Polymath Engineer Weekly #68
Food for thought
Hello again.
Links of the week
⏯︎ How We Designed the Car I'll DRIVE UPSIDE DOWN
This is the story of how we found the perfect car to drive upside down, how we made it produce more downforce than an F1 car and how we overcame a multitude of design problems, many of which you might not have thought about.
There remain good arguments against the entire concept of the chip ban, including the obvious fact that China is heavily incentivized to built up replacements from scratch (and could have leverage on the U.S. on the trailing edge): perhaps in 20 years the U.S. will not only have lost its most potent point of leverage but will also see its most cutting edge companies undercut by Chinese competition.
How DoorDash Standardized and Improved Microservices Caching
Caching has long been a go-to strategy to improve performance and reduce costs. However, the lack of a uniform approach to caching has led to complications. Here we explain how we have streamlined caching through a Kotlin library, offering backend developers a fast, safe, and efficient way to introduce new caches.
I have good news and bad news: we are not children.
There is no parent to protect us, and even if there were, it might do more harm than good. So drop the illusion. Embrace risk. Roam free. Live vigorously.
The reason we’ve made so much progress over the past half-century despite our decelerating risk appetite is that a brave few have chosen to take risk on and win. I write about the entrepreneurs among them, but they’re everywhere. Someone probably pops to mind for you.
Kora: A Cloud-Native Event Streaming Platform For Kafka
Kora deploys two significant departures from Kafka architecture: 1. Metadata has been pulled out of Zookeeper and into an internal topic, and 2. the storage layer now has two tiers: local volumes on brokers & an object store (e.g., S3).
Text is the most flexible communication technology. Pictures may be worth a thousand words, when there's a picture to match what you're trying to say. But let's hit the random button on wikipedia and pick a sentence, see if you can draw a picture to convey it, mm?
Book of the Week
Hello, Startup: A Programmer's Guide to Building Products, Technologies, and Teams
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.