Hi! 👋
My name is Lev. I live in Emeryville and work in the tech industry. I am passionate about building teams and helping people solve complex business problems. I'm currently working at Foxglove building the observability stack for the world's largest robotics companies.
Outside of work I enjoy cooking, eating, chess, reading, writing, music, peloton, traveling, and public transit. I spend a little bit of time every day studying Chinese. I am surrounded by great friends and a wonderful family. I am traveling on a journey through space and time with Aosheng, who is a brilliant designer and my favorite person in the world.
Recent Posts
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Vagrant Box for ROS2 on Apple Silicon
I’ve been knee deep in studying robotics ever since joining Foxglove earlier this month. There is so much to learn! One major pain point that I have come across is trying to work with ROS outside of Linux. I have my Framework Laptop running Ubuntu and that is all working without any issues. But my main work computer is an Apple Silicon Macbook Pro and things are complicated.
Apple Silicon has been the best thing to happen to Apple laptops in my lifetime. The performance and battery life are unreal. However it has made working with Linux VMs and compiling stuff for x86 a huge pain. ROS works best on Linux, but Ubuntu is only recently making it easy to install and run ARM based desktop Linux. Before Apple Silicon I remember running Vagrant and Virtualbox without any issues, but ever since switching over to Apple Silicon Virtualbox feels completely unusable to me, especially when it comes to doing basic things that require guest additions.
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ARR
*raspy old man voice*
Back in my day ARR used to mean something.
Three key components:
- Annual - 1 year contracts
- Recurring - someone, anyone, has renewed their plan ever
- Revenue - cash in your bank
I have no idea what ARR means now.
First we saw usage-based-pricing models touting eARR where the e = expected (I always joke that the e stands for Enron). Now we have all these AI companies changing the A from annual to annualized which is not the same thing.
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4 Years
Happy to celebrate 4 years of no smoking today. I have not really thought about cigarettes all year. Even being around them does not bother me anymore and I don’t ever have cravings. 4 years ago today I would never imagine that feeling this way would even be possible.
There is still a long way to go to heal the damage that was caused from so many years of smoking, but today I am feeling happy to make it this far.
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Cursor Playbook
Learned about nxtscape from HN today and interesting to see this cursor playbook emerging.
- Take an existing open source product with a huge marketplace/ecosystem
- cursor: vs code
- nxtscape: chrome
- Fork it
- Change some branding
- Stick some LLM hooks into it and fire up a sidepanel to chat.
- Profit.
The existing ecosystem is the key here, but Google does not want to lose browser market share. There are a hundred chrome forks that they don’t care about just like there were many vs code spins out in the world. Microsoft only started to pay attention once they started losing deals and developer mind-share to cursor.
- Take an existing open source product with a huge marketplace/ecosystem
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Generated Dependencies
The other day I wrote this chunker for my Bluesky dagger module using Claude that automatically splits up long posts into chunks and posts the correct amount of things onto Bluesky. It took a few seconds to generate and worked on the first try. Then I had this brilliant idea to add a few tests to make sure it keeps working for the long haul and all hell broke loose.