. The backend is powered by a Postgres database, and I deployed both the app and the database (integrated with Neon) on Vercel. To execute SQL queries, I used Vercel's own SDK. Although the project is quite specific to my current scenario, feel free to fork it and customize it for your own scenarios. Additionally, any contribution is very welcome, especially regarding UI/UX which is not my strong suit 🤣 Repository: https://lnkd.in/eZmJrBnp App's URL: https://lnkd.in/egjxkHtK (Note: You can create an account, but you won't be able to do much later, as you won't have full access right away. 😅) #nextjs #TypeScript #tailwindcss #Vercel #Igreja Presbiteriana do Brasil

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📈 Leveraging EDIB for a Future-Proof Business Strategy ✊ The Urgent Case for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) As Fortune 500 companies grapple with a staggering 💰 $64 billion in discrimination lawsuit settlements and over 💸 $300 million in turnover due to discriminatory practices, the return on investment for proactive Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) strategies has never been clearer. Discrimination not only damages corporate culture but also devastates financial health. ⚖ Why Justice A.I. is Essential In this transformative era, Justice A.I. emerges as a crucial ally, equipped to combat and correct biases deeply embedded within operational practices. Our innovative AI-driven approach identifies and mitigates unconscious biases, ensuring that your workforce not only flourishes in diversity but also strengthens your bottom line. Don't wait for the cost of non-compliance to escalate further. Embrace Justice A.I. and turn what many see as compliance costs into strategic investments. Let's dismantle systemic barriers together and forge a path towards a genuinely inclusive corporate culture. Are you ready to lead the charge and transform your organization? Contact us now and be the vanguard of change. Transform Today for a Better Tomorrow Join us in this journey. Let Justice A.I. help you harness the full potential of EDIB—not just as a legal framework but as a cornerstone of innovative and sustainable business practices. Contact me below 🔗 www.modatlasmedia.com #JusticeAI #InclusionRevolution #SustainableBusinessPractices

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For week 7 of CUNY Tech Prep, let’s talk about… week 8! We’re learning about decision trees and random forests! Trees should be a familiar concept to us computer science students, and indeed, they appear to be the data structure that serves the purpose of classification by branching paths. Decision trees unfortunately suffer from overfitting, and that’s not hard to see from how dependent they are on the data they are built from. Thankfully, random forests mitigate this problem by introducing an element of flexibility by having a bunch of decision trees to make classifications instead of just one! Random forests use a strategy called “bagging”: we bootstrap the data by randomizing a subset of it, and then aggregate the classification results of the random forests. We can evaluate the accuracy of the random forests by using data not used for the forests: called “out-of-bag” data! While we initially compare two columns per split, we can try multiple columns per split and repeat this process until we have the most “pure” classifier. Excited to learn more and experiment with decision trees and random forests this Tuesday!

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"I don't like leetcode style interviews!" See I wasn't making it up! Kurtis Nusbaum tells us more about why engineers don't like leetcode and the types of interviews that lead to a more enjoyable and effective interviewing experience.

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BAMM❗️ A web-app for the “residents” of the City of Syracuse. Together with Roshan Khandelwal, we've recently wrapped up an innovative project for the "Syracuse Civic Data Challenge", integrating Machine Learning, React and Django to enhance the SYRCityline website and services. 🌐✨ Project Highlights: 1) ⁠User-Friendly Interface: Developed a seamless platform enabling real-time predictions and ratings of government department performances. 2) Advanced Machine Learning: Leveraged Python and Random Forest algorithm to predict service resolution times accurately, improving decision-making and operational efficiency. 3) Increased Engagement: Our dynamic rating system and predictive capabilities foster greater community trust and interaction, making local government operations more transparent and accountable. This project not only demonstrates the power of integrating web technologies and machine learning but also sets a new standard for how cities can interact with their residents, providing them with reliable data in real-time. A big shoutout to Roshan Khandelwal for the impeccable integration of the backend and frontend with the machine learning model. #DataScience #MachineLearning #WebDevelopment #CivicTech #Innovation #Syracuse

