Genuinely awed by this video, in which a woman does a Marina Abramović “the artist is present” face at a comedian and her inscrutability and unbroken eye contact drives him to madness and reveals his deepest insecurities
As a Backend Engineer in 2026 aiming for Staff, please learn:
1. One language deeply (Go/Rust/Java)
Not “I can write APIs”, but runtime model, memory, concurrency, profiling, GC