An educational System Design Episode on TinyURL: video, slides.

I'm trying to find the balance between in-depth conversations on the one hand and making sure our meetups are useful to less experienced engineers on the other one. Hope this is a good stare; we sure enjoyed it a lot, although it's nearly two hours 😉

An educational System Design Meetup episode on Consistent Hashing: video, slides.

We squeezed it into 1.5 hours, and managed to keep it fairly educational as opposed to a deep dive. Thanks folks!

The System Design Meetup episode about search, recommendation engines, content selection, newsfeed ranking and infinite scrolling, the common part of the above and where they differ: video, slides.

Those Dreaded Microservices: video, slides.

Figured I could start executing on 2022 plans for the System Design Meetup before 2022 has begun: https://dimakorolev.substack.com/p/happy-2021-holidays

TL;DR: Yours truly and the System Design Meetup now have our own Substack.

Hi! We will meet soon, likely next week.

In the meantime, I've got the permission to publish some of our real work's research, and decided my Substack would be a good place for it: https://dimakorolev.substack.com/p/open-policy-agent-musings

Would be very curious, both on the topic, and overall on whether you think it's an acceptable use of the Substack / this Slack / this meetup.

Thanks in advance!

Wrote a post on whether using geospatial sharding for Yelp is such a good idea, or is it an overkill.

Strive to build a product so novel and technically challenging that a system design interview question is named after you!

#Yelp, #Telegram, #Uber, #Waze, #Ticketmaster, #Twitter, #Bitly / #TinyURL — 🥳

Not sure how likely this is to be the best competitive analysis of #Kafka and #RabbitMQ out there: video, slides.

But it should come very close, especially if you, like me, respect the fundamentals and think from first principles.

Thanks folks!

My Mobile Podcast Studio
After a year of trial and error, here's the setup that works for me.

https://dimakorolev.substack.com/p/my-mobile-podcast-studio

I'm looking into setting up open source reproducible blueprints / performance tests. So that they can be run on the hardware paid by the company, but the code remains open & reusable. Is this a crazy idea?

My post for Inteviewing.io about the differences in various interview scores.

New episode, Leveraging the Cores: from CPU and the OS kernel to coroutines, green threads, and actor models.

And the Distributed Task Queue episode is now released!

Also, we are now at 1K YouTube subscribers, yay!

Nothing extraordinary, just the SysDesign Meetup creating time loops.

Our OPA C++ Transpilation blog post, thanks to Max.

I keep reading more and more about GraphQL [1]. It's useful both for my meetup and for my work, so keeping up is more and more of my professional duties than intellectual curiosity these days.

Originally — say, ~three years ago — I was quite skeptical about the prospects of this "language". Back then, it didn't even have mutations, after all, and "JOIN"-ing data between, say, PostgreSQL and Redis was remarkably inefficient. Besides, the query language is not standard and not mapped 1:1 to JavaScript or anything else popular, and type checking was semi-strict. So it did look like an interesting pet project, but I was not convinced it would have a future.

Today, after hearing more and more about GraphQL's power, and after doing more research, I'm ready to concede I was largely wrong. With @defer, @stream and `@live`GraphQL may well be the future Data API language. Yes, some of these features are still deeply experimental, and I've got quite a few concerns about their theoretical performance.

In a way, the role of a "GraphQL DBA" should be emerging as we speak.

And then it clicked. I blogged about such a future back in 2014. My prediction back then [2] was that SQL would:

• Exist in 5 years,
• Exist as legacy in 10 years, and
• Go extinct in 15 years.

Well, I have to be rooting for GraphQL now. Because it may well be the force that proves my vision to be right 😊

[1]: New features in GraphQL: Batch, defer, stream, live, and subscribe. 2021.
[2]: The Future of Data Engineering, What would happen after SQL is no more. 2014.

Very proud of this episode we’ve recorded with Interviewing.io.

May well be the best SysDesign interview prep video out there today.

Enjoy responsibly!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJSVmyhq2i0

Another video with Interviewing.io, codename "two experts design the system". Extremely well moderated by both Kevin & Mike, and pleasure working with Bruno & the broader team on this one.