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Engineering leader and systems architect with 20+ years of experience building secure…
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Justin Shanks posted thisI'm excited to share that I am starting a new role as Principal Engineer at Paramount on their backend team today! I really enjoyed the gap time between Amazon and Paramount as I created an MVP for an AI framework startup. While I wasn't able to release the private demo and workshop yet, I am still pursuing it on the side and plan to release that soon. For today, I am excited to apply all my recent learnings in the AI development space in my new role at Paramount.
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Justin Shanks posted thisSmall course correction this week. I was hoping to launch a private workshop to demo my framework this week with a few awesome folks who agreed to check it out. Instead, I had to take a step back and admit it’s not quite ready yet. This weekend I attended NerdFest at #hub101 and went through a startup idea validation workshop run by Brendan Finch, founder of RocketLit. It was a timely reset. It pushed me to refocus and double down on validating the core ideas behind what I’m building, not just the surface-level progress. I’ve validated one of the two key features I’m betting on. The second one, I realized, I’d been a bit hand-wavy about. There’s an interesting temptation with AI-accelerated development. You let AI generate something, do a bit of manual testing, it seems to work, and it’s very easy to move on. It reminds me of the temptation I’ve seen on every engineering team to skip truly comprehensive end-to-end testing once things “look fine.” That temptation is even riskier when the feature itself includes AI prompts and responses as part of its core lifecycle. The system is no longer fully deterministic, even when you pin a specific LLM version. Over time, prompts evolve, rules evolve, providers change, and small shifts can quietly break expectations. So I’ve been spending more time experimenting with how to write repeatable, deterministic tests around prompts and responses. It’s not flashy work, but it feels foundational. If this framework is going to be trusted, it has to hold its shape as it evolves. All that said, I’m getting closer to publishing the first alpha of the CLI and framework. Private demos and workshops are still coming, just with a bit more rigor behind them. Back to building.
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Justin Shanks posted thisQuick update as I dive into 2026 Throughout Jan, I've been interviewing weekly for new roles while also pitching and continuing to build out my AI-first development framework. Every time I test one of the newer vibe-coding tools, I try the same experiment. I prompt it with what I consider the bare minimum launch base for a real business. User auth and profiles Email validation Basic data persistence Basic scalable real-time signals Observability Works on web and mobile Scales past “toy app” And almost every time, the tool comes back with some version of: “Interesting idea, but this is too complex for our tool.” That response is oddly reassuring. If the baseline I’d consider bare minimum for launching a real app already breaks today’s vibe-coding capabilities, it’s a pretty good signal that the gap I’m working on is real. I’ll be running a few small, private workshops soon to get early feedback from builders who are curious about where this is heading. If that sounds interesting, feel free to ping me and I’d be excited to share more. Back at it!
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Justin Shanks posted thisWeek 3 after Amazon and the momentum is starting to build. This past week was full of forward motion. I created and launched an investor pitch page, attended SoCal Startup Day, made some great connections, and was unexpectedly invited to pitch my startup idea at a competition next month. I’ve also had a few promising phone screens for AI-first engineering leadership roles. It feels like doors are opening in several directions at once. In parallel, I’ve been heads-down making progress on my MVP. The pain I’m exploring is one that many engineers are starting to feel: AI can generate code incredibly fast, but it doesn’t yet generate reliable systems. It creates components that look complete, and sometimes even functional, but they often lack the deeper design considerations that make software sustainable even as it evolves. Metrics and observability, long-term evolution, lifecycle, cohesion across layers. AI solves for the prompt, not the vision and not the architecture. And often vibe coding creates overconfidence that a real system has been created, when what’s actually been produced is only a re-invinted wheel prototype with missing spokes. That gap fascinates me. It feels like we’re still applying pre-AI assumptions to an AI-first world. Principles and patterns shaped around human limitations shouldn't be automatically mapped to an environment where code can be produced, rewritten, or replaced instantly. The more I experiment, the more curious I become about what becomes possible when we stop assuming the baked-in human constraints that shaped the last 20 years of software engineering should define the next 20. This week I validated a key part of my thesis in code. I won’t go into details yet, but it gave me confidence that the direction I’m pursuing isn’t just theoretical. There is a real path forward here. If you’re exploring how AI is reshaping the foundations of software development, or if you’ll be at any upcoming startup or pitch events in Southern California, I’d love to connect! #startups #founders #ai #sdlc #architecture #preseed #socalstartupday
