Technical Overview

• Key Principles (Explanations):

  • Optimize for iteration speed
  • Target architecture for at most 10x scale
  • Use boring technology

• Architecture: People should create diagrams of known systems and then their own systems.

  • Modularity.
  • Layering
  • Physical vs Logical views

• Technology basics and tools to inspect.

  • OS: Isolation, Containers/VMs, System Calls
  • Networking: TCP/IP, DNS
  • Security: symmetric, asymmetric. confidentiality, integrity.
  • The web: HTTP, HTML, CSS. DOM.
  • ML: neural nets, backprop
  • Persistence: memory hierarchy. SQL (ACID) vs NoSQL.
  • Concurrency. Locks, races, etc.

• Performance

  • Amdahl’s Law
  • throughput vs latency
  • Pipelining

• Programming: You need to be able to read code

  • Functional/Imperative/Declarative
  • OO Patterns. Composition/Inheritance.

• Practical Software Development

  • Testing and test pyramids
  • Logs, metrics and other observability
  • Dependency management
  • Build systems
  • Version control
  • Deployment, feature flags

• Debugging

  • Julia Evans writing