Software Engineering discussion

I wasn't familiar with Brad, but I should have been, because much of his work has ended up in influential web server technology designed for scale, including memcached and Perlbal, and his product LiveJournal.

This is a "necessity is the mother of invention" story, because the extreme demand for his LiveJournal site led to crashes, which lead to the development of his scale and performance solutions, which he later generalized for use by others.

We also get a little insight into programming life in Google in this interview.

Interesting thing about this guy is that for almost every interview question he has a story from his own life. Also, I liked the examples he comes up with to support his views and opinions. Interesting conversation, software development experience, achievements, and it seems like he enjoys all those things as well. I like him talking about an importance of understanding whole stack of running programs no matter of a layer of programmer’s layer of operation. The other interesting point he makes about making assumptions while writing and debugging programs, which takes an experience to learn how to avoid. Also, I like his view on code ownership, though I’m not really sure I understood if he likes the code ownership policies at Google or not. I wish he talked a little more about how projects are handled there. I’ve read somewhere that developers can choose their individual projects of interest and spend one day per week working on these projects.

About book, I like that Peter asks his interviewees similar questions, which allows to compare their opinions and experiences about same subjects.