San Pedro Sula is rated ‘dangerous’ as effects of forest fires, El Niño and the climate crisis cause a spike in respiratory illnesses
The air quality in San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, as been classified as the most polluted on the American continent due to forest fires and weather conditions aggravated by El Niño and the climate crisis.
IQAir, a Swiss air-quality organisation that draws data from more than 30,000 monitoring stations around the world, said on Thursday that air quality in the city of about 1 million people has reached “dangerous” levels.
Fossil-fuel dependent country hopes to provide bridge between wealthy global north and poor south at November gathering
Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. The smell of it greets the visitor on arrival and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries near the centre light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of “nodding donkeys”, small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres (20ft) tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery.
It will be an interesting setting for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties, which will take place at the Olympic Stadium in November.
Yuxuan Shui, the developer behind the X11 compositor picom (a fork of Compton) published a blog post detailing their experiences with using GitHub Copilot for a year.
I had free access to GitHub Copilot for about a year, I used it, got used to it, and slowly started to take it for granted, until one day it was taken away. I had to re-adapt to a life without Copilot, but it also gave me a chance to look back at how I used Copilot, and reflect – had Copilot actually been helpful to me?
Copilot definitely feels a little bit magical when it works. It’s like it plucked code straight from my brain and put it on the screen for me to accept. Without it, I find myself getting grumpy a lot more often when I need to write boilerplate code – “Ugh, Copilot would have done it for me!”, and now I have to type it all out myself. That being said, the answer to my question above is a very definite “no, I am more productive without it”. Let me explain.
The two main reasons why Shui eventually realised Copilot was slowing them down were its unpredictability, and its slowness. It’s very difficult to understand when, exactly, Copilot will get things right, which is not a great thing to have to deal with when you’re writing code. They also found Copilot incredibly slow, with its suggestions often taking 2-3 seconds or longer to appear – much slower than the suggestions from the clangd language server they use.
Of course, everybody’s situation will be different, and I have a suspicion that if you’re writing code in incredibly popular languages, say, Python or JavaScript, you’re going to get more accurate and possibly faster suggestions from Copilot. As Shui notes, it probably also doesn’t help that they’re writing an independent X11 compositor, something very few people are doing, meaning Copilot hasn’t been trained on it, which in turn means the tool probably has no clue what’s going on when Shui is writing their code.
As an aside, my opinion on GitHub Copilot is clear – it’s quite possibly the largest case of copyright infringement in human history, and in its current incarnation it should not be allowed to continue to operate. As I wrote over a year ago:
If Microsoft or whoever else wants to train a coding “AI” or whatever, they should either be using code they own the copyright to, get explicit permission from the rightsholders for “AI” training use (difficult for code from larger projects), or properly comply with the terms of the licenses and automatically add the terms and copyright notices during autocomplete and/or properly apply copyleft to the newly generated code. Anything else is a massive copyright violation and a direct assault on open source.
Let me put it this way – the code to various versions of Windows has leaked numerous times. What if we train an “AI” on that leaked code and let everyone use it? Do you honestly think Microsoft would not sue you into the stone age?
It’s curious that as far as I know, Copilot has not been trained on Microsoft’s own closed-source code, say, to Windows or Office, while at the same time the company claims Copilot is not copyright infringement or a massive open source license violation machine. If what Copilot does is truly fair use, as Microsoft claims, why won’t Microsoft use its own closed-source code for training?
We all know the answer.
Deeply questionable legality aside, do any of you use Copilot? Has it had any material impact on your programming work? Is its use allowed by your employer, or do you only use it for personal projects at home?
The effort aims to help close gender and racial pay gaps
Rapid7 is proud to announce their signing of the 100% Talent Compact through the Boston Women’s Workforce Council (BWWC). The Talent Compact is a collective effort among the Boston Mayor and local employers to close the gender and racial wage gaps in Greater Boston. Compact Signers are actively committed to examining their salary data, contributing that data anonymously to the BWWC’s biennial wage-gap measurement, and participating in quarterly briefing sessions.
