It is okay to know things at a surface level
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.
If you find this newsletter helpful, do spread the word about my newsletter on social media. It would mean the world to me :-)
It is okay to know things at surface level
Most good engineers I worked with had a common trait - they just happen to know a lot of random stuff, facts, and practices at the surface level while being pro at a few ?
The conversations with them were always fun and insightful as they kept telling and sharing interesting nuggets. Although they were not an expert in those, they did have a primitive idea and understanding of what they were talking about.
They built this by reading articles and watching videos on seemingly interesting topics that they stumbled upon while surfing the internet. They consumed it even though the topics were unrelated to the domain they worked on.
Being open to learning new things is a sign of deep interest in the field and spending time exploring it builds a muscle to learn and grasp varied concepts. An interesting by-product of doing this is cross-pollination, where you can connect the dots draw parallels across fields, and come up with out-of-the-box solutions.
The stuff I am talking about may seem like standalone concepts and facts. Some of them are advanced data structures and algorithms, some fragments of database internals, communication protocols, interesting design choices made by some companies, common pitfalls of using a particular tech, etc.
Now, these facts and understandings are not learned and built overnight, and neither they are learned at your workplaces. These are built by consistently spending time self-studying.
To be honest, this is not difficult to achieve, just make sure you spend some time (say 30 minutes) every weekday to learn stuff that you find interesting and build a genuine interest in those topics.
Over time, you will build momentum and turn learning into a habit and find yourself dissecting complex concepts with ease, drawing connections between seemingly unrelated topics, and confidently navigating the landscape.
ps: there is no need to sacrifice your weekends, 30 minutes every weekday over 3 years is more than enough time to build a really good understanding and become a better engineer.
?? Video I posted this week
This week I posted Understanding Database Trade-offs - The RUM Conjecture
Databases are all about tradeoffs and each database makes a different type of tradeoff to cater to a niche. But is there a structured way to look at these tradeoffs?
领英推荐
In this video - yet another research paper dissection - we go through the paper titled the RUM Conjecture which talks about different trade-offs a database could make and provides us with a framework to look at them in a structured fashion.
This framework will not only help you when you are designing a new database, but it will also help you when you are trying to pick one for your architecture.
?? Research paper I read this week
This week I spent reading BonsaiKV: Key-Value Store with Tiered and Heterogeneous Memory System
BonsaiKV is a multi-tiered database in which hot data resides in RAM while colder one moves to SSD. A good feature that sets it apart is its ability to promote the frequently accessed SSD data back to DRAM, maintaining performance.
Moving data back and forth across tiers is a pain, but adaptability is what makes it different, and something worth taking a bet.
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 top three articles I would recommend you to read.
Thank you so much for reading this edition of the newsletter ?? If you found it interesting, you will also love my courses
Consultor Empresarial | Fortalecimiento y Productividad | Direccionamiento | Planeación Estratégica | Estructuración Organizacional | Administración y Gestión Productiva | Gestión de Costos y Presupuestos | Proyectos.
9 个月Este artículo hace reflexionar a algunas personas con respecto al hecho en un mundo globalizado, dinámico y cambiante que para afrontarlo en cualquier campo, disciplina y escenario, en donde cualquier persona se desempe?e o relacione, requiere de un abanico de conocimiento y experticia en varias temáticas para lograr hacer, crear, realizar o desempe?arse con una diferenciación. Concluyendo es indispensable estar consultando, investigando, estudiando y fortaleciéndose en varias temáticas para marcar una diferencia, la cual hoy en un mundo tan competitivo lo hace requerido.??
Engineer @ Meta
9 个月I am fan of these gifs! Do you doodle them or something?
Life & Business Strategist. MBA, MA Psychology, ICF. CEO, Kaspari Life Academy. Host of the Unshakeable People Podcast. Habits & Behaviour Design, Neuroscience. I shape MINDS and build LEADERS.
9 个月I agree, connection poolers are a game-changer for optimizing database performance! ??
Engineering @ Oracle || x-Microsoft, VMware || Database Internals || Distributed systems || Build and scale data systems || Real-time Analytics || Big Data || ML and Deep learning |
9 个月Postgres requires connection pooling to scale because of its process per connection architecture. It is common to use "pgbouncer" to do connection pooling and handle many connections. It's interesting to know different connection poolers for Postgres. Thanks for sharing.