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Every engineer deserves a clear growth path so they can understand, plan, and execute on meaningful career growth. Providing a framework for this growth (we call ours a competency matrix; it’s also known as a career ladder, or professional development ladder) is important work, and the responsibility of any organization that wants to nurture and grow its employees.

Back at the beginning of 2018, we had 32 developers and a plan to double throughout the year, we already had a competency matrix, but it was woefully outdated. It focused on our more junior levels, maxing out at a level which some developers had already reached. It was also misaligned with the skills our organization had grown to value, which meant in practice, we often ignored it. It was time for a re-design.

Building a new competency matrix was a learning process, and a lengthy one, taking about eight months to complete. Along the way we discovered things we valued, as well as what the keys steps to building a career ladder are (and which ones are wasteful). While every matrix is different, and will reflect the values of the organization that wrote it, the process of producing a succinct career ladder to guide your team is consistent.

When we published our new Engineering competency matrix in December, we received many emails from teams saying they were working on similar systems. Because of this feedback, I want to share the steps we went through, and the lessons we learned, to help teams reach a productive conclusion with much less waste, and in much shorter time, than trying to figure it out from scratch.

If you want to provide your employees and reports with a clear, agreed-upon, and well-defined path for growth within your organization, then this is for you.

Image via CircleCI

Step 1: Make this someone’s top priority

In retrospect, this was the biggest factor in our lengthy redesign process. I had initially taken on this project as one of my many side projects. The only time I had to dedicate to the matrix were early mornings, late nights, and weekends. This was a passion project for me, and I loved working on it, but I was not able to give it the care it needed.

In addition to exciting its loyal legion of fans, HBO’s “Game of Thrones” premiere was also once again great news for installs of the network’s app for cord cutters, HBO NOW, which shot to the top of the App Store this weekend. The app this weekend saw a combined 300,000-plus new mobile subscribers in the U.S. across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play, according to preliminary estimates from Sensor Tower.

This is the highest the app has ranked on the U.S. iPhone App Store in three years, Sensor Tower notes, with its previous highest ranking on April 24, 2016 for the Season 6 “Game of Thrones” premiere. At that time, the app had seen 160,000 downloads on just the one day.

Sensor Tower expects to have more precise estimates of the premiere’s impact in the near future, as it wants to incorporate numbers from the fans who are getting a late start and downloading the app today.

Currently, the app is holding its No. 1 position on Apple’s App Store. If that continues, it could easily add another couple hundred thousand over the course of today (Monday, April 15, 2019), Sensor Tower estimates. That could see the app surpassing 500,000 new downloads across the three-day period.

To be clear, these numbers refer to users who have never before installed the app on their phone – not re-downloads.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a 1:1 correlation with new HBO NOW subscribers. Many fans watch the series on their TV’s big screen through an HBO app for devices like Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, and others. Or they may tune in to watch on the web, via their laptop. Still, it’s a notable number – especially considering how late it is in the series for the show to be gaining new fans.

HBO’s app for cable and satellite TV customers, HBO Go, also did well this weekend. It’s on track to exceed 400,000 installs over the same three-day period (the weekend of the Season 8 premiere, plus Monday). This is highest the app has ranked since the Season 7 premiere in July 2017, when it added 350,000 first-time users across both stores worldwide.

Combined, the two apps — HBO Go and HBO NOW — are poised to exceed over 1 million new installs in this three-day period, Sensor Tower forecasts.

However, fans’ interest in the long-awaited new season may have caused HBO’s apps to struggle some.

There have been reports from Down Detector and Business Insider of users who had issues streaming from the HBO apps, as well as Hulu. But these were nowhere on the scale of crashes we’ve seen in years past — as with the Season 4 “Game of Thrones” premiere, which had HBO issuing a public apology due to the size of the outage. (HBO has not responded to our requests for comment about the unconfirmed reports detailing last night’s issues. So the issues could be chalked up to users’ broadband connections, or other factors.)

Other TV apps had a few glitches, too, thanks to the premiere. For example, the TV-tracking social app TV Time temporarily struggled to load, shortly after the premiere’s airing last night. On its app, “Game of Thrones” is one of the most-tracked shows, where it has 4.3 million followers who post comments, photos, memes and more to the show’s in-app community. Today, there are some 6,200 comments in the show’s forum, from fans discussing the show.

Ride-sharing companies and airports have always had a bit of a fractious relationship. Riders looking to catch an Uber or Lyft have had to walk to parking garages, follow makeshift signage, find arbitrary pickup points all while waiting multiples of the ETA for their pickup at busy airports.

Lyft is piloting a new way to pair riders with drivers at the San Diego airport. It’s a Lyft line but it’s not a carpooling product, it’s actually just a cab line.