As an organization, the BWWC works alongside the City of Boston’s Mayor as well as local employers. Their programs and initiatives reflect their core beliefs surrounding the positive impact women have on businesses and communities, the importance of addressing gender and racial pay inequities, and the systemic impact gender and racial pay disparities can have in Greater Boston.
As stated by Christina Luconi, Chief People Officer, “At Rapid7, we are committed to fostering an environment where all of our people are doing impactful work in a way that is meaningful to them. Ensuring that we have equitable salary practices is just one way we can ensure everyone has the opportunity to thrive in their career.”
In the United States, women earn 84 cents for every dollar earned by a man. In Boston, data collected by participants of the Talent Compact shows consistency with this number, with a wage gap of $0.21 for women and a gap of $0.27 for employees of color.
According to Lauren Noonan, Engagement Manager with the BWWC, “These numbers are disappointing to see, but measuring this data and understanding the work that needs to be done is the first critical step to creating necessary change. The companies that have signed on to our Talent Compact are committed to taking active roles in identifying gaps within their own organizations and actively participating in the panel discussions, sharing ideas, and putting corrective plans into action to address them.”
When it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), Rapid7 has consistently demonstrated a commitment to focus efforts on driving impact; whether it’s through similar strategic partnerships with organizations like Hack.Diversity, Cyversity, and the University of South Florida or developing in-house resources and programs. Addressing systemic hurdles and supporting historically marginalized communities have become an integral part of our business strategy.
In addition to having programs and partnerships in place, Rapid7’s Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Sophia Dozier stresses how transparency is critical for creating impact and success. “Transparency is a key pillar in fostering spaces that are not only diverse and inclusive, but truly equitable. Levers of transparency should be embedded into every DEI strategy, as it helps ensure that decisions continue to reflect commitments made in support of building and maintaining impactful, high-performing, multi-dimensional teams and organizations.”
At Rapid7, we believe we are truly #NeverDone in our efforts to build an inclusive and equitable workplace where our employees can develop the career experience of a lifetime. This partnership furthers our commitment to continuously examining and enhancing our practices and programs so that all people can thrive, while being part of a greater discussion that impacts our industry and local community.
Jolie crystallises the programming concepts of service-oriented computing as linguistic constructs. The basic building blocks of software are not objects or functions, but rather services that can be relocated and replicated as needed. A composition of services is a service.
GCC 14.1 has been released, and it should come as no surprise that the new features are not exactly something I, someone who doesn’t program, can properly parse. So, here’s the three items GCC itself thought were important to list first.
The C frontend when targeting standards newer than C89 now considers many non-standard constructs as errors that were previously only warnings. See https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/porting_to.html#warnings-as-errors for more details. C23 _BitInt Bit-precise integer types are now supported, for now only on IA-32, x86-64 and AArch64.
The C++ frontend now implements several C++26 features, some missing C++23 bits and defect report resolutions. Diagnostics involving C++ templates now quote source from the instantiation context.
The libstdc++exp.a library now includes all symbols for the Filesystem TS and the experimental symbols for the C++23 std::stacktrace class, so -lstdc++exp can be used instead of -lstdc++fs. The libstdc++_libbacktrace.a library is not longer installed. Improved experimental support for C++20, C++23, and C++26. Updated parallel algorithms that are compatible with oneTBB.
In case you didn't notice, the OWASP Mobile Top 10 List was just updated, for the first time since 2016! This is important for developers since this list represents the list of the most crucial mobile application security risks in 2024. This blog explains how this fits in with other OWASP security guidelines, summarizes each of the 10 risks and discusses some possible next steps for developers.
We’re all aware of Stack Overflow – it’s a place where programmers and regular users can ask technical questions, and get answers from anyone who thinks they know the answer. Stack Overflow has become so ubiquitous among programmers and developers, the concept of “I just copied the code off Stack Overflow” has become a consistent meme to indicate you don’t fully grasp how something works, but at least it works.
If you’ve ever contributed answers to Stack Overflow, you might want to consider deleting them, altering them, or perhaps even go as far as request a GDPR removal if you’re in the European Union, because Stack Overflow has just announced a close partnership with “AI” company OpenAI (or, more accurately, “Open” “AI”). Stripped of marketing speak, the gist is exactly as you’d expect: OpenAI will absorb the questions and answers on Stack Overflow into its models, whether their respective authors like it or not.