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Nebraskans, as a California resident, I come with a message from the future: "Don't do it!" Legalization does 4 things: 1) It creates impossible barriers to "entry" for the existing, small time growers, paradoxically pushing them further underground (or out of their livelihoods altogether). 2) It ends up favoring the big players, which means you can expect cartels, human trafficking, and environmental destruction on a level you never imagined. 3) Tax revenue never actually materializes, and the ensuing "gold rush" means a labor drain from most other industries, along with a type of tourism absolutely nobody wants. 4) It transfers even more power and money out of the pockets of individuals, and into the pockets of the wealthy and government officials than they already had - and ends up widening the gap even further. I won't debate the associated social issues, since those tend to get explained away. But the point I'm making is, please take a moment to set aside the theoretical, and listen to the observations of someone who has first hand experience with legalization. Maybe even come visit my town and I'll take you on a tour of the closed businesses, the overfilled prisons, the labor shortages, and the growing homelessness that results from the type of systemic collapse that legalization inevitably leads to. Heed my advice, or don't. Remember, I'm speaking to you from just 8 years in the future - California passed prop 64 in 2016. And unfortunately, I'm here to report to you that it's not as bad as you've been told it could be - it's much worse. All the things the kill-joys are warning you about now have already come true for us here - on a scale not even they could have imagined. And none of the promises of legalization have materialized. It may be too late for us, but there is still time for you. PLEASE, don't make the same mistake we did. Vote NO on both initiatives. Your future selves will thank you.

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Hey everyone 👋 Formation is on the hunt for a few new engineering mentors for our exceptional Fellows, and we’d love to hear from you! Formation is an adaptive mentorship Platform to help experienced engineers from all walks of life land super impactful roles and level up their career trajectory. Mentorship is super flexible - you can ramp up or down and conduct sessions on your own schedule - and our mentors are a huge part of our Fellows’ success. The average placed Fellow increased their total compensation by over $100K a year and in 2024 - around 75% have placed at top tier tech companies. QUALIFICATIONS: We are currently looking for a few mentors who: - Are excited to conduct small group (3-6 person) interactive sessions for System Design topics - Are a staff+ level engineer and/or have 8+ years of work experience at top tech companies - Regularly conduct technical interviews and comfortable giving actionable feedback to improve performance - Are available about 5 hours a week, though we can work with any availability LOGISTICS: 1) Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gmNK7tVc 2) You will have a quick chat with either Tala Huhe, Daniel Tomko, or Casey Sheridan-Smith to ensure it’s a good fit and get any of your questions answered! 3) We’ll onboard you onto our Platform! You’ll input your availability (# of hours and time windows), sync your calendar, and be provided with onboarding and shadowing opportunities to get you set up for success. 4) You will get automatically scheduled for sessions every Friday. We provide session templates and all the information you need to help you facilitate each session. 5) Mentors are currently paid $65 per session and sessions are generally 1 hour. 6) Mentors are conducting sessions as independent mentors bound by the terms of service of the Formation Platform and are not employees of Formation. YOUR IMPACT We are so proud to say our bar is high and our program works! If you’d like to get a snapshot of our Fellow outcomes in H1 of this year, check out: (https://lnkd.in/giT_iUzb)! We also feature several Fellow stories on our website, like Sofie, who went from a video game startup to a senior engineering role at Meta. If you are interested, you can apply here: (https://lnkd.in/gmNK7tVc)! Please shoot me a message if you have any questions and I would be happy to help :) #SoftwareEngineering #Mentorship #SystemDesign

