Here are a bunch of Technical / Non-Technical topics that I came across recently and found them very resourceful.

Technical :

• The cost crisis in the observability space is a real problem. Here is an article that describes the issue: – link here
• How many conferences are too many? Here is an exhaustive list of all the popular talks on Kubernetes from 2023: – link here
• OpenTelemetry is the industry standard in observability. Here is a list of anti-patterns with observability to avoid:- link here
• Here is a write-up on a framework for data sharing between microservices – link here
• GoDaddy Data Platform optimizations: 60% cost reduction and 50% performance improvement – link here
• I have been deeply exploring Kafka lately, and below are some of the great resources I have found:
  • Effectively Once Delivery and Exactly Once Processing in Kafka – link here
  • Segments, Rolling and Retention in kafka – link here
  • Kafka internals – link here

• [Most recommended] “Learn Programming In 10 Years” – A video by ThePrimeTime on Youtube link here (23mins).

Non-Technical :

• [YouTube] “How Future Billionaires Get Sh*t Done” (20mins): Discusses the importance of having a larger chunk of non-disruptive time to accomplish tasks: – link here
• Currently, 94% of the universe’s volume is beyond our reach. – How quickly is the Universe disappearing from our reach?
• You are only as good as your worst days – FS blog explains it the best – link here
• An extract from a book:

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else… Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”

“Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse

Cheers until next time !

Here are a bunch of Technical / Non-Technical topics that I came across recently and found them very resourceful.

Technical :

• System Design – Designing a Ticket Booking Site Like Ticketmaster is the most common system design question – link
• UberEngineering blog on Anomaly detection and alerting system – link
• P99 CONF 2023 | Always-on Profiling of All Linux Threads by Tanel Poder – YouTube link
• On choosing Golang as a programming language at American Express- link
• [Gold] : Best Papers awarded in Computer Science – sorted Yearly and Topic wise – link
• Writing an Engineering Strategy – link
  • “If there’s no written decision, the decision is risky or a trap-door decision, and it’s unclear who the owner is, then you should escalate!”
• ThePrimeTime is a popular youtuber who is a SWE at Netflix. Here is his take on Leetcode – YouTube Link
• LWN is one of the few sane NL left out there. Here is their take on 2023 – link
• The Hacker News Top 40 books of 2023 – link (60+ books)

Non-Technical :

• HBR – 5 Generic reasons why people get laid off – link
• Paul Graham is one of the most clear thinkers. Here are his most recommended books – link
• Geeks being geeks – Why does a remote car key work when held to your head/body? – Detailed analysis link
• Book extract

“The more we want it to be true, the more careful we have to be. No witness’s say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for money or attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what they’re seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren’t there.”

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Carl Sagan

See you next time!

Here are a bunch of Technical / Non-Technical topics that I came across recently and found them very resourceful.

Technical :

• The shortest and comprehensive System Design Template for any new service – link here
• Kafka is one of the most efficiently built transient datastore. This article explains the compute and storage layers of kafka — link here
• Consistent Hashing has helped solve Distributed System with:
  • even shard distribution across nodes in cluster
  • minimum data movement on adding/removing nodes from the cluster
  • A great explaination of consistent hashing on the link here
• Picking a database is a long-term commitment. Below is very high level guiding-post. Please take it with a pinch of salt.

• I have been geeking out on rate limiting and how it is implemented on large scale systems. Below are a few interesting references for the same:
  • Stripe rate limiter : Scaling your API with rate limits — link here
  • AWS : Throttle API requests for better throughput– link here
  • Rate limiters set at Twitter — link here
  • Out of all the available Rate limiting algorithms (Token bucket, Leaking bucket, Fixed window, Sliding Window etc) – Sliding Window is the most comprehensive which handles burst load — Sliding Window Explained here

Non-Technical :

• Elon Musk’s biography by Walter Isaacson is out this week. Guess the first sentence in the book? — Amazon link here. Also one of the reviews here
  “I re-invented electric cars and am sending people to mars…did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”
• The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection and you can listen to those audio books on your spotify — link here
• The difference between Measuring and Evaluating — link here
• Quote from a book:

Did the person take 10 minutes to do their homework? Are they minding the details? If not, don’t encourage more incompetence by rewarding it. Those who are sloppy during the honeymoon (at the beginning) only get worse later

Tools of Titans

Cheers until next time !