As much as you may want to try and delete your answers if you’re not interesting in having your work generate profit for OpenAI, deleting popular questions and answers is not possible on Stack Overflow. The other option is altering your answers to render them useless, but it seems Stack Overflow is not going to allow you to do this, either. Ben Humphreys tried to alter his highest-rated answers, and Stack Overflow just reverted them back, and proceeded to ban him from the platform.
Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community.
So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message.
Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days.
Now that they’ve made what is most likely an incredibly lucrative deal with OpenAI that’s going to net Stack Overflow’s owners boatloads of money, they obviously can’t let users delete or alter their answers to lower the monetary value of Stack Overflow’s content. Measures to prevent deletion or alteration are probably one of the clauses in the agreement between Stack Overflow and OpenAI. So there’s likely not much you can do to not have your answers sucked into OpenAI, but you should at least be aware it’s happening in case of future answers you might want to contribute.
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college’s General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
Even I have used BASIC in the past, when I was a child and discovered QBasic (or possibly GW-BASIC, I’m a bit hazy on the details) and started messing around with it. My experiences with BASIC didn’t lead to a path of ever more complex programming languages, but for huge numbers of people, it did – it’s wild just how many people over a certain age got their programming start with BASIC in the 8 bit home computer era.
I mean, 30 GOTO 10 is such a widespread morsel of knowledge it made its way into all kinds of popular media, such as a few Easter egg jokes in Futurama. BASIC has effectively achieved immortality.
Humans speak countless different languages. Not only are these languages incompatible, but runtime transpilation is a real pain. Sadly, every standardisationinitiative has failed.
For most users, character encoding issues are not something they have to deal with. Programmers and other people who deal with the lower levels of computing, however, deal with this way more often than they should.
Over 35 years ago, these problems with software portability led to the emergence of the first POSIX standard in 1988. The acronym was coined by Richard Stallman, who added “X” to the end of Portable Operating System Interface. It’s meant to provide a specification of the interface that different Unix operating systems should have in common, including programming languages and tools. It’s important to note that the interface is portable, and not the implementation.
While POSIX certainly isn’t perfect, and support for it in various operating systems claiming to support POSIX even less so, there’s no denying its success. Even if the dream of 100% source code portability isn’t possible under POSIX for applications that are a little more complex than basic CLI tools, there’s enough portability that platforms like Linux, the various BSDs, macOS, and others, can share quite a bit of code.
One of my favourite things about POSIX is that it shows up in the most unexpected of places. Windows, for instance, has had various options for POSIX compatibility, some of which straight from Microsoft itself, like the currently well-known Windows Subsystem for Linux, but also mostly forgotten options like the Microsoft POSIX subsystem that shipped with Windows NT until Windows 2000, or the very rudimentary POSIX compatibility in the Windows C Runtime Library and Windows Sockets API.
OS/2 had POSIX compatibility as well, through EMX (Eberhard Mattes eXtender). It gave OS/2 – and MS-DOS – a POSIX API, and even provided access to native OS/2 APIs as well, and could run 32bit applications. You’d be surprised by how many more operating systems offered forms of POSIX compatibility, either out of the box or through first or third party add-ons.
I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It’s written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle’s userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. I’ve published the code here.
I work at Red Hat on GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. For the last five releases of GCC, I’ve been working on -fanalyzer, a static analysis pass that tries to identify various problems at compile-time, rather than at runtime. It performs “symbolic execution” of C source code—effectively simulating the behavior of the code along the various possible paths of execution through it.
This article summarizes what’s new with -fanalyzer in GCC 14, which I hope will be officially released sometime in April 2024.
Starting a career for the first time in a new country can be intimidating. For Rudina Tafhasaj, her path to Senior Application Engineer at Rapid7 was paved with both unique challenges, and incredible rewards.
Growing up, Rudina was inspired to get into technology by her older brother. “He loved computers, and he was always opening up our big PC. I was curious, and would sneak around to see what he was doing,” Rudina says. “As I grew more, I saw that advances in technology were helping improve lives in so many ways. I knew it was going to be a big part of the future, and wanted to be involved.”
