Polymath Engineer Weekly #11
Links for the curious mind.
Hello again. We have two updates this week. The first one is that we are under a new domain: weekly.polymathengineer.dev.
The other one is that now we have a paid subscription offer. If somehow this newsletter brings some value to your career and you would like to support my work, then upgrade your subscription. 🤑
So, are you ready to see what we have today?
Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
Building a distributed system is a complex task. If some of these notes are not obvious to you, it is a starting point to learn more about the subject.
The builder pattern can be useful when you have multiple ways to populate a data structure and still need to ensure it is valid.
It is cool how you can use Rust’s Option and Result types to lean on the compiler to make sure it is correct.
Don't Believe the Hype: Apple's M2 GPU is No Game Changer
“The M1 was the first 5nm-class processor to hit the market back in 2020. Two years later, TSMC's next-generation 3nm technology isn't quite ready, so Apple has to make do with an optimized N5P node, a "second-generation 5nm process." That means transistor density hasn't really changed much, which means Apple has to use larger chips to get more transistors and performance.“
An oral history of Bank Python
It is interesting to see a different perspective on some investment banks’ software architecture. Sometimes we get hyped in Big Tech stories and forget about building systems that solve the problems we have. Some further discussion on this Hacker News thread.
Cache made consistent: Meta’s cache invalidation solution
“At Meta, we operate some of the largest cache deployments in the world, including TAO and Memcache. Over the years, we’ve improved TAO’s cache consistency by one measure, from 99.9999 percent (six nines) to 99.99999999 percent (10 nines).“
Understanding Clojure's Persistent Vectors
I am currently implementing persistent data structures on a side project. This series of posts has been of great help.
This is so well illustrated and covers in depth how Clojure delivers efficient immutable data structures.
“While most of us focus on consuming information that we won’t care about next month, let alone next year, Buffett focused on knowledge and companies that change very, very slowly or not at all. And because the information he was learning changed slowly he could compound his knowledge over time.”
Book of the week
You can learn a lot by trying to break things.
Even if you are not interested in security and pentest, this book is a good resource to learn more about Go, protocols and computer networks.
Hope you enjoyed the links. Have a nice week ;)
Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.