Instead of matching with a driver, riders nabbing a regular Lyft will hop in a physical line at the airport and match up with a driver irl. They won’t have to tell them the address before the meter starts running, users will still enter everything in the app, but after doing so they will tell the driver a four-digit code that will sync the request with the driver and get everything moving.

It’s a bit funny when companies try everything only to settle on the old ways but the fact is for fringe use cases where everyone is grabbing a ride from a single location, having multiple pickup areas can just make everything move more slowly and coordinating can be tough when Lyft drivers are holding up the process having to wait for riders who are running late or on the wrong location.

Team all of this with the fact that cab companies have made life difficult for Lyft and Uber by lobbying airports to move pickup locations into remote corners and this might just be a way to make life easier for all parties involved.

This is a little bit of a different setup for rideshare users, so at the San Diego Terminal 2 airport pickup, Lyft is going to have some employees there to walk people through the setup. This is launching mid-May so it’s way too early to guess whether this works and will eventually finds its way to other airports, but we can all hope that either Lyft or Uber discover how to make the process easier for everyone.

Airbnb has completed its acquisition of the last-minute hotel booking application, HotelTonight, the company announced on Monday. The deal is Airbnb’s largest M&A transaction yet, and will accelerate the home-sharing giant’s growth as it gears up for an initial public offering.

Airbnb reportedly began talks to acquire HotelTonight months ago, and finally confirmed its intent to acquire the business in early March. Reports indicated a price tag of more than $400 million; we’ve reached out to Airbnb to confirm those deal terms.

As part of the deal, HotelTonight co-founder and chief executive officer Sam Shank will lead the boutique hotel category at Airbnb, one of the company’s newer units meant to help it scale beyond treehouses and quirky homes.

“When we founded HotelTonight, we sought to reimagine the hotel booking experience to be more simple, fast and fun, and to better connect travelers with the world’s best boutique and independent hotels,” Shank said in a statement. “We are delighted to take this vision to new heights as part of Airbnb.”

Shank launched the San Francisco-based company in 2010. Most recently, it was valued at $463 million with a $37 million Series E funding in 2017, according to PitchBook. HotelTonight raised a total of $131 million in equity funding from venture capital firms including Accel, Battery Ventures, Forerunner Ventures and First Round Capital.

San Francisco has hit the mid-point for its one-year electric scooter pilot program. In a slide deck to be presented at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s board of directors meeting tomorrow, the SFMTA reports that there were 242,398 electric scooter trips between October 2018 and February 2019.

What especially jumps out is the fact that Skip accounted for 90 percent of all rides, It seems that’s a result of consistently having more scooter availability than its rival Scoot .

On the flip side, Skip’s high number of devices and 218,000 trips made resulted in 34 collisions — 18 of which caused injuries. Scoot riders experienced zero reported collisions.

Some of the promises related to electric scooter usage have touched on fewer car trips and better access to transportation for people in low-income areas. The SFMTA says 42 percent of scooter trips replaced car trips while just 0.5 percent of Scoot trips and 0.3 percent of Skip trips were part of the low-income program.

Oh, and here’s the real shocker (sarcasm): 63 percent of riders are white and 82 percent are dudes. Meanwhile, 68 percent of the riders have household incomes of more than $100,000, according to rider surveys.

In conclusion, the SFMTA says lock-to mechanisms have improved parking compliance, but that more scooters are needed to more thoroughly evaluate the program. Additionally, scooter companies need to do more outreach in underrepresented communities.

Moving forward, the SFMTA will decide this week whether to allow Skip and Scoot to increase their respective fleet sizes, as well as consider allowing operators like JUMP, Spin, Lime and Bird to deploy their own fleets.

Every year around this time, Uber drivers, Wag dog walkers, Bird scooter chargers, social media influencers and other gig economy workers face the unsightly challenge of paying their taxes.

Companies like Uber and Lyft classify their drivers as independent contractors, which means you aren’t given any benefits and the company doesn’t withhold any of your taxes. This puts gig workers in a tough position come tax day, especially if they aren’t prepared to shell out big sums to the IRS.

Keeper, a startup that’s just graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator, is here to make taxes a lot easier for that demographic and to save them as much money as possible.

Founded by childhood buddies and former debate partners Paul Koullick and David Kang, the San Francisco-based company has raised $1.65 million on a $10 million valuation in a round led by Jake Jolis of Matrix Partners.

Keeper co-founders Paul Koullick (left) and David Kang

The pair entered YC this winter with a big idea and little to show for it. Come March, they had developed a full-fledged product and accumulated 200 paying customers. With their first round of funding, they plan to add to their small but growing team and acquire 10,000 customers in the next 18 months.