But technology wasn’t her only passion at a young age.
“Deep down my dream and passion is to be an actress - which is totally different! As I grew more, what I realized was that I actually loved the creativity involved in acting, and having the opportunity to network and work with other people.” While there may not always be cameras rolling, Rudina feels there are often similarities between her love of acting and her role today. “I can be creative in code, I can role play different scenarios, and this career is a way for me to tap into both of my passions. I am able to work on really impactful technology in a way that allows me to be creative while also partnering with all kinds of different people and teams along the way.”
At the very beginning of her career, Rudina faced a unique challenge that included relocating from her home in Albania to a new city in the Czech Republic. “It wasn’t easy moving to Prague. I had a tough time adjusting because I had never traveled, never lived on my own, and never had a professional job - and here I was tackling all three at once!” As the only daughter in a family with three brothers, she notes how she had to advocate for herself with her family in making such a big life change. While working as a Junior Developer, she had to work hard to overcome challenges and make an impact in her work.
“At my first job, as I was navigating all of this change, I got a really critical piece of feedback from my manager. I wasn’t developing my skills as much as he expected to see. I was in danger of losing my job if I didn’t make some dramatic improvements.”
This hard conversation served as a wakeup call for Rudina, and ignited her commitment to invest in learning and strengthening her skills so she could achieve her goals. While the feedback was hard to hear, Rudina notes that her manager continued to be supportive of her growth and wanted to help her succeed. “For 6 months, I woke up, went to work, came home, ate dinner, and then studied until it was time for bed. After doing that on repeat, my manager was able to see a dramatic improvement in the rate in which I was learning and growing. While there was still more to learn, he was impressed with my dedication and I continued to grow in my role.”
Rudina’s hard work paid off, and two years later, she took her career a step further with a position as a Salesforce Developer at Barclays. “I am so grateful to have had a manager that was able to give me the feedback I needed, while also encouraging me to stick with it and offer support along the way.”
Now a Senior Software Engineer at Rapid7, she reflects on her journey with a strong sense of pride and accomplishment. “Whatever challenges I went through in previous employers has made me the best person for Rapid7, and I’m grateful for all of my past experiences.” Overcoming challenges can sometimes feel uncomfortable, but it is often necessary to grow and move our careers forward. “It’s a continuous cycle too, as you grow and get more experience, you continue to set your goals higher and seek out the next challenge. There is always more to learn and more ways to grow in your career, especially in technology.”
Her appetite for continued growth is what ultimately brought her to Rapid7’s newest office in Prague in 2023. “I felt like I was ready for new challenges that would continue to accelerate my growth.” When looking at where to go next, she had three requirements that she was looking for in her next employer.
A clear development plan with support from her manager
A culture rooted in honesty and trust
Competitive and fair compensation for her work. Growing her earning potential alongside the growth of her career as she continued to advance.
“When interviewing for the role at Rapid7, I found evidence of everything on my list, and so much more as well. What really stands out the most is the trust and responsibility given to me by the business analysts or project managers that I partner with. They will share what they are looking to do, and then give me the responsibility and the autonomy to go ahead and find a way to make it happen - even when I’m brand new. It feels good to be given that trust and to be able to work on business critical initiatives where my ideas are respected and valued.”
When asked what advice she would give others looking to take on a new role, she says to note down what your expectations and goals are. “Use the interview time to ask whatever questions you need to help understand if it’s the right move for you, or not.” Rudina says having things defined before the call helps you stay on track and get the most value as you weigh your options. “I had a lot of questions during my interview - but because I was able to get answers, I walked away with a really confident feeling that the role at Rapid7 was going to be just what I was looking for.”
For Rudina, growth and development was essential in her next role. As someone who embraces new challenges, and represents Rapid7’s core values every day through her actions and work, it didn’t take long for her to be offered yet another opportunity. Within her first three months, she was given the chance to serve as a team lead. She looks forward to continuing to make an impact in her work, grow her career, and support others through her participation in the Rapid7 Women Impact Group.
To learn more about career opportunities and what it’s like to work at Rapid7, visit our careers site.
