Prince Mishra

I. 4 fundamental ideas that we need in order to design data-intensive applications. Reliable, scalable, maintainable applications. Reliability means continuing to work correctly, even when things go wrong. Common faults and preventions include: Hardware faults: hard disks crash, blackout, incorrect network configuration,… Add redundancy to individual hardware components to reduce the failure rate. As long as we can restore a backup onto a new machine quickly, the downtime is not fatal. Software faults: bug, out of shared resources, unresponsive service, cascading failure,… There’s no quick solution other than thorough testing, measuring, monitoring, analyzing. Human errors: design error, configuration error,… Enforce good design, good practice and training. Decouple the places where people make the most mistake. Automate testing: unit test, integration test, end-to-end test. Allow quick recovery rollback strategy. Set up detials monitoring Scalability describes a system’s ability to co

Takeaways Investing is about relative, not absolute performance Technology competition is about relative, not absolute strength Society is about relative, not absolute status 1. Don't bet on the most likely winner Imagine you're an investment analyst [1]. Investment analysts research companies and decide which stocks to buy or sell. You've done your work on  Tencent , a chinese internet company, concluding that the business, management, and macro trends all look good. Gaming and online entertainment  will continue increasing in importance ,  the executive team is experienced , and population growth provides a tailwind  for at least ten years. You model all of that up in excel. Write a simple 5 page investment memo. Prepare 50 pages of backpocket complicated charts just in case [2]. Convinced of your brilliance and diligence, you pitch your boss on Tencent. You time your meeting perfectly, a little after he's been in the office, but before he's busy looking up summer