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Justin Shanks shared thisWeek 2 after Amazon: Creative Exploration The ideas are starting to turn into something real! It’s been a week of creative exploration for me. As I work through some of the core concepts for my startup idea, I often catch myself slipping into my pre-AI ways of thinking about software development. Now that I’m not pushing toward arbitrary deadlines, I finally have space to challenge old assumptions and rethink what software design looks like in an AI-first world. When I start questioning the software design principles that have been ingrained in me over the years, I realize that many of them have formed around human limitations, like how much context a developer can hold in their head or how long it takes to reason through, write, and test code manually. Do ideas like Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) or Abstraction carry the same weight when code and the tests that validate it can be generated in minutes instead of days? And yet AI is still just an LLM trained on examples we created with those same human limitations. I’m not so bold or sold on the idea that “AI can do anything” to declare those principles as dead, but I am starting to see how AI could enable a new layer of cross-functional modularity that would have been impossible for a traditional, human-only dev team to maintain. It seems I’m not the only one thinking this way. A few weeks ago, MIT researchers released a paper titled "What You See Is What It Does" that hit on many of the same ideas I’ve been exploring in my early architecture work. What if our entire ecosystem of strict per-component dependencies (npm, pip, etc.) is ready for AI to help unlock a new, more dynamic layer of cross-functional module dependency graphs? Dreaming and coding toward that vision was all fun and games until I found out about SoCal Startup Day happening tomorrow. Suddenly, I had myself a new deadline to get some pitch materials together. I’m excited to attend, soak in the startup energy, and connect with others who are rethinking what’s possible. My pitch is ready, and I’ll be testing the waters for early 2026 runway support, pre-seed conversations, and maybe even potential co-founders. If you’ll be at SoCal Startup Day tomorrow or you’re just curious about what I’m building, reach out. I’d love to connect! MIT paper: https://lnkd.in/gkxUeWud Startup Day: https://lnkd.in/g_g226J3 #layoffs #AmazonLayoffs2025 #startup #founders #investors #SoCalStartupDay #SoCalStartupDay2025 #AI #SDLC
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Justin Shanks posted thisProcessing a layoff or major change: Emotional Debt I’m going to talk about the real emotional side of a layoff. Is that too real for LinkedIn? I’m usually a private person, so posting here is new territory for me. After my first post earlier this week, I was hit with an unexpected internal voice that said, “Great, now everyone knows you got laid off. They’ll think you’re a failure.” It’s easy to bury thoughts like that and try to force some positivity to keep moving forward. But like technical debt, that kind of emotional debt builds up over time, and it will impact you in the future if you keep it in your backlog. When that message showed up, I decided to pause on it instead of pushing it away. I took a few beats to really let myself feel what came up. Then I got curious. What part of me said that? What belief about myself is behind it? What is that part of me trying to protect me from? When was the first time I remember feeling that way? I pictured that part of myself standing in front of me, almost like in a blank VR-like space in my mind. I asked those questions and listened without judgment. I tried to understand what that part needed from the version of me who’s here now. Once that part felt heard, I made a kind of internal agreement with it. I honored and acknowledged that it was trying to protect me, but we agreed to redirect that energy toward more healthy and sustainable ways of carrying out its purpose. Each time I do this sort of "self integration" exercise, I feel like I’m clearing a little more emotional debt and moving forward lighter and stronger. If you’re curious, some parts of this type of inner work comes from the Internal Family Systems model described in the book No Bad Parts by Dr. Richard Schwartz. For anyone going through a layoff or major change or a tough situation, how do you deal with the emotional debt that builds up along the way? For leaders, how do you account for and manage through the massive and often unpredictable variable that is human emotion which always has real world impact on every team, project, and deadlines? #layoffs #AmazonLayoffs2025 #leadership #radicalcandor #confidence #EmotionalIntelligence