At the 2024 Women Who Code She Rocks Awards, Rapid7 Software Engineer II Ciara Cullinan was recognized with their ‘Community Trailblazer’ award.
According to Women Who Code, “This award celebrates the efforts of someone who brings people together and creates genuine connections in our tech community. Whether this is online or in-person, this person demonstrates exceptional commitment to building a thriving and inclusive community.”
When it comes to building community, Ciara is a true champion who is consistently looking for ways to establish and grow meaningful connections among her team, across the organization, and in the local tech industry. Whether it’s encouraging engagement in various slack channels with ‘water cooler’ questions and ice breakers, or driving Rapid7’s sponsorship of Women Techmakers, she’s proactively seeking out ways to bring people together while growing her own network in the process.
“I think a lot of times - and especially for women - we focus on perfection in our work. We can be hesitant to share things until we have it 100% figured out ourselves. However, when we are able to build strong personal connections with our colleagues, or even others in the industry, the bravery to put something forward or ask for feedback comes much easier. That connection opens up the door to have honest conversations, share ideas, and provide feedback. This is where we can work together to drive impact and grow our skills, which lead to rewarding career experiences and growth.”
In addition to her role as an engineer, Ciara is an active member of Rapid7 Women. Rapid7 Women is an employee resource group that aims to support, enable, and empower all employees identifying as women to bring their best, true selves to work every day through community, action, and activism. Ciara actively contributes to this mission by helping build global and local initiatives for the group. As mentioned in her nomination submission, “Ciara collaborates with colleagues from around the globe, in different business units and roles to build a Women program that caters to supporting not only Women identifying individuals, but also seeks to educate allies on how to be a culture contributor exhibiting inclusive leadership traits.”
Ciara also highlights the importance of bringing more women into the tech industry, and how organizations like Women Who Code can make a difference. “In my role I am one of two women on the team. As technology continues to evolve and things like Artificial Intelligence become part of our everyday life, it’s important to get more women involved in the field to combat any implicit bias in the things that are being built. Bringing more diverse perspectives into a team can also help drive innovation and help organizations work through challenges more efficiently. Awards and programs like this help showcase what’s possible for the next generation of women, allowing them see and then realize the potential a career in tech could hold for them.”
To learn more about Women Who Code’s Belfast community, visit their website.
To learn more about Rapid7’s culture, and our Rapid Impact Groups, visit our careers page.
Prior to becoming a Systems Administrator at Rapid7, Naeem Jones entered his career in cybersecurity through the Hack. Diversity program. Hack.Diversity is a program that connects talented Black and Latin/x students and early-career professionals with organizations that are looking to build inclusive and equitable working environments. Rapid7 is a founding member of “Hack” and has worked with the organization since 2017.
Jones remembers he and others in his cohort were looking for opportunities to grow and gain valuable experience at an organization, prioritizing the expansion of their expertise while also having ownership of tasks and projects. To Jones, one of the things that stood out the most about Rapid7 was the ability to be himself while having the opportunity to grow.
“One of my favorite core values at Rapid7 is ‘Bring You.’ I love having the ability to bring your authentic self every day – and that looks different for everyone. For myself, I am an avid gamer and even play competitively. I am part of multiple groups at Rapid7 where we discuss all the video games and media we love and are able to bond over our shared interests,” he said. Jones enjoys challenging those around him: “If you think you can beat me in a game, I am here, and I accept the challenge!”
Alongside the promise of a robust culture, there was room for Jones to challenge himself to create impact and grow. “Rapid7 emphasized that, once you join, you are part of the team. Even if you are an intern, you are a Moose and will be working alongside others with the same opportunities.” Employees call themselves “Moose” because it can refer to a single moose or an entire herd, demonstrating how every employee is working both individually and collaboratively to implement solutions. This references one of Rapid7’s five core values: “Impact Together.”
“I started by doing whatever I could to understand and take advantage of learning opportunities. A few months into my internship, I was put in charge of handling the onboarding process, which I continued as I came to Rapid7 full-time,” Jones said. “I had ownership of a critical part of the business, which was to be the face of IT and the first person at Rapid7 to give new employees information on their devices and where they can go when they need help or have issues.”
