Polymath Engineer Weekly #31
Polymath Engineer Weekly #31
Once more 'round the sun
Links of the week
You will always have more problems than engineers.
“They catalog all of the features and bugs and customer requests and tech debt and nice to haves. They try to build a complete picture of all the work so things can be compared and estimated and ordered — even though software tasks rarely have a quantifiable value. The list of work your team could do is far larger than they ever will do during their lifetimes. Enumerating that list is folly.”
Monarch: Google's Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database
“Monarch is a globally-distributed in-memory time series database system in Google. Monarch runs as a multi-tenant service and is used mostly to monitor the availability, correctness, performance, load, and other aspects of billion-user-scale applications and systems at Google. Every second, the system ingests terabytes of time series data into memory and serves millions of queries. Monarch has a regionalized architecture for reliability and scalability, and global query and configuration planes that integrate the regions into a unified system.“
“To the economics minded, the desire to release foundation models as open source is counterintuitive. Estimates for the cost of training GPT-3 run between $4.6 to $12 million, excluding staff costs and failed attempts (some startups now claim to get it down to 450k). Even Stable Diffusion’s impressive $600k cost (Emad has hinted the real number is much lower, but also said they spent 13x that (2m a100 hours) for experimentation) isn’t something to sneeze at or give away without a plan for making back the investment.“
How to Write Software With Mathematical Perfection
“Very few programmers think in terms of algorithms. When trying to write a concurrent system, if you just code it without having algorithms, there’s no way that your program is not going to be full of bugs.“
“The challenge with avoiding structures entirely is clear: prisoner's dilemmas exist and we need incentives. The challenge with small-scale and informal structures is often clear: economies of scale and gains from standardization - though sometimes there are other benefits from informal approaches that are worth losing those gains. The challenge with simply swapping the elites is clear: it has no path to socially scale into a cross-tribal consensus. “
The 4.5 Kinds of DevTool Platforms
“While storage is a commodity and it trends ever cheaper, there's a certain gravity to data that ties money wherever it goes. From a first principles point of view, if your startup went from running to not running - had data flowing in and out and then suddenly paused - your compute and networking costs would go to 0, but you'd still be charged for data at rest.“
Book of the Week
Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner
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.