Graham Bartley discusses his role in the software engineering landscape and the evolution of his job over recent years.

“No two days are exactly the same, which is part of what keeps the job engaging,” Yahoo senior software engineer Graham Bartley told SiliconRepublic.com. 

“On days when I go into the Dublin office, I typically spend the first hour of the morning enjoying tea and catching up with my colleagues face-to-face,” he said.

“I always enjoy hearing their stories, learning a little about what they’re working on and spotting opportunities for collaboration.

“On remote days, I usually start by checking in on our squad’s Jira board and any overnight Slack discussions. I lead a squad called Optimus, which is Yahoo Demand Side Platform (DSP)’s core generative AI (GenAI) backend team, so there’s often a thread to catch up on from my squad members or a design question from one of the other squads we support.”

From there, Bartley’s day is a mix of writing code, reviewing pull requests, design work, managing Jira tickets and taking calls with squad members. On a coding day, he might find himself building out a new API endpoint for Yahoo’s troubleshooting agent, writing integration tests or debugging a production issue end-to-end across multiple services.

“There are usually quite a few meetings, including our daily squad standup, individual calls with each squad member, cross-team syncs with other squads, architecture meetings and office-hour sessions where engineers present designs for feedback.

“I try to protect blocks of focused time for deep work, but being a squad lead means always being available when someone needs support.”

As a senior software engineer, how does your role fit into the wider software industry?

I work on Yahoo’s DSP, which is the technology behind how advertisers plan, target and optimise digital advertising campaigns across channels like mobile, connected TV, desktop and audio. It’s a big part of what’s called programmatic advertising and it’s a space that keeps growing.

Within that, my current focus is on applying GenAI to make the platform smarter and more intuitive. I lead a squad that built Yahoo DSP’s first GenAI-powered feature, an AI troubleshooting agent that helps advertisers understand why their campaigns might be underdelivering and what they can do about it.

What skills do you use on a daily basis and how have they evolved over time?

Day to day, I write Python and Java, design APIs and distributed systems, review code and work across the full stack from database schemas through backend services to UI components, although recently my focus has been entirely on the backend as that is my squad’s responsibility. I also design technical architectures, write design documents, and present to both technical and non-technical audiences.

The breadth of what I do has grown a lot over time. Earlier in my career, I was heads-down writing code and delivering features within a couple of codebases based on the Jira tickets I was assigned. Now I spend as much time on system design, cross-team coordination and setting technical direction as I do writing code.

The biggest recent shift has been AI, both in what I build and how I build it. On the product side, I’ve gone deep on large language models, agent frameworks, model context protocol, vector databases, knowledge bases and evaluation pipelines for non-deterministic AI outputs. Two years ago, none of that was part of my daily vocabulary. 

What are the hardest parts of your working day and how do you navigate them? 

Context-switching is perhaps the biggest challenge. As a squad lead and code-owner across many repositories, I might go from a deep debugging session to a design review to a cross-team Slack discussion about authentication architecture, all within a couple of hours. Each context requires full attention and the transitions are costly. I navigate that by being disciplined about time-blocking. I protect mornings for deep technical work wherever possible and cluster meetings in the afternoons. I also use structured notes and documentation heavily. If I’m interrupted mid-task, I want to be able to pick up exactly where I left off. 

AI tools actually help here, too. Being able to drop back into a Claude Code session and say ‘here’s where I was, here’s what I was trying to do’ and have it reconstruct the context is genuinely useful.

Working remotely from Ireland with teams distributed globally can present some challenges, such as working after-hours to interface with colleagues abroad. Managing this is definitely a skill in itself and can be difficult because it can feel very productive to work late when US colleagues are available, for example.

I try to be aware of making up for late hours worked to keep a good work-life balance, but it’s definitely challenging balancing the feeling of productivity with the reality of burnout. 

Has your role changed as the sector has grown and evolved?

Significantly. When I started, engineering work in the DSP was largely about building features in reliable CRUD applications and optimising serving workflows. The biggest evolution since then has been the arrival of GenAI. In late 2024, I was part of a small working group exploring how GenAI could be applied to our product. Within months, that exploratory work became a full strategic initiative. I went from leading a commerce media team to founding and leading Yahoo DSP’s first GenAI squad.

