Fahim ul Haq

What is the one piece of advice I wish someone told me when I was learning how to code?

I’ve thought a lot about this question. In fact, we built Educative with this question in mind.

Throughout my career as a software engineer, many of the problems my teams at Microsoft and Facebook worked on centered around designing scalable and performant software systems. Of course, we had to write code as a part of this process, but it took a back seat to problem solving, logic skills, and… Show more

What is the one piece of advice I wish someone told me when I was learning how to code?

I’ve thought a lot about this question. In fact, we built Educative with this question in mind.

Throughout my career as a software engineer, many of the problems my teams at Microsoft and Facebook worked on centered around designing scalable and performant software systems. Of course, we had to write code as a part of this process, but it took a back seat to problem solving, logic skills, and cost-benefit analysis.

The reality is that professional software developers aren’t just there to code. They are there to solve problems. Show less

It’s safe to say that artificial intelligence and machine learning have made their mainstream debut. Just look at the tremendous popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and the recent announcements of Google Bard and Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing. While AI has quietly become integrated into more and more fields, its applications were not something the average person discussed until recently.

This is just the beginning.

During the 2008 financial crisis, I was an immigrant software engineer at Microsoft with a young family. I vividly remember the unpleasant feelings of instability and discomfort about my future.

Recent headlines about layoffs at big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce, Amazon, Stripe, and Zoom bring me back to memories of those challenging times. It is easy to feel powerless when facing such uncertainty.

At the time, I decided to take control by investing… Show more

During the 2008 financial crisis, I was an immigrant software engineer at Microsoft with a young family. I vividly remember the unpleasant feelings of instability and discomfort about my future.

Recent headlines about layoffs at big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce, Amazon, Stripe, and Zoom bring me back to memories of those challenging times. It is easy to feel powerless when facing such uncertainty.

At the time, I decided to take control by investing in my own development. Show less

Want to learn how to code but don’t know where to start? I recommend learning to think like a coder first.

Today, we are excited to announce that Educative has published its first courses adapted from titles published by Oxford University Press: a global leader in education and the publishing arm of one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities.

As part of this licensing agreement, Educative has debuted seven new courses based on books written by expert authors and published by Oxford University Press. We are thrilled to bring these incredible resources to life on Educative’s… Show more

Today, we are excited to announce that Educative has published its first courses adapted from titles published by Oxford University Press: a global leader in education and the publishing arm of one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities.

As part of this licensing agreement, Educative has debuted seven new courses based on books written by expert authors and published by Oxford University Press. We are thrilled to bring these incredible resources to life on Educative’s interactive learning platform for developers around the world. Show less

Let's explore the next great paradigm shift in software engineering — and what it will take for devs and engineering leaders to stay ahead of the curve.

It's finally 2023, and there really isn't a better time than January to start talking about job interviews. Companies conduct most of their interviews around this time of year, so this is a great time to try and get hired. Coding interviews can be stressful, which is even more true in times of economic uncertainty.

However, during my time at Facebook and Microsoft, I conducted hundreds of interviews and found that there are a few key steps that every applicant can take to reduce or… Show more

It's finally 2023, and there really isn't a better time than January to start talking about job interviews. Companies conduct most of their interviews around this time of year, so this is a great time to try and get hired. Coding interviews can be stressful, which is even more true in times of economic uncertainty.

However, during my time at Facebook and Microsoft, I conducted hundreds of interviews and found that there are a few key steps that every applicant can take to reduce or eliminate that stress entirely. Show less

If you’re looking for a goal for 2023 to help you advance as a developer, here’s an idea to boost your career and keep your skills fresh: learn a new programming language.

From AI to System Design, here are my essential takeaways for software engineers and managers heading into 2023

ChatGPT crafted this limerick that effectively captures how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in 2023 can boost developer productivity.

A lesson on scaling for spikes through capacity planning and load testing.

Recently, Ticketmaster was in the news for a major system failure when tickets for Taylor Swift’s concert tour went on sale. The website crashed under the weight of demand, leading to disgruntled fans and a tarnished reputation.

This incident restarted many conversations about antitrust in the ticketing industry, alleging monopolistic behavior from the Ticketmaster-LiveNation conglomerate. A class action lawsuit was even announced earlier this week.

But what actually happened to… Show more

Recently, Ticketmaster was in the news for a major system failure when tickets for Taylor Swift’s concert tour went on sale. The website crashed under the weight of demand, leading to disgruntled fans and a tarnished reputation.

This incident restarted many conversations about antitrust in the ticketing industry, alleging monopolistic behavior from the Ticketmaster-LiveNation conglomerate. A class action lawsuit was even announced earlier this week.

