Polymath Engineer Weekly #70
Interviews, Growth, Teapots, Streaming, Hooks, Resilience and SLOs
Hello again.
Links of the week
My favorite coding question to give candidates
The question is not particularly difficult, but it does require a little bit of thinking and knowledge of code complexity and data structures. You can easily get the customers that came on both days, you can easily get the customers that visited at least two unique pages, but getting the intersection of those two efficiently requires a little more work.
Tech is Going to Get Much Bigger
I know that this sounds insane and hyperbolic. And for a while, it will be. Optimus can move some blocks around, like a baby. Figure 01 can walk, like my 1-year-old. And I need to tell ChatGPT exactly what I want done, and keep pushing it to get a result I’m happy with, like an intern.
Sorry Computer, You’re Not a Teapot
Anyway, Masinter’s final bit of satire was a demonstration of short-sighted additions to status codes, which are meant to be enduring and as universal as possible. Instead, he introduced an error status code that was as narrow in scope as you can image. 418: I'm a teapot, indicating that the request is indeed not a coffee pot, but instead a teapot, and accompanied by the description “resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.” It was ridiculous and unnecessary, much like the other status codes Masinter had seen suggested over the years.
Revolutionizing Real-Time Streaming Processing: 4 Trillion Events Daily at LinkedIn
The Apache Beam APIs enabled LinkedIn engineers to implement business logic once within a unified Apache Beam pipeline that efficiently handles both real-time standardization and backfilling. Apache Beam offers PipelineOptions, enabling the configuration and customization of various aspects, such as the pipeline runner and runner-specific configurations. The extensibility of Apache Beam transforms allowed LinkedIn to create a custom composite transform to abstract away I/O differences and switch target processing on the fly based on data source type (bounded or unbounded).
Headless Component: a pattern for composing React UIs
The magic lies in the useDropdown hook, our protagonist—the Headless Component. This versatile unit houses everything a dropdown needs: whether it's open, the selected item, the highlighted item, reactions to the Enter key, and so forth. The beauty is its adaptability; you can pair it with various visual presentations—your JSX elements.
Paper: Four Concepts for Resilience Engineering
The paper opens by admitting that the popularity of the term has led to confusion regarding what it means in the first place. I recall seeing other papers which held the ill-defined term as one of the biggest weakness of a discipline named after it. All the different uses seen around the place have been categorized into 4 groups by Woods: rebounding, robustness, graceful extensibility, and sustained adaptability.
Book of the Week
Implementing Service Level Objectives: A Practical Guide to SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets
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.