I love the first day of the year because it reminds me that one of life's greatest joys is to begin.
Living is beautiful because it means to start, always, at every moment. You're always on time to have a life that makes you happy every morning.
Happy New Year, lovely folks!
I don't know why software engineers and developers dream of retiring to become farmers. I just would like a house by the sea and a small boat to sail.
9. Eight strategies you can use to give better estimations as a software engineer. newsletter.francofernando.com/p/how-to-est...
10. A detailed guide on what to focus on as a reviewer during pull requests newsletter.francofernando.com/p/what-to-lo...
7. How to define system requirements and go from vague problems to clear solutions.
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/requiremen...
8. How RAFT solves the consensus problem in distributed systems: a breakdown that every engineer can understand.
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/the-raft-c...
5. Six critical steps to build your confidence as a software engineer newsletter.francofernando.com/p/how-to-bec...
6. Fundamental Graph Algorithms: topological sorting and strongly connected component newsletter.francofernando.com/p/fundamenta...
3. A Complete Guide to understand what happens when a program runs on your computer.
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/how-the-op...
4. How to master backtracking algorithms: a step-by-step guide to solve any problem.
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/backtracking
1. All you need to know to make your database more scalable, faster, and available with sharding.
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/a-comprehe...
2. Cache performance, architecture, and deployment strategies
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/caching-in...
This year, I wrote 51 articles (one per week) about fundamental topics like:
- Algorithms and Data Structures
- System Design and Distributed Systems
- Programming and Software Engineering
Here are the 10 most read ones (links below):
But once you've made it simple, your software is as flexible as it can be: easy to modify, or even rewrite, to suit any changes in the requirements.
In software development, the simplest solution is almost never the most obvious, so reaching it is actually not trivial. In many cases, you have to design big parts of your software at least twice.
The evolution of a web application architecture when going from serving hundreds to millions of users.
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/from-a-sin...
Be honest with yourself about what you want and work hard to get it.
Be meaningful and intentional with your time.
That is the only way to ensure that you give yourself the best odds.
When they hear "Don't Repeat Yourself," 99 out of 100 developers think of copy-paste code.
But DRY is about much more than that. The main focus is on knowledge, not code.
I wrote more about how to use DRY without falling into common traps here:
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/the-dry-pr...
We all go through 2 significant steps in our careers:
- Junior to mid-level developer
- Senior developer
In the first one, it matters more how well you code. "Nobody" will still listen to you.
But in the second stage and beyond, how well you communicate matters way more.
One thing I'm glad I paid a lot of attention to during my CS studies is "networking fundamentals".
Almost every project I've worked on has needed that background, and I've seen others who didn't have it have a hard time.
How do CDNs speed up content delivery on the internet?
You can read my in-depth article on how CDNs work under the hood and best practices when using them here:
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/a-critical...
If you work hard and are nice to people, you can get very far in life.
Being kind and honest to everyone is a skill that isn't given enough credit.
If you're not interested in your craft, you'll struggle to get a better software engineer.
Getting passionate isn't a gift, but a choice.
Pick a path, and get into it. Skills don't just come from a desire.
Life is not at extremes but somewhere in the middle:
- Work out for 45 minutes instead of 3 hours
- Do deep work for 2-3 hours instead of 10
- Get 8 hours of sleep instead of 4
Take breaks, think, and live. We're humans, not robots.
If you're in a system design interview, and you start brainstorming technical stuff, you're on the wrong path.
You're missing the most critical part of the design process: requirements.
I wrote about how requirements impact your design choices here:
newsletter.francofernando.com/p/requiremen...
If you want to become a better programmer, there is no secret sauce.
You just need to spend a lot of time coding and building projects.
Do you know what a database does most of the time?
This classic paper makes a very detailed profile of a transactional database, figuring out what each CPU command does.
Only 10% of the CPU instructions do critical work.
The rest are spread out fairly evenly between:
Read the paper here:
nms.csail.mit.edu/~stavros/pub...
There are many places where such overhead comes from, but all are necessary for a standard database to work.
Having a faster database is a matter of trade-offs:
no buffers -> keep the database entirely in memory
no locking or latching -> single-threaded system
no logs -> replication.
- Taking care of buffers (moving pages from a cache pool to the disk)
- Locking (row-level locks that manage concurrent multiple transactions)
- Latching (lightweight locks keep the internals of data structures safe)
- Logging (writing down operations before they happen so they can be recovered)
Do you know what a database does most of the time?
This classic paper makes a very detailed profile of a transactional database, figuring out what each CPU command does.
Only 10% of the CPU instructions do critical work.
The rest are spread out fairly evenly between:
Building something alongside your 9-5 job is rewarding, but it's important to have limits.
There will be times when your body will take breaks for you if you don't take breaks when you need them.
It took me 5+ years to become confident in my skills as a software engineer.
But I could have done it in less time if I had followed the 6 pieces of advice in the article below:
francofernando.substack.com/p/how-to-bec...
One thing people new to DSA often miss is that time complexity differs from speed.
O(N^2) algorithms can definitely outperform O(logN) algorithms for small input sizes.
I see many CVs from experienced engineers that put too much emphasis on their educational background.
But the truth is that once you get your first job, no one cares what school you went to.
Once you start building a small track record, things like your edu aren’t so important.