The way we build software is changing too. A year ago, our team wrote code the traditional way. Now we’re using AI coding assistants daily. It’s still early days and there are real learning curves. We’ve found that the AI works brilliantly for well-defined, bounded tasks but struggles with cross-cutting concerns that span multiple services and large contexts. Knowing when to lean on it and when to step back and think for yourself is a skill in itself.

The organisational model has changed too. We’ve moved from traditional team structures to a ‘squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds’ model, which puts more emphasis on cross-functional collaboration and autonomous delivery. My role has shifted from primarily writing code to being a technical leader who sets direction, defines standards and enables other teams to build on the foundations we create together.

Is there anything you know now about working in software that you wish you knew starting out?

I wish I’d known more about work-life balance and recognising the signs of burnout. Early in my career, I had a tendency to just push through and it took me a while to realise that’s not sustainable. Now I’m much more intentional about managing my time, protecting my energy and knowing when to step away from a problem. You actually come back sharper when you do.

I also wish I’d challenged assumptions more. When you’re starting out, it’s natural to take requirements and existing designs at face value. But as I’ve become more senior and taken on more design work, I’ve found that some of the biggest improvements come from questioning why something is the way it is. The best solutions often come from pushing back on the premise, not just optimising within the constraints you’re given.

What advice do you have for others looking to follow in your professional footsteps?

Don’t be afraid to say ‘I don’t know’ and then go learn. This is crucial. The best engineers I’ve worked with aren’t the ones who know everything. They’re the ones who learn quickly and aren’t embarrassed to be a beginner at something new. Being a mentor also means being a mentee and I’ve learned a lot from the engineers I’ve mentored. A year ago, I had never built an AI agent. Now I lead a team that builds them.

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Google’s Photos app has been doing things that Apple’s Photos app couldn’t, for years, and the iPhone-maker has noticed. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, in his latest report, claims that iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 will come with a dedicated “Apple Intelligence Tools” section inside the Photos editing interface. 

The “Apple Intelligence Tools” section will include three new AI-powered photo-editing features: Extend, Enhance, and Reframe. Before we begin with what the features actually do, all of them will run entirely on-device, and, in a typical Apple fashion, complete their edits in seconds. 

What will the new Apple Intelligence photo editing tools do?

Extend, as the name suggests, extends a picture’s boundaries by generating new imagery and seamlessly stitching it to the existing one. You should be able to use the feature to add some surrounding to close-up shots or add some negative space to either side of the subject. 

Enhance, on the other hand, works as a one-tap enhancement button, which immediately adjusts the color, lighting, and the overall image quality, without going through different editing options and fiddling with various sliders. 

Reframe is designed primarily for spatial photos captured for the Vision Pro headset. It lets users shift the perspective of a 3D image after it’s already been taken, allowing you to move from a front-facing to a side-facing view. 

Is Apple actually ready to release all three features?

Not at the moment, no. Per Gurman, both the Extend and Reframe features are producing inconsistent results in the internal testing. If the underlying AI models don’t adapt or the results don’t improve significantly before the September launch event, Apple might delay them or scale back. 

While I’m a big fan of the Apple Photos app myself, it currently offers only one AI-based editing feature, Clean Up, and that doesn’t work as well as the feature does on other smartphones like the Galaxy S or the Pixel flagship series. 

I remember when Google released its Magic zeditor in 2023, and Samsung’s Galaxy AI followed quite aggressively in the coming years. In response, the best Apple could come up with was Clean Up. In my opinion, Apple genuinely needs the Extend, Enhance, and Reframe features to work, and work in time for a showcase at the WWDC 2026 and a public release in September. 

from the fix-your-own-shit dept

There’s still a meaningful effort afoot to implement statewide “right to repair” laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.

Alaska could be up next. Two versions of a new right to repair law are winding their way through the Alaska state House and Senate. The bills would amend the Alaska Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Act, requiring tech hardware manufacturers to make parts, tools or software needed for repairs available to independent service providers and consumers.

As is always the case, the proposal has broad, bipartisan support among the actual public:

“In a lot of ways, this is a deeply conservative bill in the sense that for most of the 20th century, you could fix the stuff you bought, and the parts would be available, because it was another revenue stream for the businesses,” said Anchorage Democratic Sen. Forrest Dunbar, the sponsor of the Senate bill.”

As is also always the case, hardware vendors from a variety of sectors (agricultural, medical, tech, consumer hardware) are lobbying against Alaska’s proposal, falsely claiming that easier, more affordable repairs constitute a privacy and security threat to the public.