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Did you know that 10 years ago, a study by the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission concluded that a #breach to just 9 of the country's 55,000 electric-transmission substations could result in a coast-to-coast blackout? 🫢 As #threats to critical infrastructure continue to grow, the Reset Group LLC aims to direct the creativity of the #cyber and #defense communities toward these challenges with #RSTCON: an annual #cybersecurity conference hosted in Savannah, GA. Join us and be part of the RESET today for a secure tomorrow. Want to learn more about the U.S. #powergrid and potential impacts of its #vulnerabilities? Check out Dan Petro's (Bishop Fox) talk below:

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Sharing some of my key takeaways from Climatebase fellowship: - A great resource for climate knowledge and potential solutions: https://drawdown.org/ - https://bank.green/: Learn how your bank is investing your money in the fossil fuel industry. Choose a bank that invests elsewhere. - Fast fashion is terrible. Use resellers or renting exchanges. Look out for more sustainable brands. - We can reduce 10% of global emissions by changing to a plant based diet. - See where your electricity provider is sourcing energy from. Here in NYC, I learned about Zone1Energy that helps residents change to greener sources with reduced electricity bills. - 30% of the world's food is wasted. Reduced food waste can reduce the land and resources used to produce food. https://lnkd.in/g4N4jVa4 is a great website that helps cafes/supermarkets sell produce at the end of the day for one-third the price. - Every company should do Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) to understand their Scope 1,2,3 emissions as well as impact of how materials are sourced and products disposed. - Climate justice is needed. While countries in the Global North have produced the majority of emissions, countries in the Global South will suffer the most. There were many more learnings from this experience but these are some that stand out. As I hear about temperatures in India reaching 50 C, I hope we can collectively do a better job to save our planet!

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I was chatting with a fellow software developer recently, and he shared that his team has started doing early code reviews on a regular basis. How awesome is that? It feels like a fresh trend taking off! 🙌 If your team isn't doing this already, now’s the time to get ahead of the curve and start incorporating early code reviews into your workflow. Trust me, your code quality and team collaboration will thank you! Want to know how to get started? Check out my latest blog post for tips on integrating early code reviews: https://lnkd.in/eEnrkFVp #SoftwareDevelopment #CodeReviews #TechTrends #TeamCollaboration #DevOps

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Public Service Announcements to recruiters. If you have the same job post you re-publish every day for many weeks, we notice. This gives hesitation to apply as we have no idea why you rejected the dozens of other candidates that commented "Interested" on your previous posts. Please provide more details about the position so that it's easier for candidates to know if they are a fit or not. If your intent is to build a pool of candidates, please be candid about it and openly say "Need iOS developer to build a pool of candidates". Believe me, they will still apply.

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Software Engineering Joys: One of my favorite things as I’ve grown in my career is the ability to jump between programming languages as I find them suitable for the current task. At my old gig, I would often go back and forth between Python, Go, and SQL. It was fun because they felt different. We used Python for a lot of our production code, and I used Go for personal tools. I loved the power and simplicity of Go, and I like hacking data pipelines in Python. I also love its ability to prototype. Currently, I’ve spent the majority of my time over the last two days in Python and Bash, and I find it so cool how quickly I’m able to iterate and script in these languages. Having spent two days in these languages, I miss C++! I miss the power and expressiveness of it. I love the fact that adding debugging symbols can make the program too slow to keep up with data. I’m amazed at how quickly data can move through the GPU. It’s an awesome language with access to so much! Each of these languages has taught me something different, and I find the variety and pace of each refreshing when I haven’t worked with them in awhile. If you are still learning your first language, that’s great! Keep it up! If you are considering learning a second language, do it. That was the one that felt like it unlocked the door for me. After I learned two I knew I could work with any. Keep at it, and be thankful people have dedicated so much time to making it enjoyable for us to solve (create?) problems on computers. If you like my content, feel free to follow or connect! #softwareengineering #languages

