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Brian Rook

Engineering Leader | Expert in Full Software Development Lifecycle | Driving Operational Excellence & High Performance in Tech

Brian Rook is a seasoned software manager with an impressive background in leading software development and design projects of various scales. With a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Colorado Boulder, he has garnered extensive experience and skills in project management, software development life cycle, code review, automated testing, software monitoring, enterprise and application level design and development, and application operations & maintenance.

Brian has worked in various organizations, including Maxar Technologies, OnDeck, SomaLogic, HomeAdvisor, Blackhawk Network, StoneRiver, ITT Visual Information Solutions, State of Colorado, Citi Group, XOR/Seurat, and Resource Data International. His values-based leadership style and expertise in creating designs, measuring and monitoring systems, and establishing good/best practices have contributed to the successful delivery of world-class software systems. He has also built collaborative partnerships with cross-functional teams, acted as a “force multiplier” to empower teams to deliver better and faster results, and navigated diverse stakeholder needs.

Brian’s excellent work in the software field can be seen on his accounts on Github and Medium, where he shares his insights and experience on software development and design.

Highlights

Feb 8 · linkedin

I've been doing some more projects with chatAI using both the GPT framework as well as the assistant framework. They're very similar, but have some significant differences.

GPT is much easier and allows direct API integrations, but does require a bit more strict contract (requires a response structure in the contract). Everything is in the browser though, so you lose a little bit of control (for example, can't resurrect a conversation).

Assistant allows integrations, but they are managed in the conversation. You must 'detect' that a programmatic call needs to be made and then handle that internally. It does have a more lenient contract (does not require the response to be defined) but it also manages the thread lifecycle for you. This means that all of the messages are stored and can be retrieved via API.

I've been working on an assistant that can interact with a users calendar (Google Calendar), but I have found a few interesting things:

  • the conversation/thread becomes the database and interface. You can retrieve data from the assistant via messages. This is important because its very flexible.
  • the conversation can orchestrate business logic. For example, I can define a goal and a series of tasks and let the AI complete the goal (for example, call multiple API as a set of tasks) instead of writing all of the business logic myself. This can be extremely powerful.
  • the conversation can implement its own resiliency. I have seen the AI make calls to my interface, fail because of validation (boo to date formats), and then try again with a different request structure in order to get the call to pass. This is slow and it will make the same mistake multiple times, but its extremely useful when you 'just want to get things working' without multiple cycles of build/deploy. If you have your observability up, you can see where the problems are and fix them in parallel to having a functioning system that might have a bug.

Anyway, I should have a new project up soon. Its amazing how quickly the second iteration goes once you know where all of the tricky spots are.

Dec 14 · linkedin

Its been a little over 3 weeks since I posted about the launch of SantaTalks and here we are in the 12 days of Christmas. We reached 1K installs with pretty steady growth. Users are making accounts, logging in and making calls. Usage is up and errors are down.

We also managed to setup the email marketing and had several backend releases and 1 mobile app release in the middle of the growth, which is kind of scary but we have confidence in the monitoring. We also created a youtube channel (https://lnkd.in/gAX3AQZE) to explain what SantaTalks is and how to use it.

I appreciate everyone's support. If you've used the app and liked it, write a review in the app stores (google: https://lnkd.in/g2shAYYS: https://lnkd.in/gFeeP5Rs). If you had a bad or so-so experience, let me know at [email protected] so that I can try and make your experience better.

Also, I would LOVE some more users. Feel free to repost this into your network or talk SantaTalks up through other social media networks.

And if you haven't tried it, please do. Santa's not just for children. You can have a chat with Santa about almost any topic (I've discussed Steely Dan with Santa before). He's a great listener and is very jolly.

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Location

Golden, Colorado, United States