👋🏻 Hello, Fellow Tech Enthusiasts!
It’s mid-December, and I thought it’s not too late for another update on the market and Ralabs’ journey.
📊 Focus & Insights
- I am seeing fewer technical positions opened. There might be two reasons: AI development creates uncertainty and the lack of cheap money. The first reason is interesting because it means that many market actors don’t know if “this idea” is or will be viable in the future AI-driven world. I guess we need to wait for the major players to land on solid ground after the LLM revolutions, and we should see a slight increase in mid-2024.
- This year, most of our growth was contributed to expertise-based requests, where the client was in search of particular competency/expertise. We always had this segment of clients, but this year we (IT outsourcing as a whole) got much fewer classical IT Outstaffing requests for the reasons explained in the first paragraph.
👩🏼💼 HR Updates
- 4 new team members joined Ralabs in November.
- We had two tech-talks which you can check out on our YouTube channel Ralabs YouTube.
- Ralabs is a long-standing member of Malteser. Every year in the last week of November, we deliver New Year gifts for kids in orphanages. Almost everyone in the company takes part.
- During the pandemic, our company became truly remote, and thus we decided to have our New Year party online. We will have a lecture on cinematography with some nice catering.
📈 Business Development
- On our sales stats, in November we had 13 opportunities which converted to 3 projects with one past-client reactivation.
- Had a productive face-to-face meeting in Warsaw of Ralabs development and Management team and one of our biggest clients’ management and C-level teams.
💻 Coding Insights
- Will you join the Advent of Code in 2024? For the first few months of the advent in 2023, an LLM model was leading the charts — Advent of Code 2023. If you ask me — it’s a great tool to challenge your mind and programming skills.
- If you ever need a tool to extract data from Google Maps — Google Maps Scraper.
- Jets: The Ruby Serverless Framework is released. Before Ralabs, I was a Lead Ruby programmer. Happy to see that there are new things developing inside the community — Ruby on Jets. One of the major complaints back in that time was about Ruby (language) performance. It never stopped companies like Twitter. Anyway, now you can fix this with Jets or use a performance-focused framework Rage RB.
- Is it me, or are we moving away from Manual QA? From our small company bubble, I can definitely tell that there is more demand for AQA. If you are a QA engineer — consider tools like Selenium, Playwright, or similar.
🤖 AI Developments
- The biggest news is the release of Gemini — DeepMind Gemini. Go and get amazed at what it can do — Gemini on YouTube.
📚 Books and Reading
This month I went through the whole book series (around 1000 pages) of “The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin.
The Three-Body Problem: by Liu Cixin on Amazon.
- The Dark Forest (my favorite): By Liu Cixin on Amazon.
- Death’s End: By Liu Cixin on Amazon.
Even though they are not horror or thrillers, they have to be the most terrifying books I have ever read. It’s a series with lots of technical and scientific detail, and with ideas like “why don’t we hear from other civilizations?”, technology and science progress, and astro sociology. It’s definitely one of my favorite books now. Netflix is releasing a TV series “The Three-Body Problem” next March. After this book, the most reasonable thing was to read the Astronomy Article, which explains how star-systems are formed.
- Adding to my wishlist – DEDP Online. Not sure if I ever have time for it, but I definitely would like to make my data engineering more systematic and structured.
💡 Thoughts
As most, if not all, big companies are developing their own LLMs, I’m constantly reminded of the first law “The Law of Leadership” from the “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” book by Al Ries, Jack Trout. I have many bookmarks of interesting LLM-based tools, but still using ChatGPT any time I need help from an LLM. Even my programming setup is based on the result of OpenAI’s work – Copilot. Really want to see other players rise to a similar level of adoption, but I doubt they will.
🔍 Other Noteworthy Mentions
- Check out our Head of Engineering’s publication on Software Quality Management: Increasing Project Success.
- Want to know the difference between working with big vs. small companies, check out our Head of Business Development’s publications – Ralabs vs. IBM.
- One of the first programming languages I’ve learned turned 40 – Turbo Pascal 40.
If you found this update helpful, please feel free to share it with others. Starting last month, my newsletter is published as a blog on our website – Ralabs Blog. You can now read the previous updates if you want to.
Stay safe and connected,
Best,
Andrew
