Hey! I'm Jess Szmajda.
Currently GM, 
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Service Value Chains – 19 Oct 2024At AWS, we put a ton of work into tracking and improving the operational health of our services. Every service has at least one operational dashboard, and most have many sub-dashboards to enable operators to dive deep and resolve operational challenges. Leaders at AWS review their services’ dashboards deeply and frequently to ensure the health of their services. Senior leaders...
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30 Years – 19 Jul 2024I’ve been in the tech industry now for 30 years. That’s wild. I don’t think most people think I look much more than 30 years old (I’m much older than that). I thought it would be fun to look back at the last 30 years in tech and see what patterns I can find… The first thing that really made...
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A Conversation on Buddhism with Claude – 27 Jun 2024Preamble: This was a conversation this evening between my wife (Friday) and Claude Sonnet 3.5. My wife is a deep philosophy nerd and a Buddhist, and likes to think about this sort of thing from time to time. Claude Sonnet 3.5 has been the most game to go really deep on these thoughts, and there’s a.. well it’s a rather...
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My Transgender Journey – 31 Mar 2023Hi! I’m trans! I’m a woman, who’s transgender. I’m really happy to be trans, but I wasn’t always so happy. I’m writing this on the International Transgender Day of Visibility, 2023. It’s been a journey for me to get to this place, so I figured I’d write a bit to share with...
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Handling Departures – 25 Nov 2020I’m writing a book! I’ve been working on it for a while now, and I’m over 60,000 words into my first draft. It’s a lot of work, but I hope helpful. A friend of mine told me that if I help even just one person, it’ll have been worth it. I think he’s right. That kind of motivation is...
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Transgender Day of Rememberance – 20 Nov 2020Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR). On 11/20 every year we honor the memory of the transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence. In the past year there have been over 430 trans and gender non-conforming people who have lost their lives due to hate. 430 people whose only crime was to be...
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The CTO Role – 25 Apr 2019Note (Note this is a point-in-time article. I do still think the roles of CTO, VP of Engineering, and other related roles should be defined by the company and its needs more than what people think should be true.) The CTO Role Defining the role of CTO can be tricky. Each company has a different experience with their...
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In Divided Times, We Must Come Together – 01 Nov 2018In the wake of the deadly shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday, October 27th, communities from across the region came together to support the Jewish community who had been so tragically attacked. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto spoke to this and said “To the victims’ families, to the victims’ friends,...
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Story Of Us – 16 Oct 2017Collective Fiction Interesting thing here. Here’s an excerpt from a blog post I’m reading (unrelated to this idea): Recently I read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. The basic thesis of the book is that humans require ‘collective fictions’ so that we can collaborate in larger numbers than the 150 or so our brains...
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Setting a Vision – 05 Oct 2017We have a series of internal classes at Optoro called Managing at Optoro. It’s a great way for us to be able to promote talent into a leadership role and make sure they have the tools they need to be successful. The class I teach is called “Setting a Vision” and it’s something I think about a lot. I’m teaching...
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On Change – 31 Aug 2017I’ve always wondered how people can expect so much permanence in their lives. In Washington DC, where I was born and raised (and live now), change is a way of life. People come and go. Buildings change, are torn down, are lost to time. It’s normal. When I lived in western Massachusetts I lived in...
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What Transition Is Like For Me – 17 Aug 2017I get asked this now and then, “why did you transition?” Or “what’s it like?” Or even just “how does it feel?” For what it’s worth, some trans women really don’t like this question, so unless you’re invited to ask it, it’s probably safer not to. But I don’t mind sharing my story, and maybe it’ll help shine a light...
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Hello World! – 28 Jul 2017Hello world, my name is Jess! I’m transgender :) It’s taken me awhile to admit it to myself, but I did last fall (2016). Coming to this realization made a lot of my life make sense, and transitioning has given me a sense of peace and joy like I’ve never experienced before. I am...
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Experiment Results – 30 Nov 2016This is a continuation of my blog post series on trying to use a Surface Book as my primary computer. The first entry was Surface Book and the entry previous to this one was A Surface Roadblock. I give up. I got so frustrated today trying to just deal with basic window management that I said “well...
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A Surface Roadblock – 29 Nov 2016This is a continuation of my previous posts, the last one being More Surface Book Damnit Docker. There is Docker for Windows, but there’s no docker CLI in the WSL environment. This might be a problem because we’re shifting more and more to using docker to deploy all our services. As the CTO I am occasionally...
