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comvidyarthi

25 karma · joined February 20, 2017

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comvidyarthi··on Garage: Open-Source Distributed Object Storage
Is this open source ?
comvidyarthi··on Transactions Are Not Locks (2022)
I don’t understand the title of the article. The article essentially talks about what RepeatableRead isolation levels of Postgresql cannot do and how to remedy that by Serialize Isolation. But both need lock at some level, and tradeoff performance guarantees for weaker/stronger consistency guarantees.
comvidyarthi··on Ambry: LinkedIn’s Scalable Geo-Distributed Object Store
I have worked on Ambry for a few years now. This paper is a bit old, but captures most of the core concepts of Ambry.

Some of the most fascinating parts of the journey after this paper have been scaling the system to support hundreds of GiBps of throughput per cluster, multiple workloads supporting other databases and stream processing systems, and rethinking the replication to make it compatible with public cloud. Checkout the GitHub repo to learn more https://github.com/linkedin/ambry

comvidyarthi··on Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around
I want to point out that a person’s is not a static thing. You are not born with whatever you are “worth”. You either build your worthiness over time, or lose it. I think instead of propagating that most people are horrible devs, we should try to tell people that it’s always an acquired skill. So everyone (and I really mean everyone) can work to acquire the skills, and become a “worthy” dev.
comvidyarthi··on How to Hire Great Engineers
I do not agree with the premise that the best way to hire engineers is to follow the hire—chef model of restaurants. I don’t think it’s fair in any way to ask someone to work for free for few days, while you keep the candidate guessing whether you will give the job to the candidate or not. Also how can one plan to hire engineers who already have day jobs? Should the engineers take 3 days leave from their employer every-time they try to interview?

This kind of model is way too biased towards employers and gives them too much power to exploit, in an environment where employers anyways have a lot of power as compared to one employee (prospective candidate in fact, not even employee). This reasoning works well for companies whose job is to recruit or help recruit engineers. After all, they are being paid by the employer and not the candidate, so they want to make the process optimal for the employers. But as much as I like the doing the right thing for customer attitude, this seems like taking that to an extreme and exploiting everything that isn’t paying.

comvidyarthi··on Ask HN: What makes a good technical leader – any recommended books?
Read The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier. It’s not just about managers, it’s also about tech leads.
comvidyarthi··on Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?
I dont think there is a way to know which one thing in the list of potential 1000 things, will be the one that has highest payoff. And the definition of payoff also depends on what your goals are. For examples, learning computer networking concepts will have different payoff for someone who wants to get a PhD in Machine Learning (it will help him/her write better software maybe, or add to his/her list of employable skills), vs someone who is building distributed systems. So you have to take some bets. Think about stuff like what one or two things you can learn in next 6 months that will get you closer to your most coveted goals. And just try to focus on them. If there are more than 1/2 things, filter them out based on what gets you excited more. At the end, its all about your perspective.
comvidyarthi··on Ask HN: What Hacker News comments have you bookmarked?
This is a very interesting take. The only problem in using this analogy for social media companies is that in a coffee shop you pay for the coffee. In case of social media you don’t pay for anything. So there is no incentive to maintain your privacy:
comvidyarthi··on The habit of habit engineering
The best way of tracking that has worked for me over the years has been automatic tracking. For example my fitness band automatically tracks my workouts and gives me the summary, it automatically tracks my sleep too, my meditation app automatically tracks my meditation sessions, writing a blog as a part of completing the understanding of something new I learnt automatically tracks my learnings. Keeping things simple and automated is the best way to go as far as tracking is concerned.
comvidyarthi··on Ask HN: Pros and cons of working at a startup in 2018?
If you are in FAANG, and in bay area, then your numbers look too low. I know mid-level engineers in bay area, can make ~300k. All this assuming a good engineer who has been performing consistently, and is among the top 10% in his/her team.
comvidyarthi··on Ask HN: Which non-programming books are a beneficial read for programmers?
I really liked "The Effective Engineer" by Edmond Lau. Its not intended for starting your own company. But it has some good insight for doing good in your job and how to grow as a software engineer. https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Engineer-Engineering-Dispro...