Remembering Bob Lee

Re:Remembering Bob Lee by lpolovets on Wednesday April 05, 2023 @03:18PM (#35459103)

I interviewed at Google almost 20 years ago, and Bob was one of 5-6 interviewers that I had. I don't remember the other interviewers, but I remember Bob. He was very high energy, and posed a really fun, original question about selective logging. The kind of question that you could tell was born out of his personal experiences at Google, not just something he found in a "ten linked list questions" blog post. The gist of the question was something like "Imagine you have a very high throughput service, and you want to log notable events and errors, but not log terabytes (or petabytes) of data about successful executions. How would you design a logging system around these constraints?" We had a fun discussion about this question for about 30 minutes, and I remember being even more excited to work at Google after seeing that people like Bob worked there.

RIP :(

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Re:Remembering Bob Lee by joering2 on Thursday April 06, 2023 @12:08AM (#35464013)

This is very interesting but I fail to see an issue. You listen to all incoming log messages and only store != success. What am I missing (obviously)

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Re:Remembering Bob Lee by levidos on Thursday April 06, 2023 @03:46AM (#35465500)

I'm interested we well

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Re:Remembering Bob Lee by dumpster_fire on Thursday April 06, 2023 @04:29AM (#35465777)

It's a system design question. High throughout on the scale of Google means you'd laser any log ingestion service to death.

He was probably looking for a distributed way to label logs and build an ingestion service that shards regionally with high availability, but still able to search and filter within an acceptable time for debugging purposes.

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Re:Remembering Bob Lee by Vayl on Thursday April 06, 2023 @06:21AM (#35466464)

How can I learn about these topics? Junior self-taught dev, I read these things and kind of see what they're about, but I wouldn't know where to even start with this...

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Re:Remembering Bob Lee by shubhamkrm on Thursday April 06, 2023 @07:20AM (#35466859)

Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA)[1] is a great introductory book for such things. It covers a broad number of system design topics, and you can then go into detail for stuff that interests you.

Other than that, several companies (such as Uber) operating on a large scale maintain engineering blogs.

[1] https://dataintensive.net/

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Re:Remembering Bob Lee by sowbug on Thursday April 06, 2023 @11:16AM (#35469476)

You can practice the mindset by writing a toy solution for the problem, then listing the reasons why you consider your solution just a toy. This develops a fundamental skill of engineering, which isn't understanding whether a system will fail (it will always eventually fail, even if the first reason is that the sun explodes), but rather when and how it will fail. You can make a whole career out of pulling on that thread.

(I worked at Google with Bob in the mid-2000s. I might have interacted with him once or twice on the internal Java and Guice mailing lists, but never met him in person. He was supremely helpful and knowledgeable, and I admired him from a distance.)

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Re:Remembering Bob Lee by squirtlebonflow on Thursday April 06, 2023 @11:29AM (#35469710)

But what do you log when there is a failure? A huge call stack, a huge object, some kind of information about what went wrong, what?

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