Tech Career Events for Software Engineers

As the first terminal level in your career, senior engineers independently solve problems and deliver business value. Many engineers are stuck for years as senior engineers.

Topic: Chapter 6 - Partitioning

Abstract:

Explore the Mamba paper's groundbreaking approach to sequence modeling efficiency in this event. Uncover how Mamba addresses computational inefficiencies in transformers, especially for long sequences.

Overview:

Discover the motivation behind Mamba, highlighting its improvements over subquadratic-time architectures struggling with language tasks. Learn about Mamba's content-based reasoning and enhancements for superior performance.

Key Features:

1. Selective Structured State Space Models (SSMs): Mamba introduces adaptive SSM parameters for content-based reasoning, allowing selective information handling for discrete modalities.

2. Hardware-Aware Parallel Algorithm: Despite forgoing efficient convolutions, Mamba's hardware-aware parallel algorithm maintains fast inference and linear scaling in sequence length.

3. Architecture Overview: Dive into Mamba's streamlined architecture without attention or MLP blocks, achieving efficiency without sacrificing effectiveness.

4. Performance Metrics: Witness Mamba's 5× higher throughput than Transformers, with linear scaling, showcasing its real-world improvements in language, audio, and genomics tasks.

5. Comparison with Transformers: See Mamba outperforms Transformers of the same size and match larger Transformers, especially in language modeling.

Seattle Tarodactyls unite!

Come by and network with other talented tech folks in the Taro community! Taro will be providing up to $10 in drinks and snacks per person. For simplicity's sake, please have 1 person pay for everyone, and Taro will reimburse them $10 per person (whoever pays gets to keep the extra 😊💰).

Group Office Hours are a very simple event type with a very important goal in mind: Get you the career support you need in a safe, communal setting. This means:

• These sessions are never recorded
• All AI summary and note-taker bots will be kicked out
• If you want to ask your question 100% anonymously, just change your display name and ask it in the chat

So how does it work? Easy: Drop in whenever, raise your hand 🤚 to ask a question (or put it in chat), and leave at your own convenience.

As a new hire, onboarding is your responsibility, not your manager's.

The first few months in your job are crucial for creating first impressions and relationships that can either accelerate your success or limit your potential.

30% of tech workers leave their jobs within 90 days -- don't be one of them! What you'll learn:

My Talk & Observe framework

Build respect with your new manager and team.

4 key questions to ask your colleagues

Learn crucial context and history from colleagues on your team or adjacent teams.

How to prevent failure modes

Too many engineers are surprised with negative feedback in their first performance review -- we'll discuss why.

In this talk, we dive into scaling Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) using a groundbreaking technique called Infini-attention.

We'll explore how Infini-attention revolutionizes the traditional attention mechanism by incorporating compressive memory, masked local attention, and long-term linear attention—all in a single Transformer block. This innovative approach enables us to handle long-context tasks effortlessly, from language modeling benchmarks to complex text summarization, with LLMs ranging from 1 billion to 8 billion parameters.

But it's not just about handling massive inputs. This approach introduces minimal memory constraints, making it efficient and practical for real-world applications. Imagine the possibilities: fast streaming inference, seamless integration with diverse tasks, and the ability to unlock new frontiers in natural language understanding.

This session is for wantrepreneurs (someone who wants to leave their full-time job and do a company) and early entrepreneurs. All attendees should be prepared to either pitch an idea or provide thoughtful feedback on other ideas.

In the last two decades, more money and attention have gone to early-stage startups. It's easier and cheaper than ever to start a startup, especially if you're an engineer!

Sample discussions:

• Get feedback on the clarity of your idea, along with the opportunity size. Do you want a VC-scale outcome, or a "lifestyle business"?
• Should you get pre-seed funding (generally $100K - $500K) from an accelerator?
• How and when should you launch your product?

With Stable Diffusion 3 being released recently, we look at the underlying papers that make it possible.

We will cover:

Group Office Hours are a very simple event type with a very important goal in mind: Get you the career support you need in a safe, communal setting. This means:

• These sessions are never recorded
• All AI summary and note-taker bots will be kicked out
• If you want to ask your question 100% anonymously, just change your display name and ask it in the chat

So how does it work? Easy: Drop in whenever, raise your hand 🤚 to ask a question (or put it in chat), and leave at your own convenience.

Have you had amazing idea with clear data to support it, but it was rejected? In this event we will talk about why that might have happened, and suggest alternate strategies for next time.

Spoiler alert: we use computers to reach millions/billions of users, but we are very different from computers ourselves. Presenting the best data to another person can actually backfire, unless it is coming from a place of shared goals/values and trust. It isn’t logical, but it is human nature. If you explain a better idea than I presented, and you even have rock solid evidence, I no longer am thinking about the user or our business impact but rather about how I just don’t want to “be wrong”.

Come to this event with your stories of challenges and successes of influencing your engineering team!

To dive deeper, check out these resources:

Group Office Hours are a very simple event type with a very important goal in mind: Get you the career support you need in a safe, communal setting. This means:

• These sessions are never recorded
• All AI summary and note-taker bots will be kicked out
• If you want to ask your question 100% anonymously, just change your display name and ask it in the chat

So how does it work? Easy: Drop in whenever, raise your hand 🤚 to ask a question (or put it in chat), and leave at your own convenience.

Group Office Hours are a very simple event type with a very important goal in mind: Get you the career support you need in a safe, communal setting. This means:

• These sessions are never recorded
• All AI summary and note-taker bots will be kicked out
• If you want to ask your question 100% anonymously, just change your display name and ask it in the chat

So how does it work? Easy: Drop in whenever, raise your hand 🤚 to ask a question (or put it in chat), and leave at your own convenience.

Join us for a discussion about wealth creation and preservation for engineers. We'll also talk about financial independence / retire early (FIRE), a dream for many tech workers. Most engineers earn a high income relatively early in their career -- $200K+ total compensation per year is not uncommon for software engineers working in North America.

Some things we can talk about in this session (April 22):

Group Office Hours are a very simple event type with a very important goal in mind: Get you the career support you need in a safe, communal setting. This means:

• These sessions are never recorded
• All AI summary and note-taker bots will be kicked out
• If you want to ask your question 100% anonymously, just change your display name and ask it in the chat

So how does it work? Easy: Drop in whenever, raise your hand 🤚 to ask a question (or put it in chat), and leave at your own convenience.

As the first terminal level in your career, senior engineers independently solve problems and deliver business value. Many engineers are stuck for years as senior engineers.