About
Software engineer at heart. Passionate about how software engineers can learn faster and…
Articles by Fahim
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SEO is an essential skill for various roles, from writers to web designers to — yes — even web developers. SEO directly influences business impact…
SEO is an essential skill for various roles, from writers to web designers to — yes — even web developers. SEO directly influences business impact…
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What do the following have in common? → Junior developer → Web developer → Systems Engineer → ML engineer They all need problem-solving skills to…
What do the following have in common? → Junior developer → Web developer → Systems Engineer → ML engineer They all need problem-solving skills to…
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❓ What's OAuth, and why is it so vital to API/Product Design? Open authorization (OAuth) is an open standard for authorization that enables apps to…
❓ What's OAuth, and why is it so vital to API/Product Design? Open authorization (OAuth) is an open standard for authorization that enables apps to…
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Experience
Education
Publications
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The 1 piece of coding advice I wish I had received
Educative.io
What is the one piece of advice I wish someone told me when I was learning how to code?
I’ve thought a lot about this question. In fact, we built Educative with this question in mind.
Throughout my career as a software engineer, many of the problems my teams at Microsoft and Facebook worked on centered around designing scalable and performant software systems. Of course, we had to write code as a part of this process, but it took a back seat to problem solving, logic skills, and…What is the one piece of advice I wish someone told me when I was learning how to code?
I’ve thought a lot about this question. In fact, we built Educative with this question in mind.
Throughout my career as a software engineer, many of the problems my teams at Microsoft and Facebook worked on centered around designing scalable and performant software systems. Of course, we had to write code as a part of this process, but it took a back seat to problem solving, logic skills, and cost-benefit analysis.
The reality is that professional software developers aren’t just there to code. They are there to solve problems. -
Bing, Bard, and ChatGPT: Why AI advances are great news for devs
Educative.io
It’s safe to say that artificial intelligence and machine learning have made their mainstream debut. Just look at the tremendous popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the recent announcements of Google Bard and Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing. While AI has quietly become integrated into more and more fields, its applications were not something the average person discussed until recently.
This is just the beginning. -
3 ways to future-proof your tech career in 2023
Educative.io
During the 2008 financial crisis, I was an immigrant software engineer at Microsoft with a young family. I vividly remember the unpleasant feelings of instability and discomfort about my future.
Recent headlines about layoffs at big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce, Amazon, Stripe, and Zoom bring me back to memories of those challenging times. It is easy to feel powerless when facing such uncertainty.
At the time, I decided to take control by investing…During the 2008 financial crisis, I was an immigrant software engineer at Microsoft with a young family. I vividly remember the unpleasant feelings of instability and discomfort about my future.
Recent headlines about layoffs at big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce, Amazon, Stripe, and Zoom bring me back to memories of those challenging times. It is easy to feel powerless when facing such uncertainty.
At the time, I decided to take control by investing in my own development. -
How I would learn to code (if I could start over)
Grokking the Tech Career
Want to learn how to code but don’t know where to start? I recommend learning to think like a coder first.
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Machine Learning, Statistics, R, and Cryptography With Oxford University Press
Educative.io
Today, we are excited to announce that Educative has published its first courses adapted from titles published by Oxford University Press: a global leader in education and the publishing arm of one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities.
As part of this licensing agreement, Educative has debuted seven new courses based on books written by expert authors and published by Oxford University Press. We are thrilled to bring these incredible resources to life on Educative’s…Today, we are excited to announce that Educative has published its first courses adapted from titles published by Oxford University Press: a global leader in education and the publishing arm of one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities.
As part of this licensing agreement, Educative has debuted seven new courses based on books written by expert authors and published by Oxford University Press. We are thrilled to bring these incredible resources to life on Educative’s interactive learning platform for developers around the world. -
"How to stay relevant in 2023: Why developers need to learn ML & System Design "
Substack: Engineering Enablement
Let's explore the next great paradigm shift in software engineering — and what it will take for devs and engineering leaders to stay ahead of the curve.
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Who is big tech hiring in 2023? How to stand out in a tough job market
Substack: Grokking Tech Career
It's finally 2023, and there really isn't a better time than January to start talking about job interviews. Companies conduct most of their interviews around this time of year, so this is a great time to try and get hired. Coding interviews can be stressful, which is even more true in times of economic uncertainty.
