Ethan's Wiki Update #16

Hi, it’s been a month! A few articles here and there.

What’s New

Personal Growth Page:

• Being good isn't enough

  • It's not just work harder

  • Combine disciplines: technical skill, product thinking, project execution, and people skills

  • Agency: high-agency people make things happen; low-agency people wait

Making stuff that matters actually happen

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Engineering Page on 3D printing:

• Ultimate Guide: How to design for 3D Printing

  • Basics: thickness, bridges, overhand, orientation

  • Edges, feature sizes, fillets, ribs, splitting models, etc.

• Design for 3D-Printing

  • More technical guides, especially comparing to other manufacturing methods

  • Strength, tolerance, process optimization, integration, appearance, etc.

• Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000

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Real world software designs page:

• How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs

  • Paralleling read and write to many HDDs

  • Erasure coding: breaks data into shards and redundant parity shards

  • Power of random two: pick two random and use the less busy one

Random

Talking about Amazon S3 buckets, there is another article about S3 in the same real world software designs page. At the time I made these notes:

• Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 (HN)

  • Designing systems at the scale of S3 means 1 in a billion might be a daily occurrence

  • From the physical hard disk storage to managing heat (load balancing), to data replication, to data placement

  • There are also considerations of human factors, e.g. threat model and lightweight formal verification

  • The last bit is inspiring, scaling the team is as important as scaling the technology. Encouraging ownership intrinsically motivates people to push forward. As a senior engineer develop and articulate problems, rather than pitching solutions.