Work and Life

There is a great post from 1994 about  black triangles  in the context of building large and complex systems. You might think that 1994 sounds like the dark ages, but the principles outlined in that post do stand the test of time. Here is my favorite excerpt from that post: What she later came to realize (and explain to others) was that the black triangle was a pioneer. It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready to put it

One sunny day in 2007, I started as engineer #6 at a scrappy little startup that I knew to be as Google for jobs .  Ten amazing years flew by, working with some of the smartest people I will ever know in life. Some highlights of work I did, that I feel really good about. Tokenization and search quality improvements to Indeed's international search (China/Japan/Korea/Germany)  Performance improvements to indexing and search back-end systems, that improved performance and lowered bandwidth costs.  A complex re-architecture to horizontally shard Indeed's index of resumes Helped grow the jobs recommendation engine through performance and ranking improvements, introducing geohash clustering and other architectural changes. Implemented TLS support for Indeed's service framework Built wrappers around  Hystrix , to ease adoption within Indeed.  Built systems for monitoring and visibility of microservices, mongo and mysql. Gave four public tech talks in conferences  Led