Big Tech Digest #20 💥
Featuring articles from Netflix, Canva, Airbnb, and many more!
Happy Monday 👋 and welcome to Big Tech Digest #20.
After a break, Big Tech Digest is back (!!!) with a batch of fresh articles published in the past two weeks.
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Without further ado, let’s get started!
// 🏆 Must reads
"Yes, You Can Use AI in Our Interviews. In fact, we insist"
by Simon Newton ⸱ Canva ⸱ 5 min read ⸱ 11 Jun
Author discusses the changing nature of software engineering at Canva and highlights the need to start using AI tools (Copilot, Cursor, and Claude) during tech interviews. This new approach aims to evaluate how candidates collaborate with AI to solve problems and adapt to the use of AI tools in their daily workflow.
I honestly think it’s great tech companies evolve their hiring processes and start evaluating AI skills. This was, I must say, rather expected sooner or later, but I think it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
// 📬 Optional reads
The Best of the Rest!
"Load Testing with Impulse at Airbnb"
by Chenhao Yang ⸱ Airbnb ⸱ 6 min read ⸱ 10 Jun
Author shares how Impulse, an internal load-testing framework at Airbnb, helps engineers perform self-service load testing. It includes a load generator, dependency mocker, traffic collector, and testing API generator. Neat!
"How I stopped worrying and learned to love Cloud Inventory"
by Maxim Savin ⸱ Klarna ⸱ 8 min read ⸱ 06 Jun
An article about how Klarna Engineering Platform (KEP) developed Cloud Inventory to facilitate cloud configuration management. It uses a graph database to model and integrate cloud assets enabling automated controls and target specifications to optimize inventory, improve security, and save some costs. Smart!
"Model Once, Represent Everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix"
by multiple authors ⸱ Netflix ⸱ 15 min read ⸱ 12 Jun
Author introduces UDA, a Unified Data Architecture, that enables modeling domains once and representing them consistently across systems, powering automation, discoverability, and semantic interoperability. If this sounds cryptic enough, go ahead and read it!
"A Platform-centric Approach to AI-assisted Code Generation at Intuit"
by Deepa Soundararajan ⸱ Intuit ⸱ 6 min read ⸱ 13 Jun
Author describes how Intuit achieved 8x developer velocity using AI-driven development. A must read for all vibe coders!
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See you in two weeks 👋