What are some problems I find interesting for now as an engineer without much experiences?
How do search engine works, how to searching and retrieval works so well in modern app. For instance, Spotify where you type can type in artists, songs, albums or anything, Notion Raindrop are more text-based, LinkedIn where you can type in people, posts, jobs (Altho in reality the search lowkey sucks actually). It makes we wonder if today I rollout an app that contains a lot tables/data managements, or a UI-heavy product like VSCode and CapCut how can I make a universal search bar that is great? It feels so great as a user, you spend minimal effort to type, and the system knows that you really want. And today, multimodality is the new engine for searches encompassing images, videos, audios, ie gallery, obsidian pkms with images and videos.
How do big companies serve their network across different continents? Cloud infra goes burrr, how do you make it scalable yet having a central platform to monitor infrastructures? Afterall, I still think SRE is a very interesting role to take on, and I do know it takes a lot experiences, not only building product but desining data infra, which most of the time building product is small part of keeping a organization marching steadily in the long run. System design and data infra is interesting. I think the reason is that what I felt as a software engineer working on product, DevOps engineers are like magician they do every stuff behind the scene. Part of the reason is that I might not be the most effective builder or your typical 10x engineers, maybe I can find my sense helping my fellow engineers to build faster, have the platform to see metrics they care, have the freedom to provision infra they need.
How can I help art creators? I love arts, I suck at arts, but I know people who create good arts. What problems do they have? How can I help them? I think the specturm covers photographer, graphic designers, music composer, etc.
What types of companies I would love to work with?
Idk, working with the cinematography industry anc creative industry sounds so great. I love imagination. I love daydreaming.
Companies like Weight and Biases, Duolinguo, Riot Games, Blizzard and of course Spotify.
I feel like I like to work with it more if I encounter problems with it in my real life, else I don’t even care. For example, I don’t care enough about fintech products to be honest.
One more thing I should take note of is, how can I stand out as a condidate so I can work on these problems? What is unique in me as a engineer?
No real answer, but I think is the ability to design robust data infra and system. Hence I think SRE and DE skills (Data Tool Stacks) are pretty important. Welp of course, scaling enough AI resources for training and inferencing is also under the umbrella.
These are the fantasy “what company I want to work for”. Does it really has alot things to do with AI now, when I think about it? Well I have to admit AI tech are just supplementary technologies in solving the core business problems. I do believe AI has much and much application for individual productivity. What I think about individual productivity is about three things:
- help us to remember
- better retrieval and recall of contents
- reduce jobs we know is repetitive, and not so meaningful.
I really like Sun Yuzheng’s quote, make data useful.