👨🏻‍💻 Nishant Srivastava

NEW episode in the System Design Series is ready! Title: Database-like Memory, Cache-like Recall https://lnkd.in/d2REEUFT Let me know your thoughts in the comments. And if you like it, share it with your friends :D Also, we are running a 𝐁𝐋𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐅𝐑𝐈𝐃𝐀𝐘 sale at InterviewReady. If you are looking to improve your system design skills, this is a great time. #SystemDesignSeries #NewEpisode

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5 questions in 4 minutes: 1. What does a senior software engineer do? 2. How do you motivate your team? 3. Individual Contributor or Engineering Manager? 4. How do you stand out in Big Tech? 5. Is ChatGPT affecting the job market? Hemant Pandey, senior software engineer at Meta, shares his thoughts. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. Cheers!

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Top learnings from my discussion with Kishore Gopalakrishna - Language choice for system development should balance team expertise, hiring potential, and ecosystem maturity. A well-implemented system in a familiar language often outperforms a poorly implemented one in a "faster" language. - Distributed systems are complex - they can fail in unexpected ways, making your own computer useless. This challenge is often underestimated. Understand the failure modes. - When building new systems, design for the long-term (10 years) but plan for the near-term (2-3 years). Implement for current needs while keeping the architecture flexible for future growth. Design for long term, plan for short-medium term. - Testing distributed systems requires going beyond known test cases. Develop test frameworks that generate new scenarios automatically to uncover unforeseen issues. - Cost optimization in data systems often involves trade-offs. Kafka, for example, sacrificed transactionality and exact-once delivery for higher throughput and lower cost per log. Its all about the Trade-offs. You get some, you lose some. - When approaching problems, start with first principles. Understand why something is expensive or inefficient before trying to optimize it. Don't jump on a solution. Understand the real problem first. - Open-source success relies heavily on community building. Foster respectful communication, clear processes for resolving conflicts, and a culture of helpfulness to grow a strong contributor base. There are many communities, but only the ones with good culture thrive. - Real-time analytics can significantly boost user engagement. Even small reductions in data latency can lead to measurable improvements in user experience and product value. - When considering real-time analytics, focus on how it can improve your users' lives rather than just technical capabilities. Many support issues can be eliminated by giving users direct access to real-time data. Product isn't useful if it making users' lives better. - Innovation in data products often comes from changing perspective - instead of asking "Do we need this?", ask "How can this improve our users' experience?" This shift can uncover valuable use cases for real-time analytics. Asking the right questions will help you reach the right answers. - When building data products, consider the long-term evolution of technology. Design choices should anticipate future developments, such as improvements in network speed or storage capabilities. Keep your design extensible. - As users become more data-savvy, there's increasing demand for self-serve analytics tools. Empowering users with direct access to data can reduce support overhead and enable more informed decision-making. Empower users to do more with data quickly. ———————————————————————— In case you haven't watched the episode yet, you can watch it here: youtu.be/SmLlJmU9Daw Also subscribe if you like such discussions.

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System Design is one of my favorite. Here is the list of system design building blocks that are important irrespective of whether you are designing a system or preparing for a system design interview ✔️ Distributed message queue: A producer puts a message Or work in a line, which the consumers pick up for further processing or work defined. This is an important concept to explain how you can scale your system, perform asynchronous processing, ✔️ DNS: Translates website names to IP address. DNS service works much like a phone directory. Services like Route53 help configure the domain and routing, and one needs to understand common types of resource records like A, CNAME, NS, MX, etc. ✔️ CDN: The content delivery network is a server between the origin and the client. It stores and delivers content to the end users, reducing latency and improving the system's overall performance. ✔️ PUB SUB: Publish-subscribe messaging works asynchronously, involving publishers, topics, subscribers, and messages. It helps to decouple the system, scalability, Durability, etc. ✔️ Load Balancer: Load balancer helps divide and divert traffic across the system. It helps drive the overall system Availability and Performance. ✔️ Distributed Caching: Caching servers store the data in memory and return it to the end users, improving the overall performance and end-user experience. A fleet of servers works together to keep and serve the data in a distributed caching system, enhancing availability. ✔️ Database: Understanding data storage, storage, types, and choosing a Database, RDMBS Vs Nosql, is vital when designing a system. It is essential to deeply understand for what requirements RDBMS is the right fit, and nosql is the right fit. ✔️ Observability: It's important to know what is happening in the system. How do we make the system easier to debug and fix? Observability helps the system to drive maintainability, resiliency, and reliability. ✔️ Task Scheduler: This is an essential component that helps one decide how the tasks must be prioritized, delegated and how much resources need to be allocated ✔️ Unstructured Data Storage: Storing photos, videos, audio, and other unstructured data is essential when designing a system since these cannot be stored in traditional databases. One needs to create a highly available, consistent, reliable solution. and efficient ✔️ Scaling Services: Scalability is an essential building block of any robust system. Understanding various scaling options and what options should be used is critical. From Serverless to ID generators, one must understand the multiple options and how to design them. ✔️ Distributed Search: Search is the core of many system designs. Understating how to build a search system and the core building blocks of a search system, including crawling and indexing, is essential. #engineering #systemdesign #interview #productdevelopment

