Disclaimer: This piece is written anonymously. The names of a few particular companies are mentioned, but as common examples only.
This is a short write-up on things that I wish I'd known and considered before joining a private company (aka startup, aka unicorn in some cases). I'm not trying to make the case that you should never join a private company, but the power imbalance between founder and employee is extreme, and that potential candidates would
Picking the right architecture = Picking the right battles + Managing trade-offs
- Clarify and agree on the scope of the system
- User cases (description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful)
- Who is going to use it?
- How are they going to use it?
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Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012) | |
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L1 cache reference 0.5 ns | |
Branch mispredict 5 ns | |
L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache | |
Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns | |
Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache | |
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us | |
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us | |
Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD |