Builds and operates billion-QPS distributed systems. Senior Director @MongoDB. Core infra, databases, reliability, and engineering management. Views are my own.
Dublin, Ireland
Joined May 2009
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Evren Önem retweeted
I follow the AI & math discourse a bit - without understanding the actual math. I thought I might offer some thoughts as a scientist in structural biology - a field transformed by various tech over the years, and recently by AlphaFold. It might perhaps interest @nasqret et al.🧵
I'm currently returning to Toronto from a summit on the future of mathematics, at OpenAI. @SebastienBubeck asked me to talk a bit about the future we'd all like to avoid, where humans are mathematically disempowered. @Jacob_Tsimerman advised us to try to prioritize detail over correctness, and I have no doubt that I succeeded in deprioritizing correctness.
I tried to find a title that wasn't too bombastic:
Evren Önem retweeted
The elimination of engineers was one of the wilder hypotheses out there. Just like absurdly wrong. We just gave engineers a power tool that can accelerate the development of whatever we want.
Of course their value not only remains critical in that world, but actually goes up in many domains because we can apply engineering to far more work than before.
If you’re trying to automate drug discovery, you need engineers. If you’re trying to automate manufacturing, you need engineers. If you’re taking on larger and larger software projects, you need engineers.
This will happen in domains beyond engineering too. AI causes companies to take on way more work than before, which leads to needing more experts to oversee the work.
Even as models get better and better, they can be better utilized by the experts in those fields than the novices. Great time to be an expert.
Evren Önem retweeted
A great reminder that while people argue endlessly about tooling, it’s expertise that dominates outcomes.
I love how everyone uses specialized lenses for shooting to avoid blur and increase precision...
But then Turkey sends out a guy who looks like he just picked up the gun for fun and wins silver.
(h/t @paposfut)
Evren Önem retweeted
[new blog post]
The demise of coding is greatly exaggerated
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/20…
Evren Önem retweeted
According to legend, Milo of Croton in Greece, six-time Olympic victor, trained by carrying a calf daily from its birth until it became a full-sized ox.
I think that’s a really nice analogy for what it takes to progressively learn a tech stack or language.
ALT Cartoon of Milo carrying progressive calf’s to ox and getting stronger
Evren Önem retweeted
Kernighan’s law: “You need to be twice as smart as the person who wrote the code in order to debug it”. Don’t put yourself in a position to have to outsmart yourself.
Evren Önem retweeted
Language is an imperfect, incomplete, and low-bandwidth serialization protocol for the internal data structures we call thoughts.
Evren Önem retweeted
#DynamoDB helped @careem scale their platform to over 50 million customers, while lowering their database costs by over 50%. 🚗 ⚡ 📱 Learn more about their journey here: go.aws/3E70ZIm
Evren Önem retweeted
These papers are out today too: ❤️❤️
- meta’s microservice paper (it’s a paper on distributed tracing) usenix.org/system/files/atc2…
- AWS lambda on demand container loading arxiv.org/pdf/2305.13162.pdf
- distributed transactions at scale in DynamoDB usenix.org/system/files/atc2…
The paper lineup at Usenix 2023 ATC looks brilliant!
- Lifting the veil on Meta’s microservice architecture: Analyses of topology and request workflows ❤️
- On-demand Container Loading in AWS Lambda by @MarcJBrooker
- Distributed Transactions at Scale in DynamoDB (AWS)
Evren Önem retweeted
DynamoDB paper sharing our experience operating DynamoDB at a massive scale and how the architecture continues to evolve to meet the ever-increasing demands of customer workloads. Read the full paper on @dynamodb here
tinyurl.com/589xretb #DynamoDB #aws
Evren Önem retweeted
The team I feel privileged to be part of has just open sourced the Git-compatible Source Control client called Sapling which we believe offers a better UX over Git.
Let’s talk about source control: We’ve open-sourced #Sapling, a new Git-compatible source control client that scales to the largest repositories in the world.
We’re looking to raise the bar for #sourcecontrol & we’re hoping you’ll join us. 1/2
ow.ly/avZQ50LF4rt
Evren Önem retweeted
🧵 I’ve been unpleasantly surprised that some people seem to condone the public criticism of employees and/or the public firing of an employee for responding to this criticism.
Here are my thoughts on these topics, which I hope would be obvious to any decent leader. (1/22)
Evren Önem retweeted
"Those infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii were, on average, 29% more likely than others to have founded a startup, 27% more likely to have founded multiple ventures, and more than twice as likely to have founded their businesses alone." hbr.org/2022/07/a-common-par…
Evren Önem retweeted
Tomorrow, the DynamoDB team is going to be presenting "Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service" (usenix.org/system/files/atc2…) at ATC. This is a super exciting paper that covers a real-world big system, and how it has evolved.
Evren Önem retweeted
“If you held a grain of sand up to the sky at arm’s length, that tiny speck is the size of Webb’s view in this image. Imagine — galaxies galore within a grain, including light from galaxies that traveled billions of years to us!”
– @NASAWebb
👀 Sneak a peek at the deepest & sharpest infrared image of the early universe ever taken — all in a day’s work for the Webb telescope. (Literally, capturing it took less than a day!) This is Webb’s first image released as we begin to #UnfoldTheUniverse: nasa.gov/webbfirstimages/
ALT The background of space is black. Thousands of galaxies appear all across the view. Their shapes and colors vary. Some are various shades of orange, others are white. Most stars appear blue, and are sometimes as large as more distant galaxies that appear next to them. A very bright star is just above and left of center. It has eight bright blue, long diffraction spikes. Between 4 o’clock and 6 o’clock in its spikes are several very bright galaxies. A group of three are in the middle, and two are closer to 4 o’clock. These galaxies are part of the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, and they are warping the appearances of galaxies seen around them. Long orange arcs appear at left and right toward the center.
Evren Önem retweeted
The human brain is incredible. It’s capable of both engineering a life saving mRNA vaccine and deciding that anti-parasitic cattle paste is a better option. Just unbelievable range.
Evren Önem retweeted
Adam 5000 yıl önce Nil Nehrinde sellerin her yıl aynı dönemde olduğunu fark etmiş, geometri ve matematiği kullanmış ve barınaklarla tarlaları ona göre dizayn etmiş. Aradan 5000 yıl geçmiş, yılda 12 Milyar lira bütçesi olan Diyanet başkanı "Allah'ın takdiri" diyor.
Evren Önem retweeted
CDC'nin delta raporu : context-cdn.washingtonpost.c…
Özetle, aşılanmış kişilerde,
- ciddi hastalık veya ölüm riski 10+ kat,
- enfeksiyon riski 3 kat,
daha ***az***.