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9 key ideas discussed in the session: 1. Product sense and strategy are interconnected, and one is necessary condition for the other. 2. Product sense in interviews is different from PS on the real-job 3. Decisions in your career affect your product sense 4. How learning product sense and strategy is different than many other things we have been trained on 5. The scope of product sense changes with seniority (IC PM, PM Manager, PM Executive) 6. Skills that you need to master for product sense. 7. Skills <> seniority level mapping 8. How to measure if you are improving product sense 9. Books that would help you improve PS Couple of relevant links - > Next cohort on product sense and strategy starts at 17th August, go and apply here - https://lnkd.in/eAsgZ8xP > If you like this session, we have another free session 'Mastering Growth: 20 lessons for product leaders' coming in August, go and check it out - https://lu.ma/rw0aqbp2

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How PMs can influence other teammates without direct authority? Watch video of Vivek Karna, ex Director of Product at Razorpay here -> https://lnkd.in/dsNbgSgB Watch more case-studies related to PM topics on https://hellomeets.com/ #pm #productmanagement #razorpay #careerdevelopment

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The craziest part about this is that Android didn't even have general developer feature parity until 2016-17 with RecyclerView, CoordinatorLayout, Android Studio 2.0, and Material 1.0 . For the longest time, the developer and app dev was much higher quality and substantially easier on iOS that it was actually criminal. I was there, making apps for big companies. Trust me, I know. I still think that "Java-interops" and Java need to get off of this "Exceptions cause crashes" pattern that just isn't anywhere near the same thing for C#-likes and ObjC/Swift.

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Great advice from Chantal Cox. I’ve seen these same mistakes across the last decade of hiring. Although this is an example of a Product Manager role, it easily translates to any job search. Great post, Chantal!

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Case study from PMs and aspiring PMs . . Imagine Quora gets 500,000 new sign-ups every day and this is the daily average of the past 6 months. There has been a deviation of only +/- 5% in the daily sign-up numbers. For the last 7 days, you have noticed that the number has dropped to 300,000 suddenly and has remained at that level. As a product manager at Quora, you want to identify the reason(s) behind it and fix it, if needed. How would you go about solving this? Make whatever assumptions you want to make. P.S. - The numbers are fictitious and have no relation to the actual scenario whatsoever. This is a purely hypothetical case study meant for discussion purposes, nothing more. Used Quora as a platform only for reference. Follow Vishal Bagla for more case studies and insights on product management. #ProductManagement #CaseStudies #InterviewPrep #ProductManagers

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If a 100 Mb video gets 20k views in one month, how much bandwidth do we need to serve the video? These kinds of questions are called capacity estimation questions. They are part of system design interviews. The next version of the system design judge will have capacity estimation questions. Coming soon! #SystemDesignJudge #CapacityEstimation

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Recently Karthik .P.R, Founder of Mydbops shared this image to me from the book "Leading effective engineering team" by Addy Osmani. This book is available here: https://amzn.in/d/f5AIBvR Psychological safety sits at the root of the pyramid. Thats the foundation. I have authored a book on psychological safety named "Silent nods, lost dollars". My book is available here: https://amzn.in/d/gTRcDew #silentnodslostdollars #psychologicalsafety

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I and Snehasish Roy shall be coming live today in around an hour (at 3 pm IST) and Snehasish will talk about "How He Designed a Highly Scalable Distributed Task Scheduler at Work". He's going to share a lot of insights about solving a problem like: - Breakdowns of the whole system and how he solved individual problems. - Real challenges and smart solutions in task scheduling. - Live Q&A - ask your burning questions! 🔗 Catch the Live Session Here: https://lnkd.in/g3kAMkDq 📅 Today, 3 pm to 4 pm IST. #TechPodcast #SystemDesign #SoftwareEngineering #Innovation #LivePodcast

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Building a product - as a PM or entrepreneur. You must understand basic tech concepts. 𝐈𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬: 1. Collaborate with Tech Teams and need to be able to talk in same language: 2. Be involved in Technology Investment Decisions and should be able to understand why behind decisions 3. Communicate any tech Issues to Senior Management in a lucid language sometimes come up with ballpark estimates while discussing features with stakeholder 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧: 1. Client vs Server side Client-side means where the user is - it could be a browser or a mobile app or a wearable, displaying information to the user Server-side means where the processing takes place and servves data to user - it could be a cloud server, or an on-premise machine responding to requests from client Read more in PPT 💻 #productmanager #client #server #techforPM

