Polymath Engineer Weekly #21
Back with more interesting reads
Links of the week
How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum
“How you run teams should depend on your context. Relevant factors include your organizational structure, the people you work with, the autonomy and skills of those people, your competition, whether you’re operating in “wartime” or “peacetime.” The list goes on.“
The Latency/Throughput Tradeoff: Why Fast Services Are Slow And Vice Versa
“When a storage system like ElasticSearch has to serve both high-latency and high-throughput workloads, it is guaranteed to get ugly. This fact is super important, which is why I’m devoting this blog post to exploring the relationships among latency, throughput, and capacity from a queueing perspective.“
System Design for Recommendations and Search
“It’s uncommon to see system design discussed in machine learning papers or blogs; most focus on model design, training data, and/or loss functions. Nonetheless, the handful of papers that discuss implementation details elucidate design patterns and best practices that are hard to gain outside of hands-on experience.“
“Decrease the certainty or the size of a task's reward - its expectancy or its value - and you are unlikely to pursue its completion with any vigor. Increase the delay for the task's reward and our susceptibility to delay - impulsiveness - and motivation also dips.“
The Hacker's Guide to Investors
“Investors will often reject you for what seem to be superficial reasons. I read of one VC who turned down a startup simply because they'd given away so many little bits of stock that the deal required too many signatures to close. [4] The reason investors can get away with this is that they see so many deals. It doesn't matter if they underestimate you because of some surface imperfection, because the next best deal will be almost as good“
Your Circuit Breaker is Misconfigured
“Circuit breakers are an incredibly powerful tool for making your application resilient to service failure. But they aren’t enough. Most people don’t know that a slightly misconfigured circuit is as bad as no circuit at all! Did you know that a change in 1 or 2 parameters can take your system from running smoothly to completely failing?“
Book of the week
Practical Haskell: A Real World Guide to Programming
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.