Here are a bunch of Technical / Non-Technical topics that I came across recently and found them very resourceful.

Technical :

• Don’t turn that Swap off yet. In defense of swap – common misconceptions. – link here
• Why histogram and how are they useful. link here
  • If you have used any of the monitoring or APM tools, you would have come across Histogram form of metric being emitter. This writeup give a brief on why Histogram.
• S3 isn’t getting cheaper – link here
• [Podcast- 35mins]: Moving from CEO back to IC – with Mitchell Hashimoto, cofounder of HashiCorp — link here
• Inside Datadog’s $5M Outage – link here
• Book recommendation – Being Geek by Michael Lopp. I have been geeking out on Michael quite a bit these days and he has solid books and advices across the internet.

Non-Technical :

• “A Checklist For First-Time Engineering Managers” – link here
• Any lofi lovers here? Best lofi with air traffic control radio mix. My new WFH companion for background audio — link here
• This is such a pleasant read on WFH day and the pace of it on a rand community channel, almost therapeutic – link here
• An extract from the book:

And like it or not, your boss is judging you by these three criteria:

COMMITMENT
ATTENTION TO DETAIL
IMMEDIATE FOLLOW UP

Mark H. McCormack

Cheers until next time !

Here are a bunch of Technical / Non-Technical topics that I came across recently and found them very resourceful.

Technical :

• A new book released on the hot eBPF – “Learning eBPF” by Liz Rice. This a summary form and a quick introduction to eBPF capabilities when compared to “BPF Performance tools” by Brendan Gregg.

• To understand latency in detail – “Everything You Know About Latency Is Wrong” – link here
• Why Percentiles Don’t Work the Way You Think ? Reason to stop using Average value of metrics and how percentiles work. Link here
• Here is a detailed and practical resource on System Design in Software Engineering – link here
• “Effective and Efficient Observability with OpenTelemetry” – opentelemetry is the way to go when it comes to traces/metrics observability in your code base. – link here
• This is a lovely visualization – “Visualizing Lucene’s segment merges” – link here
• [Podcast] : What’s new in Go 1.20 – Podcast link , release notes

Non-Technical :

• 50 Ideas that changed my life – David Perell. Link here . My fav one from the 50 is:
  
  “By reading this, you are choosing not to read something else. Everything we do is like this. Doing one thing requires giving up another. Whenever you explicitly choose to do one thing, you implicitly choose not to do another thing.“

• Mental Liquidity – ability to quickly abandon previous beliefs when the world changes or when you come across new information. link here
• “Two types of Software Engineers” – One assumes it’s easy because it’s a non-technical problem, the other assumes that’s why it’s hard – link here
• [Recommended] – “What you give up when moving into engineering management” – Link here
• Quote from a book:

I write everything down, and since I put my notes where they will pop up again in the right place at the right time, once I have written something down I forget about it. The end result is that when I break from work, I break from work-related stress as well.

What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School

Cheers, until next time!

Here are a bunch of Technical / Non-Technical topics that I came across recently and found them very resourceful.

Technical :

• [Book-Recommendations]: Cloud-Native Observability with OpenTelemetry by Alex and Charity. (Side note: Half way through the book and learning a lot. )
  

• A list of possible developer questions to consider asking a prospective employer. – github link
• [Video]: Disk latency being directly proportional to vibrations (in other words, lets try shouting in data center!!) — 2min Video link
• What is Redis explained – link here
• Best Practices for Fixing your alerts in your service? (so that you can sleep well?) — link from newrelic here
• The disproportionate influence of early tech decisions (debatable but interesting!) – link here

Non-Technical :

• Second-order thinking: How to NOT create new problems while solving existing problems. – Link
• [90mins] Podcast recommendation — The Knowledge Project : Insights for making better Decision — Spotify link
• What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book ? (heartwarming!)– link
• 10 mental concepts for thinking better – Twitter thread
• A quote that struck the right chords:

“So much advantage in life comes from being willing to look foolish in the short term.”

