Building a Perplexity Clone with 100 lines of code
AI search apps like Perplexity.ai are really cool. They use an LLM to answer your questions, but pull in real-time search results to augment the answer (eg RAG) and list citations. I wanted to know how it works and decided to build my own version. Getting it to work is surprisingly simple and...
A Brief History of Scaling Uber
On a cold evening in Paris in 2008, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn't get a cab. Fast forward to today where Uber is the largest mobility platform in the world, in over 70 countries, 10,500 cities, and 130 million users. Here's the story of the key moments in scaling Uber engineering ...
Recreating my Site as a 90s Webpage
I revisited the look of early web design by recreating my home page with a 90s theme. Drawing inspiration from iconic sites like Space Jam, I incorporated classic elements such as gif badges, pixelated fonts, and dithered images to capture the era's distinct look.
Finding the Reasons for your Team's Performance Problems
Great managers strive to create high performing teams. So if they observe or are presented with a problem with an employee, they swiftly seek to understand and solve it. And the best leaders realize the surface issue most likely isn’t the real issue. They need to go below the surface to under...
Want a Good Team Now or a Great Team Later?
The goal of our teams is to deliver results for the company. So when we prioritize work, we consider two factors: level of effort and impact. (ie, do low effort / high impact projects first).
The Power of Pre-Mortems in Software Development
The software post-mortem is well known. It’s a standard best practice that really marks the end of any software project. It also fits in well with the Agile manifesto, specifically the retrospective - always be reflecting, always be improving.
Don't Ask for Feedback, Ask for Advice
Everyone wants feedback. In fact, studies show employees who get regular feedback are more engaged and higher performing. The problem is, unless you have a strong trusting relationship with a person you are asking, you may not get the concrete feedback you are looking for. People don’t want t...
So, You Want to Move to Microservices?
As I reflected back on my time at LinkedIn, I put together a brief history of its scaling story. We had done the (now) classic migration from monolith to microservices. Just like oh I dunno, Amazon, Google, eBay, Twitter, Netflix, and my current employer Uber (to name a few). And why not? Mic...
Code Reviews by Phase and Expectations
Code reviews are amazing for many reasons. And everyone on the team should contribute. Interestingly, the behavior of an engineer with respect to code reviews changes based on seniority or tenure within a team or code repository. I like to refer these changes as “phases”.
The Wisdom of David Henke
A hero to the engineering and operations world, here’s a collection of some of David Henke’s greatest quotes and sayings like “you are only as good as your lieutenants” and “what part of 24/7 don’t you understand?”.