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How does private equity businesses operating better improve our retirement savings? Wont they just improve the PE fund performance and benefit only the investors ?I am genuinely curious as its very difficult to find public information on how they actually function

In my 20 years of engineering, all my distributed systems knowledge was learnt in a period of two years under two amazing engineers working in two failed startups

One was like those legendary OG dogmatic distributed systems software engineer that you can meet and the other was an OG data platform person. They have zero social media presence but they have guaranteed jobs whomever they call.

I learnt my transactions and services from engineer 1 and my analytic/data platform fundamentals from engineer 2

I have made more money in the enterprise land but I think the two failed startups did 10x more to help me grow as an engineer

I am rather confident that an AI cannot come close to what I do and my management knows that

Why is this sloppy. The author is not saying that AI is bad but that the current capital being invested in the UD is mostly betting on AI.

If you remove AI then what is left?

   you're _Google_, your own work is always at risk of getting co-opted by others, and external people will view and criticize your work accordingly.

This rang so true to me and it probably applies for all large tech companies. I have realized that getting attached to a particular project is bad for my mental health.

Product support is an integral part of enterprise software engineering. Product management does not know what adding a new feature or deprecating an old feature means. It is the responsibility of engineering to provide the dependency matrix.

For example, engineering usually tells product, if you change feature A, then it will also affect feature B, C and Z. Otherwise you may end up with contract breaches and SLA violations.

Product lifetime and providing incremental features is a big reason why SAP and Oracle have been successful in the enterprise space and people still pay a lot of money to buy them.

Google is not a good example to look at if you are thinking about enterprise software as these need to be supported long term and Google is not very good at that. They have a history of making breaking changes and discontinuing products.

Microsoft is a much better example for business software as they are (were?) paranoid about backward compatibility.

I realized this once when I went down the rabbit hole of SQL standards.

ISO SQL standard - 187 CHF https://www.iso.org/standard/76583.html

ANSI SQL standard - 237 USD for non members https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec90752016

Thanks! It was a really sweet deal for the founder as he left as far as I know and I suspect for their direct reports as well.

Its been a while but it still brings out some bitterness. I did leave after an year but the damage had been done by then.

Maybe PE firms are ok and mine was an extreme example but I got burned pretty badly. If I do have to work on a place backed by a PE firm for some reason, I would start out as a contractor and then see how it plays out before committing to be a full time employee.

That is funny as the exact thing happened in my startup as well (we were one of the roll-ees) We got some suits sent by the PE after the funding round.They politely said that they had other plans when we invited them for lunch.

I have firsthand experience of how PE ruins startups. We were a small startup and unfortunately our founder decided to go with a PE firm rather than a VC firm for a round of funding. The latter were upfront about job cuts but the PE firm did not say anything until them took over. The founder got a good paycheck but we were left holding the bag.

There was a bloodbath and they ruined the culture, the product and the morale. I never realized the meaning of a "cutthroat" culture until that time. It was personally the most stressful period of my employment.

From then on, the moment that I see PE mentioned anywhere, I know its time to run.

How is this different from a standard enterprise service bus style architecture using ActiveMQ or Kafka ?

By definition, microservices are independent of stack. Every service in theory can have its own stack. My recommendation would be to stick with microservices but start migrating each service to modern stack. With regards to the stack, you can look at Django if you want to move to a python based ecosystem, Spring boot for java and node if you want to look at server side js backed by a classic RDBMS like MySql or Postgres

Internet Protocols. Specifically the beauty and simplicity of IPv4

Sanderson’s the way of kings introduced me to audiobooks and I have never looked back. These days I just buy the audible narration without the membership

Another unrelated thing that I discovered while buying my Audi in California is that I have to have to purchase the services from the same dealer as well.

Twitter should be at twitter.elonmusk.com instead of twitter.com

I think there are great directors and movies in the adult drama genre but a lot of them are not being made in English anymore.

I actually dont like meat because of the texture. If you give me meat which tastes like beans, I will eat it

That is what I came away with as well. We just went through a pregnancy and the last thing we had a problem with was inclusive language.

Also for non native speakers, we have non native websites and youtube channels which provide a lot of material.

There is quality, quantity and then there is common sense. I have seen an entire new dependency system invented because the author did not like open source ones. It worked great for 10 years and then they left. I also have seen a scenario where we killed a hundred thousand lines of code for concurrency by using standard libraries and a couple hundred lines for adapters

This is also dangerous. It makes the publisher an easy target for cyber criminals.

UML helps me think clearly. Specifically sequence diagrams, ERDs and flow charts

A datapoint of 1 is not really how I would characterize experience in a continent with literally thousands of large corporations.

I would argue that any language that you use for enterprise-y program will always result in similar code bases. These always a lot of standards to satisfy and eventually this results in people coming up with leaky abstractions for incorporating those policies. All business logic cannot be nicely boxed into clean code as much as we would like to.

I think the best way to use REST is to not be cultish about it which just results in more discussions and unread RFCs on your org wiki. I always endup with erring on the side of more documentation

As long as you have good product requirements, creation is actually very simple. You have freedom to choose the technology and the tools.

However, The moment that you discover that your AWS bill exceeds your engineering budget, you will have a different view of maintenance. People will now start calling it resilience, scale, optimization, etc. And then one day, the db will need to be partitioned (almost always, if the product is successful) and then the people who created the mess [almost always using a nosql database as it was available ]will run for the exits. You (or the poor unthanked ‘maintenance’ engineer ) will start learning about why distributed systems are hard to maintain.

I used to think I was a 10x developer but then in grad school I spent an hour with a university post doc optimizing an embedded OS to decrease its power consumption. It took 1 month for me to understand what he did in that hour.

And then I took a graphics class with an undergrad in that same school and he created a ray tracing program in 30 minutes or so and it also ran the first time he did a run on visual studio. He then went out to do a dance practice with his friends. I sat there in the lab for the rest of the night trying to understand Ray tracing and what happened.

I actually love it and the more complex the system the better. I have been doing it for more than 10 years now and everyday I learn something new from the legacy and the replacement that we work on

This is a very good resource. I am bookmarking it! It is very engineer friendly