Tao Ma

Tao Ma

Engineering Manager
#102808360 followers4 following
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About

Tao is an Engineering manager at Apple focusing on building products and services using computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning approaches.

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1h ago

We migrated platforms. It took 7 months.

We decided to migrate from one hosting provider to another in January. Planned timeline: 6 weeks. Actual timeline: 7 months.

Month-by-month:

  • Month 1: planning, inventory, "this will be easy"

  • Month 2: discovered 3 undocumented services nobody owned

  • Month 3: migrated the staging environment. It broke in ways production never did.

  • Month 4: migrated 40% of production. Rolled back twice.

  • Month 5: migrated the remaining 60%. Rolled back once.

  • Month 6: the old provider's DNS still resolving for 11% of traffic

  • Month 7: final cutover, then 3 weeks of cleanup

Total engineering hours: roughly 640. At a blended cost of $85/hour: $54,400. We had budgeted $20,000.

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2d ago

How do you catch subtle errors in AI documentation before they confuse your team?

I spent hours checking a PR's actual logic recently but completely skipped reading the agent-generated setup notes. Turns out the doc had a wrong step order and it ended up burning half a day for a teammate trying to run the project locally.

Bad documentation feels way harder to catch than buggy code because everything looks fine until someone actually tries following the steps.

Are you guys auditing generated markdown files as strictly as code, or did you decide to ban AI docs altogether?

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