Comment by tombert
10 hours ago
About a decade ago, I was working with a guy who was getting a PhD in search engine design, which I knew/know nothing about.
It was actually a lot of fun to chat with him, because he was so enthusiastic about how searching works and how it can integrate with databases, and he was eager to explain this all to anyone who would listen. I learned a fair amount from him, though admittedly I still don't know much about the intricacies of how search engines work.
Some day, I am going to really go through the guts of Apache Solr and Lucene to understand the internals (like I did for Kafka a few years ago), and maybe I'll finally be competent with it.
People who work on really obscure things love to talk about their work, heck if someone would listen to me I could talk for hours about what I do.
Unfortunately very few people care about the minutia of making a behemoth system work.
It seems a common problem in our profession that you can’t really talk to anybody about what you are doing. My friends have a vague idea but that’s it.
I would be more than interested to listen to you and what you do. Do not hesitate to share (blog post, AskHN, ShowHN, ...)
I would. Heck, I bet half of HN would be interested in what kind of insanity lies under those behemoths.
I work with music streaming, it is mostly just a lot of really banal business rules that become an entangled web of convoluted if statements. Where to show a single button might mean hitting 5 different microservices and checking 10 different booleans