Archive - Ketan's Newsletter

Catch Up: Lessons Senior Engineers Know about ORMs

Think you know your ORM? Discover the subtle bugs, race conditions, and performance pitfalls many engineers miss. Learn expert strategies for Rails…

17 hrs ago •

January 2024

Avoid Common Elasticsearch Pitfalls

Useful Tips from building Conversations' Search at Intercom

Jan 25, 2024 •

July 2020

Race Conditions/Concurrency Defects in Databases: A Catalogue

Or, how to create bugs that are hard to find

Jul 3, 2020 •

June 2020

February 2020

Build Systems with Speed and Confidence by Closing the Loop First!

I re-learnt something recently: the importance of closing the loop on a system you are trying to build, as quickly as possible, and then adding the…

Feb 24, 2020 •

January 2020

Intercom's Interview Process and My Experience

Based on my interview for a Product Engineering role in 2019

Jan 1, 2020 •

August 2019

Postgres: Recreating Indexes supporting Unique, Foreign Key and Primary Key Constraints

I have frequently found myself in situations when I had to reindex a few indexes (because the index got bloated a lot), and I always have to lookup the…

Aug 16, 2019 •

May 2019

Avoid breaking habits with help from Economics

Recently, while reading “How Will You Measure Your Life?”, I came across the concept of Marginal Thinking and I thought that it could be used as a…

May 29, 2019 •

January 2019

Why do we make irrational decisions?

We often get surprised by the decisions taken by those around us.

Jan 15, 2019 •

December 2018

On taking feedback well

A colleague and I were discussing how it is difficult to take critical feedback well.

Dec 10, 2018 •

August 2018

Don’t be the Alpha Geek: Your team deserves better

Aug 12, 2018 •

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