Newsletter #21: VP Engineering And VP Product: How To Create A United Front And More
Featured posts from Twitter, Lyft, GoogleAi and More
Hey there,
As always, you can read my top discoveries for the last month below. If you like this newsletter, please forward it to others who might be interested.
VP Engineering And VP Product: How To Create A United Front
It’s a nice thing for products and engineering to speak the same language. A disconnect between product and engineering can have a huge impact on this business. This is an excellent post on maintaining a united front with your VP of product or your product manager as an engineering manager.
Processing Billions Of Events In Real-Time At Twitter
A good read from the Twitter blog on moving from Lambda architecture to Kappa Architecture that allowed them to process billions of events in near real-time with high accuracy, stability, architecture simplicity, and reduced operation cost for engineers.
How And Why We Built A Custom Gradient Boosted-Tree Package
To make accurate and fast travel-time predictions, the Lyft team built a gradient boosted tree (GBT) package from the ground up to allow them to treat space and time more efficiently and yield less volatile predictions. This post provides details on how they did and why.
Grammar Correction As You Type, On Pixel 6
The addition of grammar correction makes typing on mobile devices more enjoyable. This post explains how a hybrid architecture combining a Transformer encoder and an LSTM decoder was used to build the grammar correction built into Gboard on Pixel 6.
This is an interesting article by David Stanete (@stanete) bout how to build a startup and iterate on it. The majority of startups have a clear idea of where they want to go. They don't, however, break down that concept into smaller iterative steps. Instead of evolvability, they start talking about scalability. They create large systems, reorganize ineffectively, and miss business opportunities on a regular basis.
Spotify Doesn’t Use “The Spotify Model,” And Neither Should You
Many startups are focusing their efforts on Spotify's squad model. While the Spotify squad model has some advantages, it also has significant problems. This is a great article about the difficulties Spotify has with the squad model and why they don't utilize it.
Kaylee C provides an excellent introduction to Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform. He gave a sneak peek of Kafka architecture and an example of Soundcloud leverages it.
42 Things I Learned From Building A Production Database
@maheshb led the Delos project, which is currently replacing all uses of ZooKeeper at Facebook. In the post, he shared 42 lessons he learned from building the Delos database. The lessons are widely applicable to all engineering projects.
Cheers 🎉,