“There are some companies that are trying to go very broad and trying to cover the whole spectrum of benefits; we’re just trying to go really deep on taxes,” Kang told TechCrunch. “This is a pain point. This is where people are definitely leaving the most money on the table.”

Keeper guesses the average gig worker in the U.S. is overpaying their taxes by more than 20 percent, or about $1,550 for those making more than $25,000 per year. Why? Because these independent contractors aren’t claiming the tax write-offs available to them, like phone bills, car maintenance fees and even a Spotify subscription for drivers.

“If you’re a dog walker, there are so many things you need to be writing off, like your poop bags, your extra leashes, your parking,” Koullick told TechCrunch. “This population needs the guidance of an accountant, but they can’t afford one and we’re trying to create this third option.”

Like a personal accountant, Keeper monitors gig workers’ expenses all year in search of possible tax deductions, saving each user $173 per month on average, it estimates. The startup uses Plaid to follow its customers’ transaction history, and once per day sends a text message asking if there are any tax write-offs to note. Over time, it gets smarter and smarter, keeping the SMS questions to a minimum.

Keeper doesn’t fully file taxes for 1099 workers yet, but will begin offering a quarterly tax filing service in June. Next year, it plans to offer a full-year tax-filing service.

Koullick, Keeper’s chief executive officer, worked in product at Square before joining another startup, called Stride, where he built and scaled Stride Tax, a mileage and expense-tracking app. Kang, for his part, has spent most of his post-graduate career at a trading firm in Chicago, focused on quantitative modeling. The two toyed with a few startup ideas before landing on Keeper’s tax business.

“We wanted to build something that actually mattered to real people,” Koullick explained. “And we wanted to do it in the financial space where we were happy to wade through ugly details and systems on their behalf.”

Keeper isn’t the only recent YC alum focused on the growing gig economy. Another, Catch, sells health insurance, retirement savings plans and tax-withholding services directly to freelancers, contractors or anyone uncovered. Given the rapid rise of Uber and other gig platforms, it’s no wonder YC startups are tapping into the various business opportunities available there.

“We’re willing to tackle some of these topics that are kind of boring and mundane and really intensive,” Kang added. “Like the average person doesn’t want to think about taxes or filling out forms. We saw that as an opportunity for us to step in and be like, hey, we’ll take it.”

This Thursday, we’ll be hosting our third annual Robotics + AI TechCrunch Sessions event at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. The day is packed start-to-finish with intimate discussions on the state of robotics and deep learning with key founders, investors, researchers and technologists.

The event will dig into recent developments in robotics and AI, which startups and companies are driving the market’s growth, and how the evolution of these technologies may ultimately play out. In preparation for our event, TechCrunch’s Brian Heater spent time over the last several months visiting some of the top robotics companies in the country. Brian will be on the ground at the event, alongside Lucas Matney who will also be on the scene. Friday at 11:00 am PT, Brian and Lucas will be sharing what they saw and what excited them most with Extra Crunch members on a conference call.

Tune in to find out about what you might have missed and to ask Brian and Lucas anything else robotics, AI or hardware. And want to attend the event in Berkeley this week? It’s not too late to get tickets.

To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.

The loss of Israel’s Beresheet lander during its descent to the lunar surface was unfortunate, but the mission was still largely a success — and has certainly created an interesting cultural artifact on the moon where it impacted. Perhaps more interesting than we could have known: It turns out David Copperfield stashed the secrets to his illusions onboard, and they may have survived the crash.

The data was kept on one of the Arch Mission Foundation’s tiny, high-capacity, high-endurance archival devices, meant to act as libraries or time capsules in a variety of sci-fi-sounding scenarios like extraterrestrial visits or the near-extinction of humans. They’re “nearly indestructible,” and one was on Beresheet.

In a plot twist no one could have seen coming, among the data encoded on the DVD-sized (but much more sophisticated) storage medium are the famous magician’s “secret technological innovations.” Yes, David Copperfield shot his tricks to the moon, and no, it doesn’t sound like it’s just some old ones or previously published information (I asked).

Why?

“When I was introduced to the Arch Mission Foundation, I was immediately enamored with the mission to preserve our civilization, and the possibilities of what we might do together,” Copperfield said in a press release. “One of my heroes is George Méliès, one of the fathers of modern cinema and also a great magician. His most famous movie was ‘A Trip to the Moon,’ which in 1902 visualized people landing on the Moon. It inspired a generation of scientists to actually achieve it, and 70 years later we actually landed on the Moon. Now 50 years later, we’re landing magic on the Moon. We’re bringing it full circle and I find that kind of poetic.”

There you have it. Quite absurd, but why not?

As for the device, AMF has put together a small team (including Stephen Wolfram) to look into what may have happened to it on impact.

“We have either installed the first library on the moon, or we have installed the first archaeological ruins of early human attempts to build a library on the moon,” read a preliminary document by the team containing various figures relating the crash and potential survival of the device.

