Matthew Hawthorne
@mhawthorne
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Built core infrastructure at Netflix, Twitter, Comcast. Now helping companies scale their systems. Author of "Push to Prod or Die Trying."
Pennsylvania, USA
Joined April 2011
đĽ interested in reading real-world stories about violating engineering principles, at scale? look no further
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I interviewed for a principal engineer role they asked about python, but I misheard it as âpynchonâ I gave an incomprehensible summary of gravityâs rainbow I got the job
I went on a job interview for a Senior SWE role. They asked me about my experience with Kafka. I told them how in âMetamorphosisâ someone can lose their worth in othersâ eyes the moment they stop being useful. Itâs a chilling reminder of how fragile our sense of belonging can
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itâs a great point. another reason professional software development feels less fun than personal hacks is that there is a lot of groupthink involved, often provided by design and code reviews reviews are great tools for knowledge sharing and limiting risk, at the cost of
Lately, as a developer, especially with the advent of agentic ai tools, there's no denying that the amount of "joy" in writing code at work has significantly gone down. I mean yes, we are more productive than ever, we have more power and time to build anything we want, but iykyk.
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now, a cache without a source of truth that breaks your product upon cache misses isnât really a cache, itâs an in-memory database which sounds terrible but I see it all the time
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I do wonder if investing into building scalable caches provides a better ROI than building scalable databases, as at many companies you have far more caches than databases
A major red flag for me is when a person making architectural suggestions or decisions for a non-FAANG begins, with literally no data informing the point, that you should put a cache (Redis, etc.) in front of your transactional database (PostgreSQL, etc.) Even if they insist itâs
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working on chapter 4 of my book, where I start off talking about latency one thing I've learned is that even if the numbers make sense to you, that doesn't mean that you'll ever totally understand them example: doesn't 5ms seem slow for a cached DNS lookup?
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just learned about the warnings module in python: https://t.co/bwYHsU8PK8 I don't totally get why this is superior to logger.warn, but it did allow me to disable a moviepy warning that was streaming to my terminal approximately 1 million times per second
docs.python.org
Source code: Lib/warnings.py Warning messages are typically issued in situations where it is useful to alert the user of some condition in a program, where that condition (normally) doesnât warrant...
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there's a similar concept to "you ship your org chart" which is something like "you ship your mental model" in the absence of engineers or product managers who can think from the perspective of their users, you ship products that generate endless pain and zero joy
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determined to get to the heart of why google analytics is so terrible today, thanks to this reddit post: https://t.co/vQznFF7azE I learned that to modify the date on a report, you have to create a collection, publish it, add a topic, then add the report to the topic
reddit.com
Explore this post and more from the GoogleAnalytics community
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had an issue where google analytics data for one of my sites was all zeros from 11/3 onward ran again today, and the problem has disappeared did all of the random print statements I added and removed somehow fix the issue? we'll never know
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finding a cs job so hard in this market we got people going to the nba instead đ
Maxime Raynaud graduated from Stanford with a DOUBLE MAJOR in Mathematics & Computer Science four months ago⌠Last night, he made his NBA Debut for the Sacramento Kings.
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why do great engineers lose architecture debates? https://t.co/wg86SZrbcB a post about simple tricks to improve your persuasiveness, which also improves the odds of your ideas moving forward
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you should have better problems tomorrow than you have today and if thatâs not the case, then you arenât doing good architecture work you may need to find new architects or consider not having any architects at all
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recently partnered with @GergelyOrosz to write "What is good software architecture?" for The Pragmatic Engineer: https://t.co/1N2kL8kQ2z the core thesis is that good architecture work involves upgrading your problems
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
What good architecture looks like, how to improve your skill at building it âand why Architects are not always the answer. Guest post by Matthew Hawthorne, who built large systems at Netflix & Twitter
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from the AWS incident summary: > We have already disabled the DynamoDB DNS Planner and the DNS Enactor automation worldwide. I wonder how the DNS records get updated now. manually tuning the weights every day?
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Push to Prod or Die Trying: High-Scale Systems, Production Incidents, and Big Tech Chaos by Matthew Hawthorne @mhawthorne is the featured book on the Leanpub homepage! #DistributedSystems #AmazonWebServices #Aws #Testing #PersonalTransformation #books Build high-volume systems.
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One thing thatâs annoying about being a software engineer is that youâre surrounded by people who have strong opinions about the stupidest possible stuff that couldnât possibly ever matter even a little bit. This is your whole career. Itâs just arguments like this one over and
enabled: boolean isEnabled: boolean I trust you more if you use the second convention with booleans
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Craft Is the Antidote to Slop "The devilâs oldest strategy is, of course, promising godlike creation without godlike effort."
Creation without a creator is meaningless.
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