Every role at Rapid7 is integral to delivering for our customers, and Jones’ ability to demonstrate how to efficiently use devices is a great example. The faster our Moose are acclimated to their laptops and are equipped with the tools they need, the faster they can solve the challenges our customers are facing. This means they can more rapidly build products that will keep our customers ahead of attackers and safe in the midst of a complex digital environment.
As Jones has progressed through his career over the course of five years at Rapid7, he has taken advantage of opportunities to shadow those whose roles he has found fascinating. Through open communication with his managers, Jones was able to have a hand in mapping his progression into a Systems Administrator role. This has created opportunities for Jones to impart helpful information and wisdom of his own.
“Mentorship and cross-collaborationship never goes away. Of course, workload takes precedence but there is still so much for me to learn from my peers regardless of whether they are in a more junior or senior role. I have the opportunity now to also pass my knowledge along to others on processes I am well-versed in,” he said.
“I am able to offer wisdom, tips and tricks, and where to look when things aren’t right. I love being able to empower my team – or any partner – to learn from my experiences and be a teacher,” he said. “It is a privilege to be able to show others how I navigate processes to help them learn and to improve and become better. It is a continuous cycle.” This cycle is critical to the impact made at Rapid7 as Moose are able to work together on projects which foster expanded knowledge and fluid collaboration.
For those looking for their next opportunity, Jones acknowledges a difficult obstacle to overcome that many face: imposter syndrome. Although he recognizes that it may never truly go away, Jones suggests how to push through it: “Always try to partner, learn new skills, and shadow people in roles that interest you. No matter if it is a little thing or a big thing, just try,” he said.
Overall, Jones wants others to know that there is power in taking control in the face of adversity. “There have been points in my career where I felt paralyzed by imposter syndrome,” he said. “But, you can’t let that stop you from giving it a shot. Never let those feelings block you from learning and growing. Even if you ‘fail,’ you will still learn something and can carry that experience with you.”
As we continue to grow our customer base here at Rapid7, we’re growing our offices as well – this time with a new location in the Czech Republic. With a successful history of building innovation hubs from Boston to Belfast, our teams can’t wait to bring new talent from Prague into the business.
Pete Rubio joined Rapid7 in December of 2020, and is the Senior Vice President, Platform & Engineering. In this role he leads our data and engineering teams as they work to develop, optimize, and deliver security products and solutions to more than 11,000 customers worldwide.
Here, he talks about what he’s excited to see in Prague, what makes working at Rapid7 unique, and how he has experienced growth and development in his role as a leader.
What can you share about our new office location in Prague?
As a cybersecurity company, the need to constantly evolve and bring new, innovative ideas to the table is paramount to our success and the success of our customers. When it comes to expanding our global presence with a new location in Prague, we are excited to grow our talent pool and bring new perspectives and ideas into the business. Creating an innovation hub like this isn’t new to us; we’ve seen success in our Belfast office when it comes to creating a global hub for innovation. I see Prague as a location that will follow that model and have that same impact.
What makes Rapid7 unique as an employer?
At Rapid7, it’s our culture that sets us apart from other global companies. We have really interesting problems to solve and breakthrough innovations to deliver, but it’s how we do things and the culture we’ve created here that makes us quite different. We believe in working together to challenge convention and deliver excellence. We value perspectives and ideas from all areas of the business, and there are no egos or personal agendas when it comes to delivering for our customers.
We also place an extremely high emphasis on giving employees opportunities to stretch themselves, try new things, and really grow their careers in a way that compliments our business strategy. Rapid7 has created an environment where you can grow your career, grow your leadership skills, clearly measure your impact on the business -- and have a lot of fun along the way.
People all over the world spend a lot of time at work, and if you don’t like your co-workers or the environment you’re spending one third of your day in - it’s going to be a struggle. One thing I've found is that our culture has allowed us to work through our challenges and come out even stronger.
So what exactly are we building, and what can future employees expect?
There are a few sites at Rapid7 that represent a cross section of the company and have almost every discipline represented. Prague will be one of those sites. We’ll have engineering, product, a SOC location, finance, sales, support, and more. This is more than an engineering location or satellite office. Employees here will be working on critical path initiatives across the whole business. This is exciting for our employees because it creates a lot of opportunities for collaboration as well as growing your career and skills. If you want to lean into different areas of the business, being in a place where you can learn from other people and participate in rotational projects is important to help you get there.
