Your Soft Skills Aren't Soft at All

This edition of the newsletter contains

• a write-up to help you grow in your career
• a video I posted
• a paper I read

I have also shared 3 super-interesting articles to read over the weekend. Thank you once again for reading this edition of my Newsletter. Now, without further ado, let’s jump right in.

By the way, the admissions for my System Design August cohort are open, and about ~40 seats are left. If you are an SDE-2, SDE-3, or above, and looking to build a rock-solid intuition for designing any and every system, you will find my course extremely interesting.

Instead of drawing boxes, we go into the intricate details of every single system and build an end-to-end understanding. The learnings from the course can be applied at your workplace from day 1. If you're looking for genuine engineering discussions or brainstorming, be sure to check out my course.

Course curriculum and other key details: https://arpitbhayani.me/course

Your Soft Skills Aren't Soft at All

Of course, soft skills matter, but which ones? In my opinion, every engineer should be better at these two: active listening and clear communication.

Listening isn’t just about hearing; it's about being present, processing information, and asking the right follow-up questions. Too often, we listen passively, just waiting for their turn to speak and sometimes even hoping that we need not speak at all :) Instead of listening passively, listen with intent.

Clear communication is all about conveying ideas, decisions, and information easily, clearly, and unambiguously. Be concise, structured, and complete, and say just enough to get the point across without unnecessary fluff. Apply this for your meetings, Slack messages, or even documentation.

One thing I proactively do is to observe and measure the number of clarifications asked in my communication. If there are too many such questions, then my message probably wasn't as clear as I thought it was. I go back and iterate on it and ask myself,

• did I really listen?
• did I really understand what I was talking about?
• did I communicate it well?

This happened to me recently, so, coming from my personal experience :) I am a work in progress, and will always be :)

By the way,

Being hands-on is the best way for you to learn. Practice interesting programming challenges like building your own BitTorrent client, Redis, DNS server, and even SQLite from scratch on CodeCrafters.

Sign up, and become a better engineer.

Here's a video from me

I published a video - Serverless Computing Explained - Introduction and Architecture

In this video, I explained serverless computing and architecture. We touched upon the foundational concepts of serverless, exploring how it reshapes our approach to building and deploying applications, and considered some of its architectural principles. We cover,

• what serverless computing is,
• why was it built in the first place?
• see 5 real-world use-cases where serverless made it super-efficient
• understand the advantages and, more importantly, the disadvantages of adopting it, and
• learn when to use and when not to use this computation pattern

Here's a paper I recently read

I spent some time reading Challenges to Adopting Stronger Consistency at Scale

Do you need a strongly consistent system at scale?

Some time back, I read a 2015 Facebook paper, "Challenges to Adopting Stronger Consistency at Scale," which talks about what it takes to integrate strong consistency mechanisms into a system that's already scaled massively.

Given that we are chasing strong consistency at scale, we will be taking a latency hit. But is it worth it? What makes the paper interesting is that it frames the issue not just as a technical challenge, but as a systemic one.

It makes you ask the fundamental questions - "What’s the user-visible inconsistency cost, and is fixing it worth the latency tradeoff?"

This paper will make you zoom out and consider the system end-to-end. A few technical things that stood out were

• How expensive query amplification becomes at scale
• How celebrity pages/posts dominate latency paths
• Sometimes, you simply can't compromise on consistency across services - even if it hurts latency. So… what’s the solution?

If you've ever tried or want to learn how to scale a strongly consistent system across teams, services, and at a global scale, this paper will resonate with you a ton. It's a must-read.

Btw, this is what system design is all about. It is about staying grounded in your design and keeping it closer to the real world and not drawing bo.

You can download this and other papers I recommend from my papershelf.

Three interesting articles I read

I read a few engineering blogs almost every day, and here are the three articles I read and would recommend you read.

• Faking a JPEG
• Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale
• Local-First Software is Easier to Scale

Thank you so much for reading this edition of the newsletter 🔮 If you found it interesting, you will also love my courses

1. System Design Course for Beginners
2. System Design Course for SDE-2, SDE-3, and above
3. Redis Internals Course

I keep sharing no-fluff stuff across my socials, so if you resonate, do give me a follow on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and GitHub.