George Dean

Learning to Rank is Back on the (Reddit, Inc. Eng Blog) Menu Boys!! In this post by Chris Fournier we discuss some of the infra challenges for Learning to Rank in Solr

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How do you work through feeling overwhelmed with projects, both at work and at home? My project list is never ending. I have multiple major work areas, a house with a sheet of improvement projects that keeps growing, half a dozen trips planned into next year, and a wife and two daughters with lists of their own. It's easy to not know where to start or what to do next. And then before you know it you've burned an entire day playing sudoku. Many years ago I learned the art of Getting Things Done. I even wrote an article on it for USENIX Association's ;login: Magazine just as the world came screeching to a halt in early 2020, and talked about it on The Hedge Podcast (episode 88). There is a lot of structure to GTD, but I can boil it down to having a trusted list of all the next actions I need to do. One that is reviewed regularly and captures thoughts as I have them. All of it - work, home, family - gets treated the same way in one place. I've been out of practice and I've recently rekindled my system. This is one of the ways I'm addressing feeling adrift. I can always find something to do that will move me forwards, as well as give me that dopamine hit of crossing a task off my list. And if I'm avoiding one it's probably because I didn't break the next action down to a small enough chunk. The most important part of practicing GTD (and other organizational systems) is that it clears my head. The human brain isn't really great at maintaining lists. The only real method it has for doing this is to constantly go over the list, which keeps the pathways in the brain fresh. That takes mental capacity, whether you realize it or not, and it adds to your stress. Plus, half the time you don't even have the list in mind or complete when it needs to be. You think about the dead batteries in the flashlight when the power goes out at home, not when you're standing in Home Depot wondering what else you need to get.

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I was reading one of the 2 newsletters I follow - The Grappler's Diary on Substack - and the author (Chris Wojcik) pointed out one of those "well, yeah, of course" kind of ideas that made me stop and think for a bit. Wojcik pointed out that it takes more and more effort to reach higher levels of skill in jiu jitsu. This is of course true of any skill. I've certainly seen that with programming. The easiest and biggest leaps are at the beginning. Going from zero to your first working program is pretty easy. Becoming a true professional developer takes years. Continuous improvement takes introspection, feedback, seeking out training and education, and lots and lots of work. And the noticeable improvements these days are small: cleaner code, improved readability, and better organization. Little things that matter. And the more time I spend as a "programmer" the less I write code and the more time I spend on related things: technical design, code review, stakeholder relations, project management, and more. Just as you get more skilled in martial arts, the more time you spend teaching, coaching, and advising, and the less time you spend getting beat up by kids.

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Meta uses monorepo to manage its code. I was skeptical about this approach when I joined the company a few years ago. How could it work with such a massive codebase? But I was wrong. I found working in Meta's monorepo to be a pleasure.  If you want to learn what working in Meta's monorepo is like (and why we are not using git), check out my latest post. https://lnkd.in/guaDRris #softwareengineering #productivity

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🏎️💨 Making of a Ridiculously Fast™ API client in R. Why my package is **~17x faster** than the community alternatives that call the **exact same API endpoints**. 👇🏽**design choices matter** ✨ https://lnkd.in/ggi_2XyQ

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