However, during my time at Facebook and Microsoft, I conducted hundreds of interviews and found that there are a few key steps that every applicant can take to reduce or…It's finally 2023, and there really isn't a better time than January to start talking about job interviews. Companies conduct most of their interviews around this time of year, so this is a great time to try and get hired. Coding interviews can be stressful, which is even more true in times of economic uncertainty.
However, during my time at Facebook and Microsoft, I conducted hundreds of interviews and found that there are a few key steps that every applicant can take to reduce or eliminate that stress entirely. -
Top 3 programming languages to learn in 2023
Medium
If you’re looking for a goal for 2023 to help you advance as a developer, here’s an idea to boost your career and keep your skills fresh: learn a new programming language.
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2022 in review: 5 biggest learnings for developers
Substack: Grokking Tech Career
From AI to System Design, here are my essential takeaways for software engineers and managers heading into 2023
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Is ChatGPT our new AI overlord? (No, and here’s how it can help devs)
Educative.io
ChatGPT crafted this limerick that effectively captures how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in 2023 can boost developer productivity.
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Designing Stripe for Black Friday: how to achieve 99.9999% uptime
Substack: Engineering Enablement
A lesson on scaling for spikes through capacity planning and load testing.
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How Taylor Swift Crashed Ticketmaster: A lesson on scaling for spikes
Substack: Engineering Enablement
Recently, Ticketmaster was in the news for a major system failure when tickets for Taylor Swift’s concert tour went on sale. The website crashed under the weight of demand, leading to disgruntled fans and a tarnished reputation.
This incident restarted many conversations about antitrust in the ticketing industry, alleging monopolistic behavior from the Ticketmaster-LiveNation conglomerate. A class action lawsuit was even announced earlier this week.
But what actually happened to…Recently, Ticketmaster was in the news for a major system failure when tickets for Taylor Swift’s concert tour went on sale. The website crashed under the weight of demand, leading to disgruntled fans and a tarnished reputation.
This incident restarted many conversations about antitrust in the ticketing industry, alleging monopolistic behavior from the Ticketmaster-LiveNation conglomerate. A class action lawsuit was even announced earlier this week.
But what actually happened to Ticketmaster from a systems perspective? -
Will Twitter collapse? Examining the resiliency of Twitter's architecture.
Educative.io
Let's explore the components that make Twitter work at such an impressive scale — and discuss Elon’s proposed improvements.
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My favorite System Design Interview question (and how to answer it)
Medium: Grokking the Tech Interview
Any good System Design question should reveal a lot about a candidate’s understanding of architecture and the inner workings of large-scale systems. The question should be complex enough to engage the candidate and allow them to demonstrate their skill for building web-scale services, but not so complicated that the interviewee feels overwhelmed.
When I interviewed SWE candidates at Facebook and Microsoft, I wasn’t just looking for strong coding skills and soft skills that demonstrated…Any good System Design question should reveal a lot about a candidate’s understanding of architecture and the inner workings of large-scale systems. The question should be complex enough to engage the candidate and allow them to demonstrate their skill for building web-scale services, but not so complicated that the interviewee feels overwhelmed.
When I interviewed SWE candidates at Facebook and Microsoft, I wasn’t just looking for strong coding skills and soft skills that demonstrated alignment with company values. I was also looking for a candidate who could design a software system that met requirements, explain the system’s architecture and tradeoffs, and dive deep into an area of specialization like API design or a recommendation engine. -
Rust made me nervous as a C++ user. Here's what changed.
Substack: Grokking Tech Career
Let's talk about what you need to know about Rust today (and why it’s here to stay)
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What the Meta, Stripe, and Lyft layoffs tell us (+ a framework for navigating recession)
Substack: Engineering Enablement
When’s the right time to look for another job? You’ll have to consider various factors specific to your context, but I’ll provide a framework to break down all the factors to consider in a recession.
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A framework to navigate recession as a developer
Engineering Enablement Substack
When’s the right time to look for another job? You’ll have to consider various factors specific to your context, but I’ll provide a framework to break down all the factors to consider in a recession.
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Why Every Engineering Manager Should Learn System Design
Engineering Enablement Substack
The demand for managerial tasks increases, and so does the need to keep technical skills sharp. Here's how to stay up-to-date with System Design.
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Onboarding Through an Engineering Enablement Lens: 3 stages of developer onboarding
EmHub.io
Instead of thinking about Developer Onboarding as one gigantic task, splitting it into three distinct stages enables developers to grow faster in productivity and in team impact.
