Leadership

I find myself constantly referencing great books, blog posts, and podcasts, then sending them one-off. Here’s a list of my favorites. Engineering System Design for Recommendations and Search - fantastic overview of core retrieval to ranking steps of modern pre-LLM recommendation and search systems. I directly used ideas from this at Amazon to improve homepage recommendations. Author recently followed up with Improving Recommendation Systems & Search in the Age of LLMs Patterns for Building LLM-based Systems & Products - similar to above, with a focus on LLM systems. Directly used learning here for Shopping Guides. Author summarized all LLM lessons in the much broader What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs Microservices - parody video spoofing microservices architecture that is too real. Worth rewatching anytime you think “we’ll just make this a microservice” The Missing README - canonical book to give to new software engineers. Covers core concepts of using git, testing, doing code reviews, safe deployment and more. Data Structures and Algorithms in Python - very readable book to understand core algorithms with actual python implementations which made learning and deeply understanding much easier for me. How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum - specific methodologies don’t matter, autonomous engineering teams create a plan and execute, with product focused on strategy of what to build, not delivery. Migrations Done Well: Typical Migration Approaches - multipart guide to successfully architecting, planning, and executing a migration. Leadership ...

People are familiar with the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory. This is a setup where two accomplices are caught at the same time. Police separate them and give each an offer: to defect on their accomplice - meaning blame them, or to stay quiet. If you both stay quiet, the police have nothing on you except petty crime, and you’ll go to jail for 3 months. If you both defect, they’ll have proof on both of you, and you’ll both go to jail for 1 years. But if one defects and the other stays quiet, the one who defected will walk away with no jail time, while the one who stayed quiet will get 3 years. See game theory ‘payout’ matrix below. ...

Economics has a concept of the market for lemons about information asymmetry. In a market like used cars the seller has more information about the quality than the buyers. In these markets, the price converges to the average price, essentially making all lemons (bad cars) too expensive, but all normal cars too cheap (at least for the seller) as the market prices on expected value. The canonical approach to increase efficiency is to add various 3rd party inspections for quality or to have the seller provide some warranties or guarantees on quality. ...

Becoming a first-time manager at a startup is hard. Given the intense pace and growth, you are often promoted with limited training and expected to manage people who used to be peers. You are asked to continue to deliver on individual contributor responsibilities – write code, support customers, or sell, while also managing a team. After going through this transition myself, and helping coach dozens of other managers through it, I wanted to put together a curated summary of the best advice I’ve gotten. Let me know what you think: ...