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Justin Shanks posted thisWeek 1 after Amazon: Building Again Laid off last week from my Remote SDM role. Grateful, motivated, and already building again. This first week has been full of reflection, gratitude, and momentum. The support I’ve received from my Amazon colleagues has been incredible. So many kind messages, referrals, and words of encouragement. I’m deeply grateful for that support. So far through week 1, I updated my resume, set up an AI-powered job search assistant, and took some time to reflect on my career and future. I’m beginning to explore open leadership or technical roles in Ventura County, CA, North or West LA, or remote roles, so don’t hesitate to reach out! At the same time, for the first time in my 25-year career, I actually have some runway to explore what I truly want to do next. My kids are getting older, life feels more flexible, and I’ve had ideas for startups and projects sitting in my notes and swimming in my head for years. This past week, I channeled that pent-up engineering energy and started building. It’s exciting how quickly I can move with AI-enhanced programming. It feels like I’m composing a symphony, directing each part without having to play every instrument myself. I get to conduct, orchestrate, review, and guide. In just a few days, I’ve made more progress than I would have thought possible. All hype aside, the code AI produces is functional but often uses conflicting patterns and feels poorly stitched together from random coding tutorials. It takes careful review, file by file, to turn the project into something I’d trust in production. But with each pass, I’m adding rules and agents so future code will be closer to production-ready quality from the start. It’s still early, but my vision for a new startup is beginning to take shape. It feels like the start of something special. Let’s see where this goes! #AmazonLayoffs2025 #layoffs #openforwork #startup #founders #ai
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Justin Shanks reposted thisProud to share that Ring’s Smart Video Search is here! Building on almost a decade of computer vision and #AI expertise, Smart Video Search is our latest AI-powered feature that lets customers find specific moments in their video history with just a few words. Customers can use everyday language to search for things like, “package delivery today” or “raccoons in the backyard last night.” You may have heard me say that what makes Ring magical is the combination of our hardware and our software and video experience. With the advancements we’re seeing with AI, our team is always looking at ways to apply AI and CV to features that make sense for customers and adds even more value to their cameras and subscriptions. Smart Video Search is a great example of how we’ve taken AI and used it to simplify the Ring search experience. I’m so excited for you all to start using Smart Video Search and discover those Ring moments.Smart Video Search | Find That Moment You’re Looking for With the Help of AI.Smart Video Search | Find That Moment You’re Looking for With the Help of AI.
Justin Shanks commented on a post
8mo
AI framework with business-value focused marketplace of production-ready modules
Justin Shanks commented on a post
9mo
I've found success in spending my time carefully reviewing and refining the user stories and acceptance criteria. Once it's development time, I have AI write the unit and integration tests, but the key for me has been telling AI to write, run, and troubleshoot extensive e2e tests that align with my user stories to validate full stack behavior. Only pitfall in this has been that AI will at times write flakey tests that depending on timings and forced delays instead of clean trigger based tests, but some adjusted rules have helped prevent those types of tests from wasting cycles.
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Justin Shanks reacted on thisJustin Shanks reacted on thisAfter 5+ years building in Gen-AI as a founder — I joined Google Labs to work on DeepMind's new Gen-Media Products. 🤖 🧑🎤 Flow Music is G's bet on what AI-native creation looks like when you combine DeepMind's model research with Google's distribution. I've spent the last 5+ years trying to crack this problem from the startup side — mayk, covers.ai, 10M users, a lot of lessons learned. Now I get to take another shot at building great new media products with the best research team and distribution in the world. The race to build the best creative layer for AI music & video is on. The nano banana moment for music is near. Excited to be in it. Let's chat! Dm's open. 🙌
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Justin Shanks reacted on thisJustin Shanks reacted on thisI’m excited to share a pretty special full-circle moment: this fall, I’m returning to the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater as an Adjunct Instructor in the Occupational & Environmental Safety & Health program! UW-Whitewater played an important role in launching my career in occupational safety and health, and I’ve been fortunate to stay connected to the program over the years, including serving on its advisory board. Now, I have the opportunity to come back in a completely different role and help prepare the next generation of safety professionals. This semester, I’ll be teaching SAFETY 388: Occupational Safety & Health Standards and Applications, where we’ll explore everything from hazard identification and incident investigation to regulatory requirements and the real-world judgment needed to keep people safe at work. One of the things I’m most looking forward to is helping students connect what they’re learning in the classroom to the kinds of situations they’ll encounter in their careers. There’s something incredibly meaningful about returning to a program that helped shape your own professional path and getting the chance to contribute to someone else’s. I’m excited, a little nervous, and very ready for this new adventure! #UWWhitewater #OccupationalSafety #HigherEducation #Teaching #WorkplaceSafety
