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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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.
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📹 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?
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.
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There is a saying that goes : Jack of All trades and King of none. We all arrive at this place at some time… either we know something very deep or we know just enough to get things done. In my early career I strived too much to be an expert and don’t even bother to learn something that was slightly off from my expert domain but then one of my director gave me this golden advice : We have too many experts but we have lack of generalist… I want you to become one… That opened me a different perspective of this King of none category. That’s when I realized this world do need generalist especially for cases where you don’t have experts any more and if industry were too much dependent on experts, it is not sustainable. Great article I really enjoyed, Arpit