civicsquid

One thing that I really appreciate about the blockchain and AI communities is that there is a lot of open source activity in these spaces. It seems feasible to find an interesting project on GitHub, get a deep understanding of it, and take up an issue to start contributing to it.

I wonder if there are any good examples of open source projects in infrastructure that have a similar amount of activity? When I am talking about "infrastructure" here, I'm thinking of things like: pub-sub, event streaming, distributed coordination, and/or data distribution systems.

I've started to get the feeling that open source infrastructure is relatively static now given all of the work that went into it during the last two decades, so there isn't much going on outside of the largest companies that need to scale existing solutions.

In the very late 1990s to the early 2010s, it seemed like the volume of distributed systems research was enormous.

If I search for papers during that period, I see everything from theoretical stuff like Chord to industry results like Google BigTable/Spanner and Facebook Cassandra/TAO, and of course people trying to figure out how to implement Paxos properly. Figuring out how to build systems to support web scale and mobile was both necessary and cool.

Now, I don't hear about distributed systems as a 'frontier' to be explored so much as an implementation detail.

It feels like there isn't as much innovation, but maybe that's because I'm not looking in the right places / in the right circles. I imagine distributed systems would be extremely relevant given the focus on AI and distributed consensus (crypto).

Could anyone better read than myself point to the 'hot' distributed systems work that is going on to support AI / distributed consensus today? Perhaps I just need better keywords.

Most of my co-workers aggressively max out their 401k's and contribute to an after-tax scheme once they hit IRS limits. They stress to me that it is important to keep as much money as possible out of taxable accounts.

Does this make sense for someone who is early into their professional career?

It seems like it makes less financial sense to do this if you need the money before retirement, e.g. if you are planning to buy a home or make some other large purchase in 5-10 years. As far as I can tell, you have to pay a significant penalty and/or interest to take this money out, so it feels like it would make more sense to contribute steadily (not aggressively) to tax-advantaged accounts while building wealth in a taxable account, where it can be accessed freely when needed.

I want to read some technical papers on distributed systems to understand what work has been in focus over the past few years and to learn a bit more about those topics. One thing I'm not sure about is how to even find papers like that and then how to read them once I do.

I think USENIX's OSDI would have some relevant stuff, but the best thing I can do right now is search through proceedings as in https://www.usenix.org/publications/proceedings/OSDI which is a bit overwhelming.

Can anyone suggest reading lists or other methods for finding / viewing papers that might be helpful here?

Back when I was doing research in VR about a decade ago, everyone followed the golden rule: do not cause any sudden acceleration!

This was because studies had regularly shown that doing so produced feelings of motion sickness. You could have teleportation or slow acceleration, but not any sudden movements like you would see in console FPS games.

I recently tried a couple of games on the Oculus and was surprised to see how common FPS-style 'walking' is in VR.

It make me pretty sick so I'm wondering: is there new research that refutes the 'golden rule', or did developers just decide to stop following it for some reason?

This is probably a dumb question, so bear with me. In the past few years I've noticed some folks at my company migrate to some pretty interesting mid-stage startups, all of which were completely unknown to me.

I feel like I get reach-outs a lot from early-stage startups, so discoverability isn't so hard there, but I'm a little too risk-averse to take them on -- I'd prefer something with slightly more stability. It seems like I need to do some research to find those.

Is there a good site or database for this?

I work on an infrastructure team at Meta. I love large distributed systems work and like the sort of work I do, but I’m getting a bit ground down by the machine.

I had a thought about how I’d love to try to solve some infrastructure and scaling issues as a general service - I’m not sure what that would look like, but perhaps some sort of IaaS.

My problem is I have no idea how to discover what that would look like. I have very little experience outside of large tech companies, which means I have no idea what sorts of needs exist in the market.

I’d love to try to learn a bit more about what people and companies need, but I don’t know how. If you’ve mainly worked in tech and wound up building services as a product later in your career, how did that journey go for you?

I work for Facebook (now Meta) on an infra service and have for over 3 years. When I joined I knew I was getting into an environment that had high expectations of ICs.

Ever since I started there has been this high anxiety attitude around job performance -- specifically performance reviews. As an L3 I paid much attention to it but after a promo or two people started giving me advice that I should be prepared to 'really output a lot of impact' in order to make it. I have done quite well so far, but I'm getting a bit exhausted by trying to continuously justify my worth \ existence as an IC and ensure people perceive my work as good \ important.

As I've seen my friends move around to other companies I've gotten the sense that engineers at other companies don't really have to deal with this sort of anxiety as much, either because expectations are more concrete ("we need these things done\designed\scoped out and you're working on it") or because performance reviews are just not so intense.

With recent layoffs and the direction of the company I am thinking about trying to move around, maybe to a smaller company. From a personal perspective, performance culture is one of the things I have come to dislike most about this company, although maybe it's like this most places.

Is it like this elsewhere? Any thoughts?

Note: by IC I mean engineers that contribute to changes directly, not sure if that's a common term