The Coder Cafe

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Working on Complex Systems
 • Teiva Harsanyi
So, I Wrote a Book
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Unit Tests As Documentation
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Functors, Applicatives, and Monads
 • Teiva Harsanyi

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Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 5
Leveling and Key-Range Partitioning
 • Teiva Harsanyi
The Cold Start Problem
The cold start problem is a chicken-and-egg trap: no users without value, no value without users.
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 4
Deletes, Tombstones, and Compaction
 • Teiva Harsanyi
The Coder Cafe
The Coder Cafe
Missing direction in your tech career? At The Coder Cafe, we serve timeless concepts with your coffee to help you master the fundamentals. Written by a Google SWE and trusted by 3,500+ readers, we support your growth as an engineer, one coffee at a time.
The latest from
Teiva Harsanyi
Build Your Own Key-Value Storage Engine—Week 5
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Concepts

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The Cold Start Problem
The cold start problem is a chicken-and-egg trap: no users without value, no value without users.
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Linus Torvalds vs. Ambiguous Abstractions
There’s no issue with abstracting code into a helper function. If we want to optimize for cognitive load, the intent should be as clear as possible…
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Nothing Beats Kindness
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Horror Coding Stories: Therac-25
In total, there were six known radiation overdoses involving the Therac-25,and at least three were fatal.
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Speed vs. Velocity
On paper, the team delivered 10 story points. That is only speed, though, not velocity. If we care about direction as well, the team only delivered a…
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs)
No matter when or how often the nodes sync, they always end up with the same state.
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Organic Growth vs. Controlled Growth
A codebase is like a garden: left to grow organically, it becomes colorful but chaotic.
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Second Brain
Your mind is for having ideas, but without a second brain, those ideas fade into memory.
 • Teiva Harsanyi
Availability Models
Highly available is too vague; watch out when you read or hear it.
 • Teiva Harsanyi
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