Howdy 👋

A bold yet practical stance against formal architect roles. Every engineer should be skilled and empowered to influence system design. This cumulative engineering sense, combined with experience in the trenches, should shape the overall architecture rather than a full time thinker proposing imaginary ideas.

Reading about how massive platforms use certain technologies is a great way to learn about them (and retain that learning!). This Pinterest case studies highlights change data capture (CDC) in all its glory - and the inefficient methods it replaces like DB triggers and batch jobs to detect inserts, updates, and deletions. Yet another instance of control plane-data plane design. Cool to know Debezium exists and is free.

Easy to digest, although nothing earth-shatteringly new. My biggest insight is how self-attention works, a mechanism an LLM model uses to decide while parts of the input are most relevant to predict the next token.