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Quick Thought 💡 What if we rethink how we measure productivity? 🤔 Imagine logging idle time and dependency resolution time instead of just hours worked or story points ? Just like in e-commerce these days tracking customer churn instead of retention is the norm, counterintuitive metrics could be used to measure developer productivity and team satisfaction. Does that ring a bell ? What other counterintuitive metrics would you consider for tracking developer productivity? 📊 #DeveloperProductivity #TeamSatisfaction #Metrics #Innovation #TechLeadership

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Being a talented IC Product Manager not always leads to great career outcomes. Reason - Remaining a generalist for a very long time. Here is how to avoid this career mishap by building expertise on key PM role specific skills: 1. To build expertise, pick any of the below skill which excites you and you have opportunity to work upon: • Crafting great user experiences • Finding new opportunities in competitive landscape for the team/company • Becoming an expert in specific domain eg AI/ML, Payments, Cybersecurity etc • Driving growth through growth funnels/loops for acquisition, retention, monetisation work 2. Once you know what you want to learn, play long term game building expertise in that skill (think 5+ years). 3. As you get in top 10% of any skill, move to other areas to build median expertise in others. Having a median expertise in other skills is key to get from a PM to a PM leader. There is no silver bullet to say which skill shall one build deep expertise on as it is entirely personal due to past role experiences, one's preference and having understanding of what kind of work gives energy to that individual. In case one is still not sure, PMs can explore each skill for couple of years in different roles before settling on one skill for long term deep dive. PS: Building AI/ML and Domain specific skills is not possible for everyone apart from folks in mature/late stage/bigtech companies. But, from my observation hiring for senior PM+ in startups is also focussing on expert skills eg Growth, User experience these days rather than pure generalist skills. #productmangement #pmcareer

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𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐁𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐦𝐮𝐦 𝐕𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬 (𝐌𝐕𝐏𝐌𝐬) The world of product management often feels like an exclusive club. But what if your engineering background can actually be a launching pad into this exciting field. By understanding the core aspects of product management and leveraging your existing skills, you can become a Minimum Viable Product Manager (MVPM). 👉 Understanding of the Intersection: First of all, it’s interesting to understand the intersection of Product Management skill set. An effective product manager operates at the intersection of three key areas: technology, business, and user experience (UX). They don't need to be experts in each, but possessing a foundational understanding in all three allows them to tackle a wide range of challenges. This core knowledge base is what defines an MVPM. 👉 Engineers as MVPMs: Let's say your background lies in L2/L3 support, DevOps, and system maintenance. You might not consider yourself a product person. However, your experience has likely equipped you with the essentials of product management principles, even if unknowingly. Let’s understand it in detail. 👉 Technology: • Tech Stack: The layers of technologies used to build a product. • System Architecture: How these technologies work together. • Data model and API’s: How information is organized within the product. 👉 Business: • Project Management: Knowledge about project management fundamentals. • Modeling Impact: How to measure a product's success. • Data Gathering & Analysis: How to collect and interpret data to inform decisions. 👉 UX: • Design Patterns: Consistent use of visual and interactive components in a product. • User Research: Understanding users through user experience research. • Prototyping: How to create visual mockups to communicate your ideas. Please refer the link to read full article in details: https://lnkd.in/dBG8HMff Always thank you Shravan Tickoo bhai Raghav Mehta Harsh Wardhan Keshri Rethink Systems Mayank Gupta Huzaifa Farooq Aryan Pasricha inspiring for learning and writing. #cohort #publicLearning #ProductManagement #Product #writing #𝐌𝐕𝐏𝐌𝐬 #𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐬

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🌟 System Design: The Path to Excellence 🌟 Mastering system design isn’t just about cracking interviews—it's about building scalable, reliable, and high-performing systems that solve real-world problems. The top 10 areas highlighted here provide a roadmap to sharpen your skills and stand out as a technical leader. 💡 Here’s why this matters: 🧩 Strong Foundations: From load balancers to databases, understanding the core components is critical for making informed decisions. 📈 Scalability & Performance: A solid grasp of distributed systems ensures your solutions can handle millions of users effortlessly. 🔐 Security & Reliability: With cybersecurity threats rising, knowing how to secure your systems is more crucial than ever. 🚀 Career Growth: Whether you're aiming for Principal Engineer roles or aspiring to architect large-scale solutions, these skills will get you there. 💻 Learning Tip: Don't just read—implement these concepts in personal projects or simulations. Create, break, and optimize!

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