Be an active listener at work ?

Thank you so much for resonating with what I share in this newsletter. I hope the content I share and the resources I list are making you a better engineer and accelerating your career growth. If you want me to share something else, let me know by dropping me a message or leaving a comment on the post.

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?? Career growth nugget

Be an active listener at work ?

When in a meeting or a discussion, good engineers don't just hear the words, they actively listen to understand the intent and context. This helps them zoom out and understand the bigger picture.

They ask the right questions at the right time which clarifies ambiguities, validates assumptions, and prevents going down the wrong path in development. This not only elevates the entire discussion but also ensures the team (and transitively the organization) makes fewer mistakes.

Active listening also gives the necessary visibility and indicates a high ownership mindset. This is definitely what every single manager dreams of. So, the next time when you are in a meeting, keep your camera on and do not doze off; be an active listener.

You can find this post on my LinkedIn and Twitter; do leave a like.

?? Video I posted this week

This week I posted The Compression Algorithm that Powers All Time-series Databases.

Time-series databases are supposed to accept large amounts of numerical data but storing them without compression will bloat up the entire disk shooting up the cost and making retrieval much slower.

In this video, we take an in-depth look into a very popular compression/encoding algorithm called Delta Encoding which almost all time-series databases use to store the data. Apart from looking into what it is and how it works, we will also go through the implementation of it in Golang and benchmark the impact.

?? Research paper I read this week

This week I spent reading Panda: Performance Debugging for Databases Using LLM Agents

This paper is by Amazon and talks about generating contextual, actionable, and accurate recommendations for debugging performance issues in databases improving over the generic and vague answers provided by the LLMs currently available.

You can download this and other papers I recommend from my papershelf.

?? Articles I read this week

I read a few engineering blogs almost every single day, and here are the three articles I would recommend you to read.

• Nobody Cares About Your Git History
• CRDTs Turned Inside Out
• Lossy CSS compression for fun and loss (or profit)

Thank you so much for reading this edition of the newsletter ?? If you found it interesting, you will also love my courses

1. System Design Course for Beginners
2. System Design Course for Experienced Engineers
3. Redis Internals Course

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