Forgive me, I am about to make another music analogy, this time to help guide you as you grind projects for your profile.
So in music pedagogy, there is this thing called an 'étude' - an étude (French for 'study') is a short musical piece designed to provide exercise for a particular skill. It's not an 'exercise' like playing scales, and isn't a full blown composition - it's somewhere in between. Think of chess puzzles as études. Studies. They are evidence of practice but they do not by themselves qualify you to join the orchestra. For that you will need to understand how to put these techniques together with an understanding of the tension and resolution, the ebb and flow of the music, the emotional presentation of it and so on.
And it is the same with your projects. When you write a Netflix clone or a CLI tool, you're practicing your études. These are a necessary part of the education of a craftsman but are by themselves insufficient to make you an autonomous developer. In order to do that, you have to build more than one stand-alone piece of the system. You have to build a 'whole system'.
Whole systems have this messy way of not coming together nicely. Your various subsystems need separate deployment. Databases and in-memory caches need to be managed. Real world usage patterns throws up poor data models, bad performance, out of sync data, race conditions and also confused users, demanding users, stupid users....aaahhhh users!
So my word of advice for juniors building projects - build some 'whole systems'. And the best way to do this is to build something someone needs. Even if it's just you, your family, neighbourhood, college friends, turf friends - build something that is a whole system by itself. This is the next step in your evolution if you've been doing études all this time.
Even if you wish to specialise in databases or some narrow part of the system, it is critical to understand how the characteristics of this narrow part ripple out across the whole system and will add a level of maturity and understanding to your approach to your work.
Anyways, on to the jobs.
A close friend of mine (who is currently in stealth mode) has just started emergent.sh and has raised a seed round from YC. I recommend you apply to the various roles there -
- Senior Backend Developer
- Senior Frontend Developer
- LLM Training and Inference Engineer
and other roles. There are even internships available!
I also attended the Fifth Element and I met an amazing Indian deep tech company building a Snowflake competitor (killer? maybe!) out of Bengaluru. E6Data has a killer team and a killer product and you would do very well to apply for the role here - Software Engineer - Performance. More senior roles from E6 coming soon.
Help me hire?
I'm having some trouble finding the right candidate for the Principal Engineer Role at Druva. I'm offering a bounty of 15% of my commission (amounts to Rs.100,000+ as bounty) for anyone who sends me the successful candidate. Reply to this email and I'll hook you up with the Invite flow. Some of you already have it - just look for the 'Invite' link on the top nav bar.
And now on to the jobs
So in music pedagogy, there is this thing called an 'étude' - an étude (French for 'study') is a short musical piece designed to provide exercise for a particular skill. It's not an 'exercise' like playing scales, and isn't a full blown composition - it's somewhere in between. Think of chess puzzles as études. Studies. They are evidence of practice but they do not by themselves qualify you to join the orchestra. For that you will need to understand how to put these techniques together with an understanding of the tension and resolution, the ebb and flow of the music, the emotional presentation of it and so on.
And it is the same with your projects. When you write a Netflix clone or a CLI tool, you're practicing your études. These are a necessary part of the education of a craftsman but are by themselves insufficient to make you an autonomous developer. In order to do that, you have to build more than one stand-alone piece of the system. You have to build a 'whole system'.
Whole systems have this messy way of not coming together nicely. Your various subsystems need separate deployment. Databases and in-memory caches need to be managed. Real world usage patterns throws up poor data models, bad performance, out of sync data, race conditions and also confused users, demanding users, stupid users....aaahhhh users!
So my word of advice for juniors building projects - build some 'whole systems'. And the best way to do this is to build something someone needs. Even if it's just you, your family, neighbourhood, college friends, turf friends - build something that is a whole system by itself. This is the next step in your evolution if you've been doing études all this time.
Even if you wish to specialise in databases or some narrow part of the system, it is critical to understand how the characteristics of this narrow part ripple out across the whole system and will add a level of maturity and understanding to your approach to your work.
Anyways, on to the jobs.
A close friend of mine (who is currently in stealth mode) has just started emergent.sh and has raised a seed round from YC. I recommend you apply to the various roles there -
- Senior Backend Developer
- Senior Frontend Developer
- LLM Training and Inference Engineer
and other roles. There are even internships available!
I also attended the Fifth Element and I met an amazing Indian deep tech company building a Snowflake competitor (killer? maybe!) out of Bengaluru. E6Data has a killer team and a killer product and you would do very well to apply for the role here - Software Engineer - Performance. More senior roles from E6 coming soon.
Help me hire?
I'm having some trouble finding the right candidate for the Principal Engineer Role at Druva. I'm offering a bounty of 15% of my commission (amounts to Rs.100,000+ as bounty) for anyone who sends me the successful candidate. Reply to this email and I'll hook you up with the Invite flow. Some of you already have it - just look for the 'Invite' link on the top nav bar.
And now on to the jobs