Unknown

Cheers, until next time!

Here are a bunch of Technical / Non-Technical topics that I came across recently and found them very resourceful.

Technical :

• A few interesting and hidden features of Python – link
• Below are the BCP tools that can be used for digging in to Performance analysis of memory parameters on a Linux machine. More in BPF Performance Tools book by Brendan Gregg.

• How does Database indexing work? – here
• How to get the most out of your 1:1s – here
• At around 8-10years of experience, career branches in to either Engineering management or Technical Staff Engineer. Here are a few stories of Staff Engineers and their journey.
• [Self-endorsement]: A tiny 50lines of code tool for getting my highlighted quotes from my Fav books – here

Non-Technical :

• [Highly recommended]: First-principles thinking is a competitive advantage because almost no one does it. More here
• The importance of annual health checkup – Seema’s True story of battling cancer – here
• I always thought about a social platform but based on Books. Booqsi is trying to do the exact same. It is still in early beta though. More details here
• A website that removes things from images in seconds- Magic Eraser 
• What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: Book Summary – here
• Podcast : Hugh Jackman – on Daily routine, intuition, meditation, decision making and more. link
• A quote that the struck right chords:

“If you are not willing to take responsibility for your situation, you cannot use your situation as an excuse either.”

Cheers, until next time!

Here are a bunch of Technical / Non-Technical topics that I came across recently and found them very resourceful.

Technical :

• Memory leaks on client side – the forgotten side of web performance. Link
• A list of helpful patterns/commands on "sed" command – link
• A “Streaming availability” api to lookup which show/movie is available in which OTT in 60+countries. Something to explore for a fun weekend project – link
• You remember the times, when there are 10 terminal sessions opened on your system and you wanted to know “at what time did I run that command” ? Ya, article addresses the same problem – link
  PS: If you use zsh, there a few themes which come in-built with this feature.
• Wordle puzzles are crazy popular in the last week or so. Here is a python project to solve the puzzles. link

Non-Technical :

• Completing part-time master’s in CS while on a full time job! This article was so inspiring also reminds, how much time we waste in general. – link
• Drop a raindrop anywhere in the world and watch where it ends up. A fun site – link
• Rocket engines, they deal with a lot of heat right? How come they don’t melt? Detailed geeky explanation – here
• An interesting Thread on Human psychology fact. link
• [Image below]: “Stop focusing on the black lines behind you. Start focusing on all of the green lines before you.”
  

• Extract from a book:

“When you worry, ask yourself, ‘What am I choosing to not see right now?’ What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom?”

The Obstacle in the Way, Ryan Holiday

Have a great week ahead!

Here are a bunch of Technical / Non-Technical topics that I came across recently and found them very resourceful.

Technical :

• CPU utilization is wrong – PS : idle waits are counted in the %CPU.
• Python : Comprehensive Python Cheatsheet
• Finished coding, but waiting for PR to be review/approved ? – The Pull Request Paradox
• Best practices can slow your application down – Best Practices vs Required Practices – link
• Profiling and analyzing performance of Python programs – link
• Also, since it is Monday:

Non-Technical :

• Naval Ravikant is a great thinker who makes you wonder on different thought processes. His reading recommendations here
• “Lessons from my PhD” – Not only on the PhD topic but in general by Prof. Austin.
• If— a wonderful poem by Rudyard Kipling here
• Although, this article is not very engaging in anyways, but the simplicity of it made me fall in love with cycling again. — “Cycling to work“
• We all know the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman for his unique way of thinking(example) but here are some Heart-Wrenching Letters from him to his late wife, Arline.
• Unless you were living under a rock, you know about James Webb Telescope launched by NASA on Dec 25th. It is fully deployed now. Here is a great comment explaining why it is a Big Deal. A video here.
• Extract from a book:

“When you are not practicing, remember, someone somewhere is practicing. And when you meet them, they will win.”

Ed Macauley

Happy and Peaceful 2022 !