Although AMF co-founder Nova Spivack said in the press release that “every indication thus far suggests that the Lunar Library is intact on the Moon,” the truth is there aren’t that many positive indications just yet.

Mission control lost contact with Beresheet when it was only 150 meters from the surface; it would have impacted about a second later with about 956 m/s of horizontal velocity, which translates to over 2,000 miles per hour. So this thing was going faster than a bullet and was considerably less durable. The wreckage is likely strewn over kilometers of the lunar surface.

“We think it is highly unlikely that the Lunar Library was atomized in the impact,” writes the team. “Without knowing the impact energy directed at the library, it’s hard to know how the stack fared.  But taking the construction of the Lunar Library into account, we believe it has a high chance of being intact.”

It isn’t just an archival-quality disc or something. It’s a special 25-layer sandwich of nickel and epoxy, the bottom 21 layers of which are filled with digital data. This is the information most at risk, since, like snapping a DVD in half, you can’t just put the pieces back together and hope the 0’s and 1’s align again.

But the top 4 layers are essentially a form of high-durability microfiche, etched with tiny letters that could be read with a basic microscope. These you really could just piece back together. The 60,000 pages of analog data include ” the Arch Mission Primer, selections from Wikipedia, The Wearable Rosetta, The Israeli Time Capsule, a selection of books — and potentially all or some of the not-yet-announced secret Vaults of content.”

Among those “not-yet-announced secret Vaults” in the analog layers is in fact the collection of Copperfield’s illusions. Lucky, that!

Unfortunately, even if the device does theoretically survive, it may never be found: at those speeds the debris from the landing would have spread over a large area and perhaps buried itself in dust and regolith. So even if it were completely intact, it might be invisible even to the high-resolution cameras on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which AMF has requested to take a few images of the crash site (it was probably already going to given the interest in the Beresheet mission).

“We think it is highly unlikely that the Lunar Library was atomized in the impact, given what we currently know. Therefore either the Lunar library remains entirely intact or it remains in a partially intact state — somewhere within a few kilometers of the landing zone,” writes the team. However, “This may not be verifiable without investigating the scene firsthand, on the ground at the crash site.”

So a trip to the moon, Méliès-style, might be necessary after all.

The idea of a treasure hunt for a famous magician’s secrets in a moon landing gone wrong really sounds more like science fiction than everyday news, but the two things have been growing closer and closer to one another for a while now, so I guess none of us should be surprised.

Apple’s new gaming subscription service Apple Arcade may have been a bit of a footnote at its Services event earlier this month compared to the stage time given to more primetime-ready efforts like Apple TV+ and Apple News+, but the company is throwing some major funding behind its effort to get people paying a monthly fee for exclusive titles.

The company has already set aside a budget of more than $500 million for its Arcade service, according to a report in the Financial Times.

The service, arriving in the fall, will let users play exclusive gaming titles across their Apple devices ad-free and offline. The titles will be free of micro-transactions unlike many of the popular gaming titles on the App Store.

While the company has already reportedly spent more than $1 billion on its TV+ content service, the gaming subscription world marks another uncharted territory for Apple as it will put the tech giant in the position of curating with its cash by directly funding titles for exclusive launches on Apple Arcade. At its event, the company detailed that it will have more than 100 new and exclusive gaming titles launching as part of its service.

The report states that in order to receive funding from Apple, developers will have to eschew releases on the Google Play Store and refrain from taking part in other gaming subscription services. After a “few months” of exclusivity, developers will be able to release their games on non-mobile platforms such as PCs and gaming consoles. The company is focusing its efforts on funding indie titles as opposed to bankrolling AAA studios to create an exclusive epic.

As with Apple TV+, we’re still waiting on exact details regarding price and availability

Micromobility — electric personal vehicles — has gone from being non-existent to ubiquitous across cities all over the world. Currently, we’re seeing micromobility take on the form of electric scooters and pedal-assist bikes.

JUMP and Scoot operate in both of those categories. JUMP got its start as a pedal-assist bike-share startup, but has since evolved to handle electric scooters. And while Scoot’s first product from 2012 was an electric moped, it got its feet wet with bikes back in May 2018, then electric scooters later that same year.

Between JUMP founder Ryan Rzepecki, who sold his startup to Uber for about $200 million, and Scoot SVP of Product Katie DeWitt, TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility presented on July 10 in San Jose, Calif. is ready to dive deep into what the future of micromobility holds for us.

We’ll explore topics around asset management, unit economics, partnering with cities, data sharing, consolidation and what a potential shift to ownership would mean.

Early-Bird tickets are now on sale — save $100 on tickets before prices go up.

Students, you can grab your tickets for just $45.