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André Kenji Horie
Director of Engineering @ Duolingo
André Kenji Horie is a notable figure in the tech industry, currently serving as a Director of Engineering at Duolingo. In this role, he leads the engineering efforts for the Duolingo English Test business unit, focusing on product development, systems architecture, and artificial intelligence. Horie is passionate about fostering leadership development and scaling high-performing teams within a culture of collaboration and kindness. He was born in Brazil to a Japanese immigrant family and currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.12
In addition to his professional responsibilities, Horie is also associated with enrich, where he contributes his expertise and experience. He holds a degree from the University of Tokyo, which adds to his strong educational background in the field.2 His LinkedIn profile indicates that he has over 500 connections, reflecting his active engagement within the professional community.2
Highlights
Last week, we had our first Engineerication week among senior engineering leaders at Duolingo. This piece of engineering culture started at Stripe, and it's about encouraging leaders to experience being an engineer -- yes, writing code!
Here are my takeaways:
✤ I strongly recommend all engineering leaders to do it! It helps create empathy with engineers, and understand their pain points.
✤ My manager reports as well as engineers really appreciated me taking the time to do it, and were very curious to hear about my insights.
✤ I found several small blockers and inefficiencies, which prompted a larger conversation on what we can do about developer productivity.
✤ Pair programming is an excellent use of time! Not only did it help me to learn things faster than I would on my own, but it also helped me connect with engineers.
✤ And finally: I had a blast spending a full week writing production code. It was really fun!
OpenAI is testing memory with ChatGPT
"Remembering things you discuss across all chats saves you from having to repeat information and makes future conversations more helpful. [...] You can explicitly tell it to remember something, ask it what it remembers, and tell it to forget conversationally or through settings. You can also turn it off entirely."
