Leave your job with grace and gratitude
This edition of the newsletter contains
one quick write-up that will help you grow faster in your career
a video I posted
a paper I read
I have also shared 3 super-interesting articles 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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Leave your job with grace and gratitude
It is quite natural to feel a dip in motivation toward the end, but how you exit reflects your professionalism. There are some situations where you might not have been treated well, but no matter the circumstances, it’s important to leave on a high note.
do not complain
do not try to pull down your peers
refrain from insulting or blaming
stay respectful, express gratitude, and focus on the positives
fulfill your responsibilities diligently until your last day
More importantly, thoroughly document your work, hand over tasks, and ensure a smooth transition for whoever takes over leaving no loose ends whatsoever.
I’ve made my share of mistakes in the past, and I can tell you firsthand how crucial it is to leave on a good note. It is a small world out there and it gets even smaller at the top.
Most people are no more than two degrees of separation away and burning bridges, even unintentionally, can have long-term consequences. Try to be remembered as a dependable, positive, and respectful professional.
It’s not just about how you start a job; how you end it matters just as much.
Here's the video I posted
I published a video - How Razorpay Designed and Scaled their Notification System
Razorpay is one of the most popular payment gateways and the guarantees they seek from their notification systems are quite different from the usual ones we build or observe.
I spent some time exploring this deeper and compiled my learnings in this video talking about their scaling strategies, how they meet SLA, and more importantly the design decisions and trade-offs they took to meet their specific needs.
Paper I read and would highly recommend
I spent some time reading Amazon Redshift re-invented
I read a paper about Amazon Redshift; it covers the challenges of scaling analytics systems in the cloud and what makes it cost-effective, performant, and operationally seamless.
The paper covers some critical foundational concepts shared across analytics systems, like massively parallel processing, columnar storage, and advanced query execution strategies.
I already read the paper I can say that reading this paper will make it easy for you to understand every single analytics system out there. A few things that I found super interesting from the paper are
generating runtime-optimized C++ code for queries
FPGA-driven query acceleration that pushes operations closer to the data
decoupled storage system combining S3 with SSD caching for scalability and performance.
More importantly, the paper helps you build the right engineering intuition driving all the key decisions that made Redshift what it is today. It's a super interesting read for anyone interested in distributed storage and compute systems.
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 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
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