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More Surface Book – 28 Nov 2016This is my first “normal” work day using the Surface Book. For first impressions go back and check out my first post, Surface Book It’s the little things now, and a few big things VIM So ConEmu doesn’t show my visual highlights properly. Maybe that’s a yak I can shave but it’s an annoying one. General Windows...
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Surface Book – 23 Nov 2016I’m trying out the new Surface Book with the performance base as my main computer. It’s been.. interesting! Here are some ramblings about my experience: Initial thoughts I installed a bunch of stuff. Primarily Windows Subsystem for Linux, but also normal stuff (Chrome, etc), and the nicest terminal emulator I could find, ConEmu It’s definitely different! It...
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What Podcasts I'm Listening To Right Now – 02 Mar 2016Podcasts My commute is pretty long (about an hour and fifteen minutes each way), so I have the opportunity to listen to a lot of podcasts or audiobooks on the trip. I talk about them with folks pretty often, and some have asked me for a list of what I’m listening to, so here it is. Before the list,...
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Ergodox – 22 Dec 2015I went on a quest awhile back to find the perfect keyboard for me. I used a Microsoft Natural keyboard for a long time and got used to the split layout, but eventually the keyswitches started to annoy me. I tried Microsoft’s Sculpt Natural keyboard, and it was nice but then I heard about mechanical keyboards. I tried...
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StrangeLoop – 20 Sep 2014I went to StrangeLoop. It was awesome! Basically a polyglot conference that pulled together academia and industry. Very focused on Functional Programming (FP), but had other ideas too. I took notes, pasted in somewhat raw fashion below. I highly recommend going next year! 2014-09-17 Future of Programming Workshop x Emerging Languages Camp I attended a bonus day...
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Free and Open Source – 14 Sep 2014Open Source, Open Communities Open source is really great. I wouldn’t be where I am today without it. We’re all standing on the backs of giants. Think about it—if we hadn’t had the open-source movement, we’d all be paying thousands of dollars for access to mediocre software that would allow us to write slightly less mediocre software in carefully...
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Minecraft Mod with RubyBukkit – 19 Jan 2013The other day I went to CoderDojoDC and it seemed like every kid there was obsessed with Minecraft. I recently interviewed Charles Nutter, who mentioned you could mod Minecraft with JRuby. I wanted to get some experience with it so I could help the kids out, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It wasn’t hard!...
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Measuring Rails Boot Time – 07 Sep 2012Our main rails app is pretty slow to load, so I hacked together a really simple report to show what’s going on during boot. This system could use a lot of improvement to aggregate together requires, but it’s enough to draw some immediate conclusions. First, I created this script that overrides Kernel.require: Kernel.
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On Entrepreneurship – 18 Mar 2012You live in a city on the ocean. Your fellow citizens are generally part of two groups: normal people and people who have won medals. The people with medals are accorded higher honors and have access to the best things in life. You, of course, want a medal. The problem is, the only way to get a medal is to...
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Testing Rails Memory Usage With Valgrind – 13 Dec 2011TL;DR: Ruby 1.9.2 leaks memory with rails apps, switch to 1.9.3. We’ve been having some trouble running out of memory on our production servers ever since we upgraded our app to Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9.2 (p290). Our unicorn processes will gradually use up all the memory on our (m1.large) servers (7.5Gb) over the course of 24 hours or so....
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Ruby DCamp Retrospective – 21 Sep 2011I attended Ruby DCamp this year. It’s a programmers’ event where you camp out (in cabins). There’s a code retreat the first day and then subsequent days are an open-spaces event. The Code Retreat The code retreat involved programming Conway’s Game of Life over and over again. Each time you get 45 minutes to work on...
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Shut Up, HAProxy! – 10 Mar 2011We use HAProxy to load-balance requests across multiple Rails backends. It works great, but man does it clutter up the logs. Every N seconds (2 in our case), HAProxy requests our root url (DashboardsController#index) to ensure the site is up. This results in lots of log entries like this: Processing DashboardsController#index (for 10.0.0.205 at 2011-03-07 06:42:20)...
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Net::HTTP Alternatives – 10 Feb 2011Here at Optoro we’ve been building some external tools that interact with our website via http. For simplicity’s sake, we’ve been using curl. I was discussing this with some friends when someone recommended I check out Curb. I was already in the middle of transitioning to HTTParty, due to its improved syntax, but I figured I’d...