March 27 2022
Tech News - TL;DR
US’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) over counted deaths by 72,000 due to a coding error
It had two questions “Has the person died from illness”, and “Date of Death”. If the user has provided the date of death but answered No to the first question, the system assumed that it is an error on part of the user, and switched the first answer to “Yes”.
#Facepalm
Nvidia launched 144-core grace GPU superchip.
Top picks from social media
PhonePe CTO on building career as software engineer and culture at PhonePe
On building career as software engineer:
Ask "What a successful career as a software engineer looks like?" instead of "How to build a successful career?"
Many jobs can match compensation expectations but not all will build a great career. Make sure to over-index on capitalising on compressed learning cycles & a great work environment.
PhonPe Culture
#PhonePeUniversity runs Projects, Workshops & Bootcamps to create structured learning
Flat organization
Pod structure with engineers, product managers, marketers, etc in a pod give 360-degree exposure to engineers.
Web 3
1. Ukraine is raising funds by selling timeline of Russian invasion as NFTs
2. Russia considers taking payments for oil in Bitcoin given the sanctions
3. TL;DR of Phantom Co-founder’s interview
Started Phantom when he realized web3 wallets are going to be powerful because they are the first interaction with Web3 for many users.
NFTs, Solana’s growth, and mobile-first approach gave massive growth of 3 million users in 6 months.
Product principles: Being great at design, focusing on users, and having a great brand voice and customer support (instead of just creating Discord servers and leaving)
Moving tokens from the exchange and securing tokens are low hanging fruits in wallet space
Bitcoin’s original concept of peer-to-peer cash has not become a reality because small merchants don’t have the necessary infra.
AI/ML
Nvidia’s AI turns 2D photos to 3D photos in seconds
“it requires just seconds to train on a few dozen still photos — plus data on the camera angles they were taken from — and can then render the resulting 3D scene within tens of milliseconds.”“NeRFs are like bitmap images: they densely capture the way light radiates from an object or within a scene”
“Instant NeRF could be as important to 3D as digital cameras and JPEG compression have been to 2D photography — vastly increasing the speed, ease and reach of 3D capture and sharing”
Just because :D
Become a 10x engineer
Approaches to solving the issue discussed in the last edition:
Question in brief: Auto-incrementing ID column of a table has reached its maximum limit and is not taking any new entries. How to fix it?
Approach 1: Change the ID type to bigint (it holds a larger number of values).
Approach 2: Swap the tables. Reduce overhead by setting foreign key check to 0.
TL';DR of Kailash Nadh’s (CTO, Zerodha) podcast
Zerodha does 15 million transactions daily and supports 9 million users, with a tech team of just 33 engineers.
On being an absurdist (life/universe is meaningless): All the 3 turning points in his life have been tiniest random events. So, he just doesn’t see a point in meaning in life and hence refers to himself as an absurdist.
Self hosting (RDMS, Redis etc) has saved costs for Zerodha. Many open source software that they have use ended up with maintenance problems.
Tech team culture:
Focus on solving problems and not chasing projections
Every person is treated equal. No designation
Respecting others’ decisions and debating to land on a decision
Hiring
Hired high school students because most things he learnt were from trial and error. So, why not give that chance and time to others?
Special traits like curiosity, hobby programming are great indicators