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Fast Database Restarts at Facebook
Meta Research
Facebook engineers query multiple databases to monitor and analyze Facebook products and services. The fastest of these databases is Scuba, which achieves subsecond query response time by storing all of its data in memory across hundreds of servers. We are continually improving the code for Scuba and would like to push new software releases at least once a week. However, restarting a Scuba machine clears its memory. Recovering all of its data from disk — about 120 GB per machine — takes 2.5-3…
Facebook engineers query multiple databases to monitor and analyze Facebook products and services. The fastest of these databases is Scuba, which achieves subsecond query response time by storing all of its data in memory across hundreds of servers. We are continually improving the code for Scuba and would like to push new software releases at least once a week. However, restarting a Scuba machine clears its memory. Recovering all of its data from disk — about 120 GB per machine — takes 2.5-3 hours to read and format the data per machine. Even 10 minutes is a long downtime for the critical applications that rely on Scuba, such as detecting user-facing errors. Restarting only 2% of the servers at a time mitigates the amount of unavailable data, but prolongs the restart duration to about 12 hours, during which users see only partial query results and one engineer needs to monitor the servers carefully. We need a faster, less engineer intensive, solution to enable frequent software upgrades.
In this paper, we show that using shared memory provides a simple, effective, fast, solution to upgrading servers. Our key observation is that we can decouple the memory lifetime from the process lifetime. When we shutdown a server for a planned upgrade, we know that the memory state is valid (unlike when a server shuts down unexpectedly). We can therefore use shared memory to preserve memory state from the old server process to the new process. Our solution does not increase the server memory footprint and allows recovery at memory speeds, about 2-3 minutes per server. This solution maximizes uptime and availability, which has led to much faster and more frequent rollouts of new features and improvements. Furthermore, this technique can be applied to the in-memory state of any database, even if the memory contains a cache of a much larger disk-resident data set, as in most databases. -
Windows Azure Storage: A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency
Microsoft
Windows Azure Storage (WAS) is a cloud storage system that provides customers the ability to store seemingly limitless amounts of data for any duration of time. WAS customers have access to their data from anywhere at any time and only pay for what they use and store. In WAS, data is stored durably using
both local and geographic replication to facilitate disaster recovery. Currently, WAS storage comes in the form of Blobs (files), Tables (structured storage), and Queues (message delivery)…Windows Azure Storage (WAS) is a cloud storage system that provides customers the ability to store seemingly limitless amounts of data for any duration of time. WAS customers have access to their data from anywhere at any time and only pay for what they use and store. In WAS, data is stored durably using
both local and geographic replication to facilitate disaster recovery. Currently, WAS storage comes in the form of Blobs (files), Tables (structured storage), and Queues (message delivery). In this paper, we describe the WAS architecture, global namespace, and data model, as well as its resource provisioning,
load balancing, and replication systems. -
What does the perfect FAANG coding interview look like?
Grokking Tech Career
Let's talk about how to send "hireable signals" to your interviewers — and how to prep for your interview efficiently.
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Some of the most influential laborers in programming history were women. During World War II, six women held what can be considered the first…
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Being a good developer isn't about writing good code. It's about writing good tests. Unit testing is a great way to catch bugs and resolve issues…
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We often refer to the “Google Search Algorithm” as a singular entity... but it actually comprises several algorithms working together cohesively. 🔎…
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🎞️ Ready for the Netflix interview? (If yes, keep scrolling.) 👇 Otherwise, here's a breakdown of Netflix's tech stack, design, and architecture.…
🎞️ Ready for the Netflix interview? (If yes, keep scrolling.) 👇 Otherwise, here's a breakdown of Netflix's tech stack, design, and architecture.…
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Getting ghosted after an interview can be discouraging. It's even worse if you've spent a bunch of time on a take-home assignment only to be left…
Getting ghosted after an interview can be discouraging. It's even worse if you've spent a bunch of time on a take-home assignment only to be left…
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You're reading this post because of an algorithm. Algorithms are a cornerstone of technology as we know it. They influence what we see in our news…
You're reading this post because of an algorithm. Algorithms are a cornerstone of technology as we know it. They influence what we see in our news…
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Want to ace Meta's System Design Interview? From my own experience conducting System Design Interviews at Meta, I share how to prepare in my Medium…
Want to ace Meta's System Design Interview? From my own experience conducting System Design Interviews at Meta, I share how to prepare in my Medium…
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Is AI going to eliminate the need for junior developers? The short answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT. The long answer is that it will actually do the…
Is AI going to eliminate the need for junior developers? The short answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT. The long answer is that it will actually do the…
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