Before you form an opinion, experience it
It's easy to jump to conclusions and form opinions based on what others say. But nothing beats firsthand experience. Before forming a strong opinion, take the time to see and understand things for you
This edition of the newsletter contains
I have also shared 3 super-interesting articles to read over the weekend. Thank you once again for reading this edition of my Newsletter. Now, without further ado, let’s jump right in.
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Before you form an opinion, experience it
It's easy to jump to conclusions and form opinions based on what others say. But nothing beats firsthand experience. Before forming a strong opinion, take the time to see and understand things for yourself, i.e., experience it.
When you go through something, you see the full picture - the good, the bad, and everything in between. You get into the nuances that someone with secondhand information would lack. That's when your opinion truly holds weight.
Firsthand experience also sharpens judgment and does not just teach you what works, but also
why it works, and
why certain things don't
It helps in building empathy because once you've lived through something, you can better connect with others in similar situations. Plus, it gives you the much-needed confidence to talk about it and tackle similar problems in the future.
This holds for all things work and all things learning.
If you're trying to make an impact, participate in design discussions, mentor people, make decisions, or navigate uncertainty - experience matters, because real impact demands real understanding.
And the best part? It holds for life, too.
Here's a video from me
I published a video - How an ALTER TABLE Caused a Massive GitHub Outage
Can an ALTER TABLE command bring down your entire production environment?
GitHub experienced a significant outage, and the root cause was a schema migration gone wrong. In this video, I broke down the incident and performed an in-depth analysis to uncover 5 key insights that you can apply to your own systems.
I have also covered a clever mitigation technique they employed to restore service and discussed a possible long-term fix to prevent similar issues in the future.
Here's a paper I recently read
I spent some time reading Efficient Search Ranking in Social Networks
Remember Orkut? the OG social network. Some time back, I read a paper from Google where they talk about how to implement ranking and relevance when someone searches for a person's name.
The core insight from the paper is simple - people care about people from their social graph, they do not care about keywords. So, the most relevant people are - from their circles + broadening it as we go deeper.
The paper approximates social distance by precomputing distance vectors from seed nodes (randomly chosen people). The distance between two people is an approximation of the distance between their closest two seed points.
With this insight, the lookup becomes lightweight and the ranking becomes effective. Each ranking query leverages this graph and spits out results in less than 5ms, which is a 400x latency improvement over classic methods of that time.
The approach is lossy but behaviourally aligned. They did not follow classic IR metrics to rank the results and measure the impact, but rather leveraged heuristics and intuition to solve this problem.
It is certainly easy and interesting to read. If you have ever used ElasticSearch, you will be at ease reading this paper. Give it a shot.
You can download this and other papers I recommend from my papershelf.
Three interesting articles I read
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
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