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🚀 Excited to attend #EMNLP2024 in Miami next week, where I’ll be presenting our work on ECCO, our code-gen benchmark for correctness-preserving program optimizations! Here’s a question we’re tackling: Can current code LMs generate sufficiently efficient programs?🤔 More importantly, Can these LMs improve code efficiency without sacrificing correctness? ECCO introduces a new benchmark specifically for correctness-preserving program optimizations. We propose a reproducible, virtual-hardware setup using Judge0, that measures programs with a simple API call, for 60+ languages! ECCO also includes a unique dataset of 1.3k problems and over 50k pairs of slow-fast human-written Python programs, exploring two optimization approaches: 1️⃣ History-based editing 2️⃣ NL-instructed generation Check it out: Website: https://lnkd.in/dwdzms-C Code: https://lnkd.in/dUNga_rF Data: https://lnkd.in/dEnbyW47 Paper: https://lnkd.in/dR4P3F5J It was a great experience co-leading this work with Vishruth Veerendranath and huge thanks to Zora (Zhiruo) Wang Daniel Fried for their contribution and advise! Looking forward to connecting at the conference! Stop by our poster presentation on Tuesday to say hi and learn more about our findings! #CodeEfficiency #CodeOptimization #Benchmarking #LLM

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I guess people feel bored when they recognize certain patterns because it ceases to surprise them when they can predict it. However, this fits AI tools very well since they are designed to recognize patterns.

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Here's my 2024 LinkedIn Rewind, by coauthor.studio In analyzing every Mozilla #CommonVoice dataset release this year, I've documented how speech recognition systems continue to reflect and reinforce existing power structures. Catalan now has more voice data than English - showing how language reclamation efforts can succeed. But languages like Ligurian show contributions mainly from older speakers, revealing the urgent challenges of language preservation. This systematic documentation of bias patterns paralleled my own resistance to data exploitation. I've methodically withdrawn from platforms monetizing user-generated content: - Stack Overflow selling content to train OpenAI models - Reddit betraying its open source roots - Facebook demanding facial recognition - Pinterest censoring health information Most viewed posts from 2024 weren't about voice tech, but about systemic issues: "If we really cared about women in the workplace, we'd be doing more research into which work styles best promote the attraction, retention, productivity, promotion of women." On the corporate co-option of International Women's Day https://lnkd.in/geanstTA "Don't give your passion, purpose and promise to people who do not remember your name." On workplace power dynamics https://lnkd.in/gQFUEDvA "By removing my logins, I've removed several 'advertising surfaces' from my life" On practical resistance to surveillance capitalism https://lnkd.in/g4J3ydGY Research progress in 2024: - Developed new visualization approaches for Common Voice metadata - Spoke alongside Peter-Lucas Jones at Fantastic Futures #FF24 at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia about #ASR origins and data sovereignty - Leading publicity for #ALTA2024 - Writing up my my #PhD thesis Looking ahead: Continuing this work through: - Presenting "Token Wars: Why everything shouldn't be open" at Everything Open 2025 - Submitting my #PhD thesis in the new year The data shows we're right to be concerned about #AI systems perpetuating linguistic injustice. Keep documenting, keep questioning, keep resisting. -- Get your 2024 LinkedIn Rewind at https://lnkd.in/gqQFhMsK

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💻 New Article Alert! After a few focused evenings, I’m excited to share a deep dive into ASGI’s inner workings. This article demystifies what goes on behind the scenes, covering essential concepts every ASGI framework user should know—but rarely gets to see. If you’re curious about how HTTP requests are managed in ASGI or want a stronger foundation for exploring it further, I hope you find this both insightful and practical. Enjoy the read! https://lnkd.in/dYckjkDQ

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🚀 Exciting News! 🚀 I just registered for KubeCon in Salt Lake City! 🎉 I’m really looking forward to connecting with industry professionals, especially in the observability space, to exchange ideas, learn about the latest trends, and explore new opportunities. If you're attending, feel free to reach out—let's network! 🤝 Check out the event details here: #KubeCon #Observability #CloudNative #DevOps #Networking

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