The GeekNarrator

In this podcast I have invited Neha Pawar, who is one of the Founding Engineers are StarTree (the company powering Apache Pinot). We talked about how StarTree has implemented Tiered storage and how it differs from other available implementations.  Note: Currently tiered storage is available only in StarTree’s Pinot and not available in the open source version. But its only about time.

Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 03:28 What does Tiered Storage mean? 05:51 How many tiers are typically supported? 07:30 Is it mainly about Cost Optimisation? How do I compare the cost savings vs performance hit? 15:41 What is mmap and how does it help? 16:45 How do I implement/approach Tiered Storage? What are the challenges? 23:00 What is Apache Pinot? When we say low latency, how low it is? 25:00 How is it implemented in StarTree (Apache Pinot)? 36:45 What happens when I query for more number of (or all) columns? How is that optimised? 47:10 What are the failure modes? 50:15 How can we test and validate Tiered Storage as a feature? 54:30 How would bloom filter false positives affect performance and correctness? 56:15 Can I move back my data from Cold storage to Hot Storage? 57:45 What other cloud storage services are supported other than S3? 58:35 What is the future of Tiered Storage?

In this episode I invited Curtis Einsmann to join us and share his knowledge and experience on how to do code reviews effectively. 

Curtis has created a course called "Master the Code Review" which has some great testimonials and amazing feedback. 

We have discussed various suggestions on making code reviews more effective for teams and individuals.  

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction 

10:36 How should teams appoach Code Reviews?

 18:19 How should individuals approach Code Reviews? 

25:10 Does Code Reviews slow down the development process? 

28:15 Common mistakes done by Authors and Reviewers 

35:20 Are nitpicks useful? 

37:45 Where does Pair Programming fit into this process? 

40:50 Practical examples  

Links: Curtis Einsmann Twitter:  https://twitter.com/curtiseinsmann

Curtis Einsmann Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtisein...

Master the code review course: https://curtiseinsmann.gumroad.com/l/...

Here is the team license: https://curtiseinsmann.gumroad.com/l/... 

Hope you get amazing insights from the episode and make your code review process better. 

If you like the video please don't forget to hit the like button and share your feedback in the comments section.   

Also please press the bell icon and subscribe to The GeekNarrator for more content on Software Engineering.   

Cheers, 

The GeekNarrator

Hey Everyone, 

In this episode I had a fun conversation with Pratik Pandey who is currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Booking.com and has vast experience in the Software Industry specialising in designing systems for large scale workloads.    

We have covered System Design in Depth and destroyed the myths around System Design in general.  

Agenda: 

00:00 Introduction 

04:30 System Design Framework 

19:33 Requirements Gathering 

28:00 Capacity Planning and Estimations 

31:50 Driving System design with Capacity planning 

42:21 Choosing the right tech stack 

58:45 Real world System Design vs System Design Interviews 

01:13:00 Must have components in a System Design Interviews 

01:17:32 How do I prepare for System Design? 

01:22:45 How do I gain experience in System Design? 

01:26:00 Resources to prepare for System Design  

I hope you like our discussion and learn more about System Design interviews and how it differs with the real world system design. Do hit the like button and subscribe to the channel if you like such content.  

Cheers, The GeekNarrator

Hey Everyone, 

In this episode I invited Patrick McFadin who is an expert in the world of Cassandra and Data Modelling. 

Patrick currently works for DataStax as a VP Of Dev Rel. Patrick has given several techtalks on Cassandra and the ecosystem around it. We have covered the architecture of Cassandra in depth.   

Heres what we have covered:  

00:00 Introduction 

04:00 History of Cassandra 

07:18 Patrick  Apache Cassandra? 

14:30 How writes work in Cassandra? 

21:30 How many copies are written on a single write? 

25:44 How does replication work? 

32:00 How do reads work? (Read consistency levels) 

39:00 Why is Allow Filtering not recommended? 

43:00 Data Modelling in Cassandra 

50:45 Modeling a Chat Application 

01:05:00 How does CAP theorem fits Cassandra? 

01:07:06 New features in Cassandra?  

References: 

Patrick McFadin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-m...

Kaivalya Apte: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaivalya-...

Astra:  astra.datastax.com 

Cassandra: https://cassandra.apache.org/_/index....

Webinar on Data Modeling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D39w... 

Playlist on Distributed Systems and Databases: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... 

I hope you enjoyed our discussion and learned from it. Please like, share and subscribe to the channel and keep supporting.  

