Polymath Engineer Weekly #59
What are you waiting for?
Hello again.
Links of the week
I always urge builders to consider the evolution of their systems over time and make sure the foundation is such that you can change and expand them with the minimum number of dependencies. Event-driven architectures (EDA) and microservices are a good match for that. However, if there are a set of services that always contribute to the response, have the exact same scaling and performance requirements, same security vectors, and most importantly, are managed by a single team, it is a worthwhile effort to see if combining them simplifies your architecture.
Rethinking infrastructure as code from scratch
The ironic thing is that the current state of most infrastructure of code being written today is still similar to that of ancient HTML of 30 years ago, before CSS. Most infrastructure as code users define cloud resources in rigorous detail and each resource has a full list of properties and settings on it that configure that resource, but that resource alone. These configurations can become even more complex than HTML styling. Often a single cloud resource may require tens of lines of configuration for the 20-30 properties that define that resource’s settings and behavior.
Sentence Transformers: Meanings in Disguise
The problem here is that we create an information bottleneck between the two models. We’re creating a massive amount of information over multiple time steps and trying to squeeze it all through a single connection. This limits the encoder-decoder performance because much of the information produced by the encoder is lost before reaching the decoder.
The attention mechanism provided a solution to the bottleneck issue. It offered another route for information to pass through. Still, it didn’t overwhelm the process because it focused attention only on the most relevant information.
The earliest memories I have of taking notes are in primary school. I would copy word-for-word what the teacher would say or write on the board. Things like definitions and multiplication tables. Then I’d go home, study what I’d copied, and eventually take a test. In practice, I was learning to encode, store, and recall information. When you think about it, it’s a bit like S3.
How to Build Software like an SRE
Note that this list is a weird in some ways coming from an SRE. My goal here isn’t “what is 100% the most reliability-oriented way we can build things”, it’s more like “what is the 80% of reliability we can get for 20% of the effort while still enabling devs to go fast“, which gets you ultimately a system that looks pretty different. But it’s a line worth walking – if you do it well, working with production is fun, instead of miserably-safe or frighteningly-dangerous.
⏯ How to measure and improve developer productivity
Dr. Nicole Forsgren is a developer productivity and DevOps expert who works with engineering organizations to make work better. Best known as co-author of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book Accelerate and the DevOps Handbook, 2nd edition and author of the State of DevOps Reports, she has helped some of the biggest companies in the world transform their culture, processes, tech, and architecture. Nicole is currently a Partner at Microsoft Research, leading developer productivity research and strategy, and a technical founder/CEO with a successful exit to Google. In a previous life, she was a software engineer, sysadmin, hardware performance engineer, and professor. She has published several peer-reviewed journal papers, has been awarded public and private research grants (funders include NASA and the NSF), and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Computerworld, and InformationWeek.
Book of the Week
How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
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