2024-05-02 –, Connally Ballroom
One of the worst interview questions is "how would you design and scale Twitter from scratch on a whiteboard?" This is a very complicated question and typically used to gauge your knowledge of how things scale. This is also something that is limited to folk knowledge, so in this talk I will show you how you get from "humble beginnings" to "globe spanning monstrosity".
The goal of this talk is to make knowledge of how things scale in the real world accessible to everyone. Knowing how things happen means you can build systems that can scale for tomorrow without being caught in the "what if"s or the "how about"s that this interview question forces you into. This is aimed at people of all skill levels to help them skill up and pass these kinds of interviews with knowledge they'd certainly learn on the job anyways. The talk will be light-hearted with jokes aplenty.
This talk will start from the humble beginnings of a single app on a single server with sqlite and slowly build up through layers of abstraction until it becomes a giant globe-spanning monster like Twitter is today. Each stage will be explained and the tradeoffs that are usually made will be shown off.
Xe Iaso is a technical educator, twitch streamer, vtuber, and philosopher that focuses on ways to help make technology easier to understand and do cursed things in the process. Xe lives in Ottawa with their husband and does developer relations professionally. Xe is an avid writer for their blog xeiaso.net, where they have over 400 articles. They regularly experiment with new technologies and find ways to mash them up with old technologies for their own amusement.