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Justin Shanks reacted on thisJustin Shanks reacted on thisI’m building Sverklo, a local-first code-intelligence MCP server for coding agents. The product story I want to earn is not “here is a good answer.” It is “here is the answer that misled us, how we found it, and what changed.” For unfamiliar codebases, I would rather Sverklo be judged on that correction loop. What would you need to see before trusting an AI tool’s explanation of a repository? #OpenSource #AIEngineering
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Justin Shanks reacted on thisJustin Shanks reacted on thisSuper excited about Cameo’s product integration within Yahoo’s Fantasy Football App. Booking a celeb to select your fantasy football draft order has become really big business on Cameo. Fantasy Football draft season has grown to be the second busiest time of the year for the platform (recently passing Mother’s Day 🤯)! In fact, our top talent can make mid-six figures during these next few weeks! Yahoo Fantasy and Cameo now let your league book a Cameo to announce and reveal your draft order, without leaving the app. Any league member can purchase the celebrity Cameo which will activate the experience for the entire league. Stay tuned - we’ve got some other great things in store this fantasy season. It took a village! Huge shout-out to Gabby Najmolhoda Adam Schwartz Bronwyn Perry-Huston Eric Fleisig-Greene Nick Coutre Lauren H. Olivia Isaacs Mike Kanter Libardo Alexis Durán Martinez Brian Wonch Luis 🧑🎨 Castro Moreno Gretchen Hianik Dom Scandinaro on the Cameo side as well as Ryan Spoon and his excellent team at Yahoo for making the magic happen 🪄Let a celebrity reveal your league's draft order with Cameo on Yahoo FantasyLet a celebrity reveal your league's draft order with Cameo on Yahoo Fantasy
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Justin Shanks reacted on thisHello all! I’m a bit late in reposting this, but I wanted to make sure I thanked Jamie Brown, MBA for taking the time to highlight me and my work. Interning with Amazon Ring has been an awesome experience, and I’d encourage anyone with an interest and the relevant skill set to consider applying. I also want to take the opportunity to recognize a few of the mentors who have continued to help me move forward in my career. Dr. John Licato, my Ph.D. advisor at the USF Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing, has been instrumental in my development as a researcher. Bernard Batson has also helped me immensely, both personally and professionally, including helping connect me with opportunities through the Social Science Research Council. I’m very grateful for the people who have invested their time and energy in helping me get to where I am today.Justin Shanks reacted on thisHappy National Intern Day! 🎉 Today I’m spotlighting one of our returning AI interns, Stephen Steinle. Stephen is a seven-year US Navy veteran and PhD student. This summer, he returned to Ring to continue advancing AI research. His project tackled a challenge familiar to anyone working with AI coding assistants: How do we help AI stop making the same mistakes? As Stephen puts it: “I built a system that watches an AI coding assistant make mistakes, learns from those mistakes, and teaches it not to repeat them. It closes the feedback loop automatically detecting failure patterns, generating fixes, and proving through rigorous testing that the fixes actually work.” His work earned a Top 10 spot at the Global AI Solutions Expo, recognizing one of the standout AI projects presented across Amazon. Congratulations, Stephen, on an incredible accomplishment, and Happy National Intern Day to you and all of our interns who are helping shape what’s next. 🚀 #NationalInternDay #AI #MachineLearning #SoftwareEngineering #Veterans #PhD #Internship
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Justin Shanks liked thisJustin Shanks liked thisI recently published an article exploring a concept I believe many organizations underestimate: Visibility Debt. While technical debt receives significant attention, many organizations struggle far more with the inability to quickly answer basic questions about their systems, data, processes, ownership, and dependencies. The result is often rework, delayed decisions, duplicated effort, and increased risk during transformation initiatives. In this article, I explore: • What Visibility Debt is • How it differs from Technical Debt • Why enterprise rediscovery is so costly • Why visibility becomes increasingly important as organizations grow and transform Have you encountered visibility debt in your organization? What's your perspective? #EnterpriseArchitecture #DigitalTransformation #ITStrategy #Governance #TechnologyLeadership #BusinessArchitectureYour Biggest Enterprise Risk isn’t Technical Debt - It’s Visibility DebtYour Biggest Enterprise Risk isn’t Technical Debt - It’s Visibility Debt
