"How can you not know this?" is the worst thing you can say ⚡
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“How can you not know this?” is the worst thing you can say ⚡
Junior engineers or someone slightly unfamiliar with the domain have relatively trivial doubts and when they put forth such questions, it is important to handle them with humility.
This also happens during presentations and meetings where some people are quick to interrupt and point out the gaps in the understanding. In most cases, this is done for desperate participation, visibility, and to earn some leadership brownie points.
If you are a senior engineer or not, it does not matter. It is important to be respectful, humble, and polite. Not knowing something does not mean not having the ability to understand. It is important to acknowledge that everyone has taken a unique path to reach where they are.
Humility is the ability to acknowledge your expertise while recognizing the potential for growth in every interaction. And that, in my experience, is the hallmark of a truly exceptional engineer.
Choice of words matters, and humility matters.
Because nobody wants to work with a genius jerk.
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📹 Video I posted this week
This week I posted What exactly is the HTTP protocol and how to write a new one from scratch?
We all use the word protocol often, but what exactly are they?
HTTP is the most common protocol out there that we use every day while surfing the internet writing backend APIs, or consuming them in our applications. But how does it look?
In this video, we go deep and understand what protocols really are, what is an HTTP protocol, how it looks, and what it takes for you to write your own protocol from scratch.
🧠 Paper I read this week
This week I spent reading TreeLine: An Update-In-Place Key-Value Store for Modern Storage
I spent this weekend reading the paper titled TreeLine which proposes a new KV store optimized for modern storage like NVMe
KV stores are traditionally designed to prioritize write performance through techniques like append-only LSM trees. This comes at the expense of read performance and write amplification. TreeLine flips the approach by leveraging the capabilities of NVMe – where random writes are no longer a bottleneck. It proposes an update-in-place design, ditching the append-only approach.
You can download this and other papers I recommend from my papershelf.
The algorithm that makes PNG lossless.
I got curious about image formats and started exploring the difference between JPEG and PNG, here's something that you will find fascinating.
JPEG is a lossy format which means it throws away some data to get a higher compression rate, while PNG does not.
PNG tries to balance between the sizes of the image and the exactness (quality) of the image using a compression technique called DEFLATE which uses a combination of LZ77 and Huffman.
LZ77 finds the repeating patterns in the image data, storing a reference to them instead of the entire data itself. For example, if the next 100 pixels are red in color, instead of storing color for them individually, it combines the information and stores it as "next 100 pixels are red"; thus saving space when colors are consecutively repeated.
Huffman Coding helps in assigning shorter codes to more frequent colors and longer codes to less frequent colors, saving significant space.
This indicates that PNG is a great format for images that contain fewer colors and patterns; but if the image is vibrant and contains lots of patterns the file size might be larger than the JPEG counterpart.
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📰 Interesting 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.
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