One Career Bet Worth Taking

such a mission takes you out of your comfort zone, but it gives you the drive and the energy for the next few years of your life. This isn't just about building a product; it's about creating ...

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 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.

---

By the way,

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.

---

One Career Bet Worth Taking

at least once in your career, take a step back, and

• find an audacious problem worth solving

• join a team with passion and grit

• find a leader who is chasing the goal day in and day out

such a mission takes you out of your comfort zone, but it gives you the drive and the energy for the next few years of your life. This isn't just about building a product; it's about creating something that resonates deeply with you.

Such a bet, in most cases, will give you an undifferentiated monetary outcome. If not that, then at least the satisfaction that we all chase. Remember, such decisions are high-risk, high-reward. So, chase them only when you have a risk appetite.

The most remarkable and memorable journeys begin with a single, courageous decision. When you find the right match, there is nothing like it, and to be honest, it is fun :)

---

Here's the video I posted

I published a video - Kademlia - a Distributed Hash Table implementation | Paper Dissection and Deep-dive

I dissected the Kademlia paper in this deep dive, exploring its XOR-based routing, efficient lookups, and fault tolerance. This protocol powers P2P networks like BitTorrent and Ethereum.

Trust me, you will fall in love with the CS after watching this.

---

Paper I read and would highly recommend

I spent some time reading Amazon DynamoDB: A scalable, predictably performant, and fully managed NoSQL database service

This week, I recommend reading an old, yet classic, paper about DynamoDB.

The paper talks about the key design decisions that helped it scale to meet the demands of some of the largest workloads in the world while maintaining predictable performance and operational simplicity.

By the way, I also have a video where dissected the paper covering every single nuance from the paper and explaining it in a highly practical manner. The video will help you build the right intuition to understand any and every distributed database out there.

Give it a watch.

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.

• Distributed Systems Programming Has Stalled

• Postgres as a Graph Database: (Ab)using pgRouting

• 3,200% CPU Utilization

---

Thank you so much for reading this edition of the newsletter 🔮 If you found it interesting, you will also love my courses

1. System Design Course for Beginners

2. System Design Course for SDE-2, SDE-3, and above

3. Redis Internals Course

---

I keep sharing no fluff stuff across my socials, so if you resonate, do give me a follow on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and GitHub.