But what actually happened to Ticketmaster from a systems perspective? Show less

Let's explore the components that make Twitter work at such an impressive scale — and discuss Elon’s proposed improvements.

Any good System Design question should reveal a lot about a candidate’s understanding of architecture and the inner workings of large-scale systems. The question should be complex enough to engage the candidate and allow them to demonstrate their skill for building web-scale services, but not so complicated that the interviewee feels overwhelmed.

When I interviewed SWE candidates at Facebook and Microsoft, I wasn’t just looking for strong coding skills and soft skills that demonstrated… Show more

Any good System Design question should reveal a lot about a candidate’s understanding of architecture and the inner workings of large-scale systems. The question should be complex enough to engage the candidate and allow them to demonstrate their skill for building web-scale services, but not so complicated that the interviewee feels overwhelmed.

When I interviewed SWE candidates at Facebook and Microsoft, I wasn’t just looking for strong coding skills and soft skills that demonstrated alignment with company values. I was also looking for a candidate who could design a software system that met requirements, explain the system’s architecture and tradeoffs, and dive deep into an area of specialization like API design or a recommendation engine. Show less

Let's talk about what you need to know about Rust today (and why it’s here to stay)

When’s the right time to look for another job? You’ll have to consider various factors specific to your context, but I’ll provide a framework to break down all the factors to consider in a recession.

When’s the right time to look for another job? You’ll have to consider various factors specific to your context, but I’ll provide a framework to break down all the factors to consider in a recession.

The demand for managerial tasks increases, and so does the need to keep technical skills sharp. Here's how to stay up-to-date with System Design.

Instead of thinking about Developer Onboarding as one gigantic task, splitting it into three distinct stages enables developers to grow faster in productivity and in team impact.

Facebook engineers query multiple databases to monitor and analyze Facebook products and services. The fastest of these databases is Scuba, which achieves subsecond query response time by storing all of its data in memory across hundreds of servers. We are continually improving the code for Scuba and would like to push new software releases at least once a week. However, restarting a Scuba machine clears its memory. Recovering all of its data from disk — about 120 GB per machine — takes 2.5-3… Show more

Facebook engineers query multiple databases to monitor and analyze Facebook products and services. The fastest of these databases is Scuba, which achieves subsecond query response time by storing all of its data in memory across hundreds of servers. We are continually improving the code for Scuba and would like to push new software releases at least once a week. However, restarting a Scuba machine clears its memory. Recovering all of its data from disk — about 120 GB per machine — takes 2.5-3 hours to read and format the data per machine. Even 10 minutes is a long downtime for the critical applications that rely on Scuba, such as detecting user-facing errors. Restarting only 2% of the servers at a time mitigates the amount of unavailable data, but prolongs the restart duration to about 12 hours, during which users see only partial query results and one engineer needs to monitor the servers carefully. We need a faster, less engineer intensive, solution to enable frequent software upgrades.

In this paper, we show that using shared memory provides a simple, effective, fast, solution to upgrading servers. Our key observation is that we can decouple the memory lifetime from the process lifetime. When we shutdown a server for a planned upgrade, we know that the memory state is valid (unlike when a server shuts down unexpectedly). We can therefore use shared memory to preserve memory state from the old server process to the new process. Our solution does not increase the server memory footprint and allows recovery at memory speeds, about 2-3 minutes per server. This solution maximizes uptime and availability, which has led to much faster and more frequent rollouts of new features and improvements. Furthermore, this technique can be applied to the in-memory state of any database, even if the memory contains a cache of a much larger disk-resident data set, as in most databases. Show less

Windows Azure Storage (WAS) is a cloud storage system that provides customers the ability to store seemingly limitless amounts of data for any duration of time. WAS customers have access to their data from anywhere at any time and only pay for what they use and store. In WAS, data is stored durably using
both local and geographic replication to facilitate disaster recovery. Currently, WAS storage comes in the form of Blobs (files), Tables (structured storage), and Queues (message delivery)… Show more

Windows Azure Storage (WAS) is a cloud storage system that provides customers the ability to store seemingly limitless amounts of data for any duration of time. WAS customers have access to their data from anywhere at any time and only pay for what they use and store. In WAS, data is stored durably using
both local and geographic replication to facilitate disaster recovery. Currently, WAS storage comes in the form of Blobs (files), Tables (structured storage), and Queues (message delivery). In this paper, we describe the WAS architecture, global namespace, and data model, as well as its resource provisioning,
load balancing, and replication systems. Show less

Let's talk about how to send "hireable signals" to your interviewers — and how to prep for your interview efficiently.