As I mentioned before, professional growth is a critical component of our culture and our values. We are always open to people having new ideas and suggestions that are aligned with or help evolve our strategy in a positive direction. By giving employees the opportunity to have discussions and set their own goals for professional development – while holding managers accountable for having those conversations – we become a place where learning, innovation, and growth are taking place all around us every day. When our people are thriving and doing really impactful work and growing their skills, we’re able to succeed as a business and deliver better products and services to our customers.
Why should someone consider working in Cybersecurity?
There isn’t a more dynamic sector than Cybersecurity. Not a single day has been boring for me since I’ve been in the industry. I also think the ability to make a positive impact on the world is rewarding. We work to secure companies from bad actors. We have well known brand names that we secure, and there's a level of job satisfaction that comes from knowing we built technology that is actively working to make the world a safer place and stop the bad guys. The role between defender and attacker is always going to be a big cat-and-mouse game. We constantly need to be thinking three steps ahead in order to keep customers secure.
What customer challenges are we solving?
When you look at the security landscape, our portfolio is probably one of the richest in the industry. So when we approach a customer to understand their security needs, we have almost everything they could possibly need in our offering. Additionally, the experience across our products and services are second to none. When I talk to our customers, I share that we are looking to be the leading platform consolidator.
When customers do business with us, we will make it so that their security programs are much more impactful for every dollar they spend with us. There are a lot of other companies that have a one-point solution, and that limits your ability to expand and grow with your customer. From the employee perspective, that also limits their ability to grow and work on new things. We have multiple products for our employees to work on and explore, and that means you don't need to leave the company to grow.
You can do new and innovative things by changing product teams or working on a new offer. There are a lot of different ways we can increase customer efficiency as well as the efficacy of our programs, while providing really interesting career paths and opportunities for our people along the way.
What have you found to be most rewarding in your role at Rapid7?
The most rewarding part of my job has been the opportunities I’ve had to lead; these opportunities go beyond what I was initially hired to do. It’s fantastic to see the breadth and depth of impact I've been able to have in just three short years. There are company-wide challenges I’ve been able to support that have not always been in my domain, but I’ve been given the trust and opportunity to come in and help. Leaning in like that has truly evolved my career – I’ve been able to grow my leadership skills, develop a team, and deliver favorable outcomes for customers.
My story of growth is not unique within the company. As our business becomes more successful, we see opportunities for each person to become more successful as well. Our People Strategy team is intentional about looking at employees as individuals and recognizing that growth and success isn’t always a linear journey. We’re giving employees the opportunity to have ownership of their career trajectory. As leaders, our job is to support their goals, give feedback, and align that evolution and growth to business objectives.
How does Rapid7 maintain a consistent culture across global offices?
Every site has their own microculture that is a core part of our macro culture. Each office has a unique flavor that compliments the culture and employee experience we’re known for. Every time I arrive at a Rapid7 office, it FEELS like a Rapid7 office. This goes beyond the spaces and the way things look. It’s about the people I interact with, the sense of a common goal, and a feeling of being welcomed and included.
When I walk into the Belfast office, I feel like I’m in the Austin office. When I’m at the Boston office, I feel the same way I do when I’m in the Tampa office. Getting the culture to a place where it feels consistent across each and every site is a really hard thing to do – and yet we’ve done that here.
When I think about what makes that possible, I feel it comes down to the way we think about people. We don't have a Human Resources team, we have a People Strategy team. It’s a simple shift, but it’s deliberate. We don’t look at people as resources, we look at them as people. The intellectual property we produce and the value we deliver as a business is created by people. They are our most valuable asset, and the way we support, grow, and engage them has a direct impact on our success as a business.
What would you say to someone in Prague looking for a new opportunity?
If you are looking for a place that intentionally values you as a person and gives you incredible opportunities to do your best work, I can't think of a better environment than Rapid7. We’re committed to Prague as our next center for innovation, and we look forward to welcoming some of the most talented and collaborative professionals to join us in building a secure digital future.
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