I wrote a post for the Times Open blog, you can read it here.

I’ve come across BigQuery (BQ) at work a few times recently - mostly in the context of our data engineering team enabling data analysts to ask questions of our data. I’ve also seen a few cases of teams thinking of leveraging it in some job oriented operational tasks due to its low latency querying capabilities. Needless to say this piqued my interest and I got hold of 2 papers by Google talking about the secret sauce behind their tech. One is a about BQ itself as available through Google Cloud Platform (GCP); the other is about the internal Google tool Dremel that BQ is based on.

I came across the paper in the title of this post while searching for material on the phrase ‘just enough design up-front’ that I heard from a colleague. The paper can be found here. It was published in 2015 and hence is fairly recent. I found it particularly interesting since I’ve been seeing similar factors in play at my day job and similar coping mechanisms. I highly recommend reading the paper in it’s entirety as well since it contains many interesting anecdotal quotes from fellow engineers / managers that one may be able to relate to!

Some of the more memorable bugs I’ve encountered over the course of my career thus far:

When my team interviews candidates for a SWE position we often have a software design / architecture interview where we go over an application or feature that the candidate has worked on and / or ask them to come up with a design for a new system. Some of the criteria I base my evaluation on follow.