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Justin Shanks reacted on thisJustin Shanks reacted on thisToday is THE Day. I left my CTO seat to solve the problem every enterprise leader recognizes but few will name out loud: AI deployment in real organizations is brutally hard, and the consulting complex keeps selling a smooth sailing version that never materializes. That work is published today. How to Build an AI-Enabled Enterprise introduces MuShuHaRi — a four-stage framework that takes any enterprise from "Not Ready" to "AI-Enabled": Mu — Not Ready. Where most enterprises stand while believing they are further along. Shu — Aware, White Belt. Foundational discipline. Cost liberation that funds the journey. Ha — Ready, Green Belt. Commercial precision. Revenue growth without proportional headcount. Ri — Enabled,Black Belt. Systemic intelligence. AI-native economics and 14x-40x valuation multiples. A 20-minute diagnostic lets any CEO, CTO, board member, or investor assess where their organization actually stands. This is Book One of the Building Purposeful AI for Enterprises series. Two more books are on the way. If you have ever wondered why your AI initiatives keep stalling — this book is the answer. Available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/07nNmq20 #AIEnabledEnterprise #MuShuHaRi #TheHiddenYearHow to Build an AI-Enabled Enterprise: Skip the Hidden Year with MuShuHaRi Framework to Build your DouJou (Building Purposeful AI for Enterprises)How to Build an AI-Enabled Enterprise: Skip the Hidden Year with MuShuHaRi Framework to Build your DouJou (Building Purposeful AI for Enterprises)
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Justin Shanks liked thisJustin Shanks liked thisThis is one of the most insightful posts I’ve seen on the shift happening in software engineering. I’ve tried to express versions of this idea to my team many times, but I’ve never put it nearly this well. I’d go one step further: If you’ve ever been told to slow down and think, if you get bored without constant stimulation, if your brain naturally jumps between ten topics at once. (Am I just describing ADHD?) As long as you learn to temper that energy with strong taste, discipline, and a solid testing infrastructure, this is your moment!
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Justin Shanks reacted on thisHappy to share that I'll be speaking at Bitcoin 2026 Las Vegas | Make sure to attend it on April 27 in the open source area at 1:30 pmJustin Shanks reacted on thisHeading to Bitcoin 2026 Las Vegas? We’d love to meet. RSVP to our event and set up time with us if you want to talk about where Bitcoin-native credit is heading, what still needs to be solved, and what it takes to build it the right way. We see this event as one more step toward making Bitcoin-native credit real: not just as an idea, but as something people can understand, trust, and use.
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Responsible for architecture of back end print and digital cms, website framework, database design, & full stack architecture for this site and 25 other high traffic niche market sites.
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Arda Online
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Fan site for Lord of the Rings Online, home of the first Map of Middle Earth on Google Maps (retired)
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Julien D.
Julien D.
A pragmatic Engineer based in San Francisco, with a bias for action, strong sense of ownership, a taste for well-written code and well-architected, scalable, reliable software.<br><br>✓ Driven and dedicated, with excellent communication skills, interacting with all departments of the organization, partners, vendors, customers... <br>✓ Able to provide expertise, execute, delegate, throughout all stages of the software development life cycle, from requirements gathering, analysis and planning to delivery. <br>✓ Recognized for his ability to hire, build & operate teams of highly skilled and motivated engineers, and his involvement in training, career-building & mentorship<br>✓ Lead diverse and cross-functional web, mobile, infrastructure teams<br>✓ Defined and prioritized technology roadmap, ensuring balance with product and business needs<br>✓ Eliminated technical debt and ensured deprecation/migration out of/complete phase-out of legacy systems<br>✓ Built large/scalable/distributed, well-architected systems and applications from scratch using micro-services and bleeding-edge technologies such as offered by the AWS Cloud<br>✓ Drove SmartZip Analytics' Cloud transformation (initial analysis and execution), full revamp of the SmartTargeting Platform, and countless technologies & vendors adoptions<br>✓ An advocate for innovation, experimentation, learning and development culture<br><br>My areas of interest and expertise include:<br><br>✓ Ruby on Rails, Rails API, Relational and NoSQL Databases<br>✓ Amazon Web Services / Cloud Computing / Infrastructure<br>✓ Project Management, Leadership, Mentorship<br>✓ Operational Excellence, Scalability, Reliability, Performance & Cost-Efficiency, SRE<br>✓ Systems Architecture / UML / LucidChart<br>✓ Docker / Kubernetes / ECS / EKS / Fargate<br>✓ Serverless, Infrastructure as Code / Lambda / SAM<br>✓ Machine Learning, Deep Learning, AI, SageMaker, Generative AI, Bedrock...
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