Polymath Engineer Weekly #34
Polymath Engineer Weekly #34
What will you learn today?
Links of the week
The cloudy layers of modern-day programming
“Recently, I’ve come to the realization that much of what we do in modern software development is not true software engineering. We spend the majority of our days trying to configure OpenSprocket 2.3.1 to work with NeoGidgetPro5, both of which were developed by two different third-party vendors and available as only as proprietary services in FoogleServiceCloud.“
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
“Our main goal is to improve the quality of web search engines. In 1994, some people believed that a complete search index would make it possible to find anything easily. According to Best of the Web 1994 -- Navigators, "The best navigation service should make it easy to find almost anything on the Web (once all the data is entered)." However, the Web of 1997 is quite different. Anyone who has used a search engine recently, can readily testify that the completeness of the index is not the only factor in the quality of search results. "Junk results" often wash out any results that a user is interested in.“
“If you have not heard about Dragonfly - please check it out. It uses - what I hope - novel and interesting ideas backed up by the research from recent years. It’s meant to fix many problems that exist with Redis today. I have been working on Dragonfly for the last 7 months and it has been one of the more interesting and challenging projects I’ve ever done!“
“One time, I worked for 12 months on a project I believed was dumb on a team of at least 30 to 40. It made no sense why we were building it. I told my manager my feelings, and he brushed them off.
A year later, the entire project was wound down. It had never shipped past an extremely limited beta. It completely failed to generate any sort of traction or product market fit. The manager who brushed off my concerns left the team way before this and went to work on something else in the organization.“
Meetings for an effective eng organization.
“ I’d like to recommend six core meetings that I recommend every organization start with, and that I’ve found can go a surprisingly long way. These six are split across three operational meetings (each manager with their direct team, technical spec review, incident review), two developmental meetings (staff engineers, engineering managers) and finally a monthly engineering Q&A to learn what the organization is really thinking about.“
Why you can’t buy an observability solution off the shelf
“Most talk about observability is around vendor tooling. I’m using observability tooling here to refer to the software that you use for collecting, querying, and visualizing signals. There are a lot of observability vendors these days (for example, check out Gartner’s APM and Observability category). But the tooling is only one part of the story: at best, it can provide you with a platform for building an observability solution. The quality of that solution is going to depend on how good your system model is and your cognitive & perceptual model is that it’s encoded in your solution.“
Book of the Week
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.