A startup guy

image via https://www.wrike.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/software-product-management.png I am an Architect at a Startup called as Egnyte and my daily job involves working closely with Product managers and translating their vision into reality.  I had interviewed hundreds of engineering candidates during my tenure at Egnyte and sometimes I am asked to interview candidates outside my role. Recently I was asked to interview a Product Manager. I was like huh its been a long time I have interviewed a one and the Startup landscape has changed a lot these days.  A good Product Manager these days can really make your product stand out from the competition and drive growth.  How do I know he is the best candidate for the job? I was one of the interviewers and was given 30 min. I usually want one hour but that day was packed with meetings.  A day before the interview I started preparing for it and landed on to this master piece written by Ken Norton( @kennethn ) ...

http://www.conniekuusisto.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Email_overload.png Email had became a productivity hog for me and I was overwhelmed by it. I am working for Egnyte since last 6 years and every year not only the team has expanded but with it the number of emails I receive has increased. New processes get added and new mailing lists get created and  someone adds you to it and now you are blasted with this news feed like twitter firehose. The longer your tenure the more mailing lists you are on. It seems I was working all day, but as a programmer/Architect by heart I was not getting satisfaction if I hadn't coded anything by the end of day or solved a meaty problem in a quarter. Reaching to InboxZero was a mirage to me, you are this close to it and then suddenly in an hour you are blasted 20 emails and there goes another hour sifting through it to see if you have missed anything important.  Programming/Architecture is a creative field and you require decent unint...

It seems Mysql is rock solid if you want: Transactions ACID support So I would still recommend mysql for any thing that is mission critical data and is the primary datastore for your transactions. But what about derived data or analytical data? I had built large scale cluster of mysql server storing metadata about billions of files and folders used by tens of thousands of customers daily and its scaling fine and working good, its still growing at a healthy rate and holding up.  But this requires a lot of baby sitting if you have 100s of nodes and you need to do replication add more nodes rebalancing data monitoring entire cluster Sharding Backup/restore You have to write a lot of tooling and lot of monitoring/babysitting to scale the cluster. Plain stock Mysql will scale up to a limit but vertically scaling has its own issues. So +1 for Mysql but not everything should be stuffed there. But recently me and my team built full text indexing on same dataset usin...