TechNet (a lobbying coalition that includes Dell, Apple, Amazon, Google, Nvidia, and Verizon), for example, is trying to convince the Alaska state legislature that everything is working fine currently, and that fixing anything would make consumers less safe. Apparently because truly independent repair professionals are too incompetent if they don’t have big corporate oversight:

“TechNet wrote that the bill would erode the current system where manufacturers work with authorized repair service providers, and that these agreements “ensure that technicians have the appropriate training, access to safe repair procedures, and the qualifications necessary to protect both the device and the consumer.”

TechNet is also trying to claim that the Alaska bill is “misaligned with language of right-to-repair bills from other states” such as New York. Granted they would say that, given that after New York passed its bill, tech lobbyists convinced NY Governor Kathy Hochul to water that states’s bill down to the point of uselessness.

The concern now is that lobbyists successfully manage to water the Alaska bill down so badly that it ultimately becomes similarly useless.

Something that’s broadly not mentioned in coverage of right to repair: while eight states have passed right to repair laws in recent years, not one of those states has actually managed to actively enforce it, despite no shortage of bad behavior by companies looking to secure repair monopolies. That’s something that needs to change if the movement is to have any serious impact.

Filed Under: alaska, bipartisan, hardware, independent, monopoly, right to repair, software

The world today is riven by cultural differences, political divisions, and geopolitical disputes — a challenging environment for any investor hunting for startups that can grow large enough to deliver venture-scale returns.

Kompas VC has developed a regionally sensitive strategy to help it navigate, and invest in, this fragmented world. And it’s putting fresh capital towards this approach with a new €160 million fund ($187.5 million), the firm told TechCrunch.

“We see the world really falling into three main spheres of economic activity, of political activity — the U.S., Europe, and China,” Sebastian Peck, partner at Kompas VC, told TechCrunch. “We certainly see today that these three domains follow very, very different trajectories.”

Kompas has staked its reputation on backing startups that tackle core industrial competitiveness challenges, from manufacturing and supply chains to critical infrastructure and sustainability. Those themes haven’t disappeared, but different regions emphasize them to varying degrees.

“There was a lot of enthusiasm around these themes back in 2021,” Peck said. “In 2026, we’re in a very, very different paradigm. It’s all about AI, it’s all about fast growth, very explosive growth. A lot of big topics that we partially play to but also are not really part of what we stand for.”

“Our focus is in the physical world, anything around producing physical goods,” he added, saying that Kompas focuses on startups working on decarbonization, productivity, and risk management. “We’ve found our niche.”

That niche turns out to be pretty broad. Reshoring is en vogue in nearly every market, and depending on the startup, those markets typically have more than enough scale for a firm like Kompas.

Though dwarfed by some venture funds these days, Kompas’s newly raised second fund should give it ample opportunity to lead early stage rounds with checks ranging from €3 million to €5 million. 

As a European fund, Kompas has access to a range of founders and startups in the region. But it must weigh how global fragmentation might limit the potential for some to deliver venture returns. Peck cites prefab housing as an example. The approach is widely used in Scandinavian countries, but it isn’t as common in Germany or the rest of Europe, let alone the United States.

“It feels like such an intuitive solution. It’s a product that is effectively an industrial product. It should be highly scalable,” he said. Ultimately, the reason it doesn’t resonate outside Scandinavia has more to do with “cultural conditioning” than the technology itself, he said. “In that industry, if the U.S. isn’t the market you can go to, you need to look very, very carefully at whether there’s a large enough addressable market.”

The fragmentation extends beyond housing. For example, in Europe, sustainability is still broadly attractive, in contrast to the U.S., where the theme doesn’t have the cachet it did several years ago. 

Still, a lot can change quickly, Peck acknowledges. “We are investing over 10-, 15-year horizons. That’s a few legislative periods to bridge, and sometimes things swing in unexpected directions.”

The shifting landscape poses a challenge, but also an opportunity for a smaller investor like Kompas. “I think there’s a great space for highly focused, highly specialized, smaller funds like ours to be the first check-in and bring sweep up certain themes and certain founders,” Peck said. 

When looking for some powerful wireless headphones, the Skullcandy Crusher Evo, priced at $99.99 (was $210), is a popular choice. Why? Users want something with a lot of bass, but not so much that it drowns out the rest of the track. On the right earcup, there is an adjustable slider that allows you to fine-tune the low end to your liking.

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