Have you ever wondered how your browser resolves a domain name when you hit Enter on a URL? Here’s how it works, at a high level. Your browser first looks in its own cache for the address. If it doesn’t find it, it checks the OS cache, and finally the ISP’s cache. If the name isn’t cached, the next step is the /etc/hosts file. If there’s an IP address there, the browser tries to load the page from that server.

Amazon’s Leadership Principles are used in everything from hiring to design reviews, and they’ve become hugely influential well beyond Amazon itself. This video walks through them. The fourteen principles: Customer Obsession Ownership Invent and Simplify Are Right, A Lot Learn and Be Curious Hire and Develop the Best Insist on the Highest Standards Think Big Bias for Action Frugality Earn Trust Dive Deep Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Deliver Results (Amazon has since added two more - “Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer” and “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility” - bringing the total to sixteen.

Arnold Schwarzenegger gave this commencement speech at the University of Southern California, and the six rules he lays out have stuck with me. They’re simple, but they apply just as much to a career in engineering as to anything else. His six rules: Trust yourself. Work out who you really are and what you want, rather than what others expect of you. Break the rules. Not the laws - the conventions.

By default, the JVM’s maximum heap size is 1/4 of the physical memory available - you can read about this in the Oracle GC tuning guide. This means that if you don’t define -Xmx in your JVM parameters, the container will set 1/4 of the host memory as the maximum heap size. On a recent enough JVM (8u191+ and 10+), the JVM is container-aware: if you set a Kubernetes resource limit, the JVM uses that limit rather than the host’s memory to size the heap.

A Service Account provides an identity for processes that run in a pod. When processes inside a pod contact the API server, they are authenticated as a particular Service Account. Create a Service Account using the YAML below. apiVersion: v1 kind: ServiceAccount metadata: name: sa-app-name namespace: namespace-name Once the Service Account is created, you can reference it in your pod spec: apiVersion: v1 kind: Pod metadata: name: app-name spec: serviceAccountName: sa-app-name Now on to Kubernetes Secrets.

Bill Gates is famously a voracious reader, getting through dozens of books a year and publishing detailed recommendations on his blog, GatesNotes. This video collects fifteen of his picks. What I like about his lists is how little of it is about technology. Gates reads widely - history, public health, psychology, science, biography - and that breadth clearly feeds into how he thinks about hard problems. There’s a lesson in that for people who work in tech.