Rachel Kroll

Honestly, if she’s ready to graduate High school and enter college, she’s old enough to be researching those questions on her own (not that you can’t too). She should be, too. Learning how to learn in your industry is an actual skill to learn. Learning what the “pulse” of the industry is will also be valuable for her during studies and beyond, and she’ll also meet peers who can have those discussions with her.

That said, I think for many this forum is actually the place to learn about the industry. It’s too broad an industry to find more specifics without knowing her interests. Does she like startups? Does she care more about the business side? Financial tech? AI? App development? Does she not know?

This site is honestly a great mixed aggregator of other sites. Find interesting ones and see the other posts. She’s in HS so the bar is low on deep technical knowledge and expectations. She should probably focus less on intense research topics unless she has an actual interest in a more academic side (simply because academic research is less approachable to someone without much academic experience).

If she doesn’t have an answer to those questions, I would say she just start googling things that pique curiosity. “How does X work” is how I started. That’s how I learned which buzzwords and jargon mattered to me. Probably more approachable for a younger person earlier on the journey.

Here are some newsletters I follow. My interests skew towards business.

Bits About…

I think it's little appreciated that planets solve many of the practical problems of feed crawling.

If you wanted to follow 2000 blogs yourself you'd find it is really a hassle. You can follow one planet and its easy.

For that matter, if 2000 people want to follow your blog (and many other blogs) they are going to generate 2000 requests per polling period. It is not wonder why people like [1] get so exasperated. There are three kinds of polling periods: (1) too fast, (2) too slow, (3) both at the same time. Instead of having 2000 people poll your blog too often, one planet can poll your blog. It improves the scalability and economics of the system dramatically.

(e.g. the difficulty of finding a good polling regime is one of 10 or 20 or so unappreciated reasons why RSS has remained nerdcore)

[1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

I was interviewing for software jobs recently, and while I was studying up on the "system design" portion I kept circling around the same insight that Dan Luu writes about so well here.

I would sit down at an interview and try to create these "proper" system designs with boxes and arrows and failovers and caches and well tuned databases. But in the back of my mind I kept thinking, "didn't Facebook scale to a billion users with PHP, MySQL, and Memcache?"

It reminds me of "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster" at https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html , and the occasional post by https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ where she builds a box that's just fast and with very basic tooling (and a lot of know-how).

I'm not sure about SRE specific or CI specific writing but at risk of answering another question, here's what comes to mind for me.

In the Operations space my favorite writer is Charity Majors, although a lot of what she talks about isn't OPs specific:

https://charity.wtf/

Rachel by the Bay is also great:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

Totally not related, but Phil Eaton's posts on how databases work are super interesting and lack fluff.

https://notes.eatonphil.com/

In terms of CI and builds, I try to write some on this topic for the Earthly Blog. My Bazel article was recently on Hn. Here are my posts:

https://earthly.dev/blog/authors/adam/

Warning though, I also write about lots of other stuff. Are there specific CI topics you'd like to see covered?

Yep this is why, more and more, developers are simply doing private repositories. They might exist on GitHub. Or a torrent or something. Rachel goes into more detail about them here.

Basically people fix things and don't commit them back upstream because doing so is too much of a political headache.

> While it's probably true that the dictator does suck at design, the talented user wants no part of the drama which would follow such a report. There is absolutely no benefit to lighting that particular fuse. And so, the problem is never reported, and the patch is never conveyed upstream. It effectively becomes a private fork limited to the talented user's systems.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/10/09/moat/

Yes. It’s called “understanding your constraints”.

The inverse is “appeal to higher power”; (implication being that its almost religion since it’s based on faith).

However: if you think that running large systems is hard, then it follows that it’s better to deploy small systems.

There can be times to outsource for sure, and I’m being relatively glib: but this idea of rent vs own is quite pervasive in the industry and it leads to dangerous situations where entire companies grind to a halt because these trade offs were talked down.

Regardless of that; understanding the trade offs is important, the famous “your nines are not my nines” is good to reference here: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/