This edition of the newsletter contains
Btw, enrollments are open for my Systems Design December cohort (sessions start 6th Dec). If you’d like to dig deeper into systems, their implementation, and how to design them the way they actually run in production, check out:
The course is completely no-fluff and packed with brainstorming and discussions that will shape your thought process and intuition. You’ll feel like you’re part of a real technical discussion happening at your workplace.
Say you have an idea, something that could change your company’s or product’s trajectory and fast-track your career growth. What do you do?
Most engineers follow the default playbook: chart a plan, pitch it to their leadership, and then wait for the result. But this does a disservice to the idea and undersells its potential.
We engineers often worry that sharing an idea widely will seem pushy, needy, or worse, political. But it’s not.
Politics is when multiple people want the same thing, but only one can have it. Influence becomes necessary to tip the outcome. This isn’t politics; it is not a competition but a collaboration.
It is essential to talk to many people 1:1, explain your idea, and gather feedback and support. Yes, you’re building social connections and getting people on your side, but that happens only when the idea has merit. In that case, your social capital becomes a catalyst.
Don’t let your great idea die in silence. Talk. Listen. Iterate. Build, and remember: ideas rarely win on merit alone; they win because someone cared enough to make others care too.
Being hands-on is the best way for you to learn. Practice interesting programming challenges like building your own BitTorrent client, Redis, DNS server, and even SQLite from scratch on CodeCrafters.
Sign up, and become a better engineer.
I published a video - How a Single MySQL Index Broke GitHub
Imagine you created an index on a table, and instead of boosting the performance, it led to an outage.
This happened with GitHub when, for more than 60 minutes, the site was partially down, and it was all due to an index that was created to boost the performance. This outage gives us a super-in-depth insight into MySQL and its indexing structure.
In this video,
we dissect this outage,
understand what happened,
why GitHub had to flip its index,
and conclude with 3 key takeaways.
I spent some time reading Talking in Circles: Selective Sharing in Google+
Here’s a non-Engg paper about Google+ that I read and found pretty interesting :)
It’s a 2012 paper that explores how users actually think about sharing on social platforms. Google+ had Circles as a first-class primitive, allowing users to decide who sees what every time they post.
The paper dives into interesting details about selective sharing and the motivations behind it. It gets into behavioral analysis and builds a strong argument for topic clusters and contextual boundaries. Some interesting patterns from the paper:
most people who share prefer to do so privately.
most circles were work-related, suggesting that work often serves as a preferred partition.
Give this paper a read to understand how people share content. If you’re into B2C, the data and patterns it discusses are something you’ll absolutely love.
You can download this and other papers I recommend from my papershelf.
I read a few engineering blogs almost every day, and here are the three articles I read and would recommend you read.
Thank you so much for reading this edition of the newsletter 🔮 If you found it interesting, you will also love my courses
I keep sharing no-fluff stuff across my socials, so if you resonate, do give me a follow on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and GitHub.
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