We need more RAM! Probably I have heard this hundreds of times. For some reason people are addicted to vertical scaling-up. And it’s crazy that this is a general solution to many problems (and sometimes it works 😂). But, wait. Do we know what really Computer Memory is? 🤔
Modern Memory is DDR5 SDRAM DIMM. Let’s dive 🕵️ in at what this means.
We have been building modular PCs “in the same way” since the 80s. If you compare Jeff Atwood’s (Stack Exchange co-founder) PC build blog entries from 2007 and 2020, you will notice that nothing has changed. The process and the components remain the same. But at the same time, everything has changed. All technologies and standards have evolved, but the core concepts remain the same (Processing, Memory, Storage, Expansions, Power, I/O, Graphics).
Modern motherboards still orchestrate all these modular concepts, and today are the result of 40 years of engineering refinement and the operational reality of all humanity.
I need to buy a computer, which one is the good one? Intel or AMD? Why is this one 500€ and this other is 1500€? It’s this good to play Fortnite? i7 is better than i5? This one comes with Windows 11. If I buy this new computer, will my Facebook still be there?… If you are in the tech world, maybe someone has ever asked you these kinds of questions, and for social responsibility reasons, you should answer them 🙂.
I decided to collect all my notes and discoveries on hardware over the years, and write this Hardware Series to answer these questions.
A 2020 cool book by Alex Xu to get hands-on with system design interviews, with real-world scalable systems examples.
If we look at the Computer History, we can see that since the 1940s, characters have been represented in very different ways.
As the 50th anniversary of cohesion and coupling concepts I decided to read this book in order to refresh concepts and compare how things has change (or not) since that. This is a great book by Pedro Moreira Santos, Marco Consolaro & Alessandro Di Gioia published in 2018 about agile technical practices
This is an interesting and recommended book by Will Larson published in 2021 about Staff engineers roles.
Last week we noticed that in some of our production environments, a request was performing very bad times, more than 20 seconds to complete. After analyzing the case we could reduce this to 119 milliseconds. I would like to share the steps we made to reach this:
Some days ago we were designing a new feature using Azure Cosmos DB. We needed to query data filtering by 4 different IDs. After comparing a few options, we ended up wondering: What is the most efficient way to query this data?
This time I want to share my view about the Senior Software Engineer path.