tl;dr:“If someone cannot explain a concept without jargon, I now doubt they truly understand what they are talking about. The true test of properly understanding a given topic is whether you can teach it to someone else. Explaining your thoughts without the use of jargon - or gradually introducing jargon - is a form of teaching, as you need to adopt to someone who has less domain knowledge.” Gergely provides us with 4 tips on how to improve our critical thinking skills.
tl;dr:Gergely analyzes data points from Indeed and Hacker News to conclude the following: (1) There was a peak in software developer positions posted between mid-2021 and mid-2022. (2) The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020. (3) Germany, France and Australia still have significantly more jobs than in February 2020.
tl;dr:Gergely covers: (1) The history of Uber’s data centers. (2) Challenges of operating your own data centers - hard drives, ODM woes, and the automation of data center maintenance. (3) Incentives and pull factors from Covid-19, the Postmates acquisition, and CapEx and OpEx costs. (4) Cloud basics. A primer on data centers, regions, and availability zones. What these mean for public Cloud providers and businesses like Uber.
tl;dr:"We’re diving into a massive migration project by Khan Academy, involving moving one million lines of Python code and splitting them across more than 40 services, mostly in Go, as part of a migration that took 3.5 years and involved around 100 software engineers."
tl;dr:Gergely discusses rapid shifts in the engineering job market. "It’s certain we’ll see a correction of 2021-22’s hiring frenzy and it’s a given that Big Tech will hire much less this year than in 2022, while the question remains whether other large tech companies will follow suit and announce layoffs in the coming months."
tl;dr:Gergely interprets the following software engineering or engineering management case studies from tech companies: (1) Trello choosing Kafka over RabbitMQ for messaging. (2) Why Birdie moved to Micro Frontends. (3) Why MetalBear settled on Rust. (4) Why Motive moved over to Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile.
tl;dr:Gergely covers topics such as How Frontend Engineers Work, Engineering Practices, Technologies, Developer Tools, and more. "27% of respondents reported working at a company with more than 50 frontend engineers. At the same time, 30% of developers shared how 5 or fewer frontend developers work at their company. 50% of respondents work at companies with 10 or more frontend engineers."
tl;dr:Gergely covers examples of companies that have carried out large scale migrations, including: (1) Box: a zero downtime data migration using a 6-step plan. (2) Pinterest: data migration using double writes. (3) LinkedIn: navigating the migration chaos when 100+ engineers were needed to write code and 600+ use cases need to be moved. And more.
tl;dr:"Understanding the ins and outs of distributed systems is important for both backend engineers and for anyone working with large-scale systems. Large-scale systems can mean systems with high load and high queries per second (QPS), storing a large amount of data, or ones built with low latency and high reliability. These systems are pretty common across both Big Tech and high-growth startups."
tl;dr:"A series in which I interpret interesting software engineering or engineering management case studies from tech companies. You might learn something new in these articles, as we dive into the concepts they contain." Includes: (1) Resilient payments systems learnings from Shopify. (2) Designing a solution to store and access millions of records by Grab. (3) The challenges of the analytics infrastructure platform team at Yelp. And more.