Hello, welcome back to another edition of the weekly nomz. Over the past week, I've been reading up on diverse range of articles and listening to a few podcasts. Let's get into it!

At work, I've been working on trying to implement an efficient and effective solution to a synchronisation problem. It involves synchronising a huge array of structs across two microservices. The following article provides an interesting solution to a very similar problem – Using checksums to verify syncing 100M database records. It involves a fair bit of "napkin math", as the author terms it, so I would recommend reading it in a less distracting environment. I have yet to implement this solution as I'm still working out the details on how I can effectively use a variant of Merkle Trees to identify differences between the two datasets. It would definitely make for an interesting article to write about once I've completed the implementation.

The next thing I wanted to share was actually a follow-up to the book – The Ulysses Contract – which I shared about in my previous weekly nomz. Towards the latter half of the book, the author talks about how the reader shouldn't try to copy directly from the greatest investors like Warren Buffet. Rather, we should try to understand the underlying principles and apply them in our own way. Despite it being only one chapter, I appreciated his frankness, especially when every other online investing guru trying to advocate for copying Warren Buffet. The insights, principles and reminders shared during the book were really helpful and I would recommend anyone who is just about to start their investing journey to give it a read.

Lastly, here are a few web articles that were interesting for me the past week. From the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Software Engineers, I enjoyed the point about estimating the time spent to perform a certain task, and recalibrating that estimation once the task has been completed. I find that this has multiple benefits: better estimation of time in the future as well as benchmarking proficiency and growth.

Diving into Engineering Metrics is an insightful article about having developer metrics to help quantify the performance of a team. I personally liked the inclusion of the ‘feedback loops’ and ‘cognitive load’ dimensions within the DevEx framework as I find that these are extremely important areas to work on improving. Having the DevEx framework in mind helps me to quantify clear objectives that I want to hit (personally or as a team). I think it will be very useful as I can use them to spark discussions and spearhead changes, even if I’m are not in a managerial or tech lead position.

That's all for this week's nomz! I greatly enjoyed reading and learning from these resources and I hope you will too.