Polymath Engineer Weekly #57
Feed your curiosity
Hello again.
Links of the week
Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it.
Most of this codegen/sandboxing can and should be done locally, but as the End of Localhost draws closer and more agent builders and users realize the need for cloud infrastructure for building and running these code segments of the LLM inference process, one can quite logically predict the rise of Agent Clouds to meet that demand. This is in effect a new kind of serverless infrastructure demand - one that is not just ephemeral and programmatically provisioned, but will have special affordances to provide necessary feedback to non-human operators.
Building personal and organizational prestige
Writing a great deal online, and working at companies during periods when they invested heavily in their external engineering brand, I’ve seen the opportunities and limitations of personal and organizational brand building. From those experiences, I’ve come to believe that the value of brand building is overemphasized, but that the impact of enhancing prestige is underrated, and that there’s a relatively straightforward playbook to increase your personal and organizational prestige.
The reality of Big Tech's 'fake work' problem
"The bigger your team you have, the more qualified people you have in your team, the more weight you have in the company," Graham, the former Amazon employee, said. "It's what we call empire building. You're not focused on building a product; you're focused on building an empire. That leads to fake work and unnecessary bloating."
Lifting the veil on Meta’s microservice architecture: Analyses of topology and request workflows
The microservice architecture is a novel paradigm for building and operating distributed applications in many organizations. This paradigm changes many aspects of how distributed applications are built, managed, and operated in contrast to monolithic applications. It introduces new challenges to solve and requires changing assumptions about previously well-known ones. But, today, the characteristics of large-scale microservice architectures are invisible outside their organizations, depressing opportunities for research. Recent studies provide only partial glimpses and represent only single design points. This paper enriches our understanding of large-scale microservices by characterizing Meta’s microservice architecture.
▶ Twitter vs Threads is More Interesting Than You Think
Threads, a Twitter clone is officially the most rapidly downloaded app in history, gaining 100 million users in 5 days. Yes, using instagram to populate the app played a large part in it's growth, but what's more interesting in the protocol Meta plans to use. Who will come out on top? What about privacy issues? In this episode, we look at the boiling feud between two billionaires.
Book of the Week
Euclid's Window : The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace
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.