Brian Liao
A Few Favorites of 2021
Hey 👋, It’s near the end of the year so I though I’d share a few of my favorite articles, books, and podcasts I’ve read or found in 2021. Articles Sc3nius in Not Boring by Packy McCormick Shopify: A StarCraft Inspired Business Strategy in NonGaap Investing by Mike Exponential curves feel gradual and then sudden by Chris Dixon 50 Thin... Read more 24 Dec 2021 - 2 minute read
Tech Talks at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google
This post was originally posted from the 10% Smarter newsletter. Consider subscribing if you like it! Ever wonder how large scale services at built at large tech companies? I’ve collected tech talks given by Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google to share! Facebook: YouTube Playlist Memcache at Scale, Whatsapp Erlang, Scaling Instagram,... Read more 12 Aug 2021 - less than 1 minute read
Consistency and Consensus
This post was originally posted from the 10% Smarter newsletter. Consider subscribing if you like it! Distributed systems are complex and include many difficult problem to tackle. Fortunately, some techniques have been developed and are widely used in production to deal with these issues in distributed systems. Today, we’ll discuss the rela... Read more 18 Jul 2021 - 9 minute read
Why Database Transactions Are Such A Great Idea
This post was originally posted from the 10% Smarter newsletter. Consider subscribing if you like it! Transactions are one of the fundamental ideas in databases. They enable safe semantics for applications and developers. But what are they and how do you use them? Let’s dive in and find out. What are Transactions? Transactions group multi... Read more 04 Jul 2021 - 9 minute read
How do Databases do Storage and Retrieval?
This post was originally posted from the 10% Smarter newsletter. Consider subscribing if you like it! In past posts, we’ve covered the data modeling side of databases. This post will give an overview of the internal storage and retrieval in databases. Let’s start by compare two different storage engines: Log-structured storage engines (log... Read more 06 Jun 2021 - 8 minute read