The 100X Engineer

My new year's resolution is to continuously improve as a Staff Software Engineer as well as help others on their journey by sharing all the helpful resources I come across. My focus is on building cloud-native, high performance, web-scale apps. Wish me luck! 🙏

Re-read this insightful piece by @DarioAmodei a year later. Always interesting to see how emphatic predictions around scaling laws, geopolitics, game theory have actually played out in the real world. darioamodei.com/post/on-deepse…

I'm back! Finished this little gem by @philipkiely. A must-read for all SWEs. Excellent primer to help you plunge into the Inference rabbit-hole. Learned about Roofline model, Arithmetic Intensity, Disaggregation, Orpheus TTS, NIMs, MIGs, LoRAs, etc. books.baseten.com/products/infer…

"Latency: Reduce Delay in Software Systems" by @penberg Excellent revision for Staff+. It deep dives into techniques for modeling, reducing and hiding latency; introduces ultra-low latency concepts like Kernel bypass, NIC offload, CPU pinning, etc. amzn.in/d/4cVN1vg

"Hugging Face in Action" by Wei-Meng Lee Fantastic hands-on guide to understand the HF ecosystem, running pre-existing models locally, and Gen AI concepts like transformers, quantization, multi-head attention, fine-tuning models, building agents, etc. a.co/d/65cBfVy

"Mapmatics" by @PaulaRowinska Fascinating read on all the math used for mapping and navigating our planet. It helped refresh concepts like Trilateration, Web Mercator Projection, Retroazimuthal Projection, Gaussian curvature, Snell's Law, Fractals, etc. amazon.com/Mapmatics-Math…

An excellent read to understand the implementation details of a k8s Pod. Blew my mind that it's almost trivial to create a pod using standard docker commands and some cgroup/namespace magic. labs.iximiuz.com/tutorials/cont…

Happy New Year, you! Excellent postmortem of the 12/11 OpenAI outage. The underlying issue was API server being a SPOF and reliance of k8s data plane on control plane for DNS. status.openai.com/incidents/ctrs…

"Container Security" by Liz Rice (@lizrice) Good starting point to dive into how exactly containerization is implemented at the system level. Learned about eBPF, seccomp, rootless containers, AWS Firecracker (microVMs) and CNCF Project Falco! amazon.com/Container-Secu…

Succinct explanation of Multi-Stage docker builds. @iximiuz has become one of my favourite educators on all things containers, k8s and networking. Must follow. labs.iximiuz.com/tutorials/dock…

Alright! Back from a year-long hiatus. Got myself promoted to a Dad Engineer. 🥳👨‍👦 Added posts about a few books I had skimmed in 2023. Moving forward I'll be sharing helpful blog articles as well as the books I complete. Cheers! 😇

"Managing Mission-Critical Domains and DNS" by Mark Jeftovic (@StuntPope) Excellent read for wannabe DNS nerds. Learned about DNS Zones, Bailiwicks, Anycast, Glue Records, DNS amplification attacks & cache poisoning. Finished skimming in November, 2023. amazon.com/Managing-Missi…

"Python Tricks" by Dan Bader (@dbader_org). Cool code snippets and a simple explanation of Python concepts. Great resource for Python beginners. Finished skimming in July, 2023. amazon.com/Python-Tricks-…

"Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python" by Al Sweigart (@AlSweigart). Another great resource to understand how things work under the hood. Finished skimming in July, 2023. amazon.com/Python-Beyond-…

"Python Workout: 50 ten-minute exercises" by Reuven M. Lerner (@reuvenmlerner). Excellent resource to brush up on common idioms and constructs useful for coding interviews and beyond. Finished skimming in July, 2023. amazon.com/Python-Workout…

"Grokking Algorithms" by Aditya Bhargava (@_egonschiele) Great refresher on different genres of algorithms used in day-to-day programming. Finished skimming in July, 2023. amazon.com/Grokking-Algor…

"Learn PostgreSQL: Use, manage, and build secure and scalable databases with PostgreSQL 16" by Luca Ferrari and @sscotty71 Excellent read as this book goes into just-enough details of @PostgreSQL db. Finished reading in December, 2023. amazon.com/Learn-PostgreS…

"Networking and Kubernetes: A Layered Approach" by @strongjz and @isthelaststop Highly technical book. Prior working knowledge of networking and k8s is required. This book helped me understand container networking. Finished reading in November, 2023. amazon.com/Networking-Kub…

"Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet" by @ajblum Painstakingly detailed. This is not a technical book but has fascinating content (espeically if you are a nerd for internet's physical infrastructure). Finished reading in November, 2023. amazon.com/Tubes-Journey-…

"Real-world Cryptography" by @cryptodavidw Excellent read! David did a remarkable job of introducing a lay engineer to the fascinating world of cryptography without getting into too much theoretical stuff. Finished reading in September, 2023. amazon.com/Real-World-Cry…

"HTTP/2 in Action" Outstanding read! This book helped me solidify my understanding of the mother of all internet protocols: HTTP; especially the improvements over the years from http/1 to http/3. Finished reading in September, 2023. amazon.com/HTTP-2-Action-…