Cheers, The GeekNarrator

In this episode I talk to Luis Mineiro, Senior Director at Delivery Hero about Site Reliability Engineering. 

We have busted a lot of myths around Site Reliability Engineering as a concept. 

We have talked about the following: 

 00:00 Introduction 

02:00 What is SRE? What is NOT SRE? 

10:00 DevOps vs SRE vs Developers 

13:10 When do we need a dedicated SRE team? 

20:00 Traits of a Strong SRE culture 

29:00 Observability vs Monitoring vs Alerting 

41:40 Adding Observability to a Sandiwch Shop 

53:00 How to add distributed tracing to the Sandwich shop? 

57:10 How do we define SLO's for the Sandwich shop? 

01:01:00 How to I define timeouts between services? 

01:05:00 How do I determine cost of adding 9's to my SLOs? 

01:15:00 How do I transition from a Developer to SRE?  

References:  SRE Books from Google:  https://sre.google/books

Luis Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmineiro/

The GeekNarrator Page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-...

Kaivalya Apte Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaivalya-... 

I hope you like the video and learn a lot about SRE.  

Cheers,  The GeekNarrator

In this episode I speak with Arasu Shankher, who is working as a CTO at KBX Digital. Arasu has a vast experience as an Engineer, Manager and Technology Leader. He has worked for companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon and has built many high performance teams.

We cover extremely important topics for Software Engineers and Managers at all levels.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

02:30 Traits of a Successful IC and Manager

07:11 Depth for ICs?

09:05 Do you miss being an IC? what is it that you miss?

10:10 How do you stay up to date? How do you keep learning?

16:30 What are some resources that you use to learn?

21:20 Productivity and Time Management

28:20 Dealing with toxic people?

37:10 How has the Tech space changed over the years?

41:40 What is the next big thing in the Tech Space?

48:00 Buy vs Build? How do we make a good decision?

54:10 How to manage Tech Debt effectively?

57:00 Attaching risk level to Tech Debt. Is it a good model?

59:20 Strategies to mitigate technical risks

01:01:20 One tip for Junior, Mid and Senior Engineers and Managers.

I hope you like this episode. Please hit the like button if you did and subscribe to the channel for more content like this.

Cheers, The GeekNarrator

Hey Everyone, 

In this episode I am talking to Mayank Shrivastava who has vast experience into building and maintaining high scale distributed systems. He was in the team that originally built Apache Pinot at Linkedin and is now working at StarTree as the Head of Core Data Engineering.  

He has shared some amazing insights from his experience and there is a lot to learn from our discussion.   

We discuss about the following: 

00:00 Introduction 

04:20 Practices to follow while designing and developing Distributed Systems 

05:47 What do we mean by Solid Scalable Design? How do we approach that? 

09:00 Safety Nets for developing Distributed systems 

10:21 When is the right time to do performance benchmarking? 

17:00 What is release certification? 

21:00 Deploying to Production 

24:45 Example when Canary Deployment might not be a good strategy? 

26:00 Example when Canary Deployment a good strategy? 

27:30 Post Deployment - how do we observe our system? 

33:30 How do we avoid on-call(alerting) noise? 

42:00 Maintaining a Large scale Distributed system 

47:15 Scaling up/down for stateful systems 

51:30 Handling Failures in Production (Disaster Recovery) 

01:00:30 Runbooks - How do we keep them updated?  

References: 

The GeekNarrator Linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/86276626

Kaivalya Apte: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaivalya-apte-2217221a/

Geeknarrator website: www.geeknarrator.com 

Mayank Shrivastava: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayankshriv/

StarTree: https://www.startree.ai/

Apache Pinot: https://pinot.apache.org/ 

Hope you enjoy the discussion and learn from it. Please hit the like button if you liked my discussion with Mayank and please subscribe to the channel for more content like this.  

Cheers, The GeekNarrator

Hey Everyone,

Welcome to the API design masterclass with our guest Deepak Patil, who works as a Principal Architect at iCertis (https://www.linkedin.com/in/01patilde...) and has decades of experience building and architecting mission critical experience.  

We talk about: 

Basic API Discussion 

00:00 Introduction 

03:50 What is an API? 

07:10 Why do we want to implement APIs? 

10:22 How do we plan to execute the API program?

14:45 Practical API Design 

24:40 Dominant Styles of API Entity vs Behaviour oriented 

31:50 Fine Grained vs Coarse grained APIs 

43:45 Pagination  

I hope you enjoyed the discussion in the part-1, please do listen to part-2 for more advanced topics and more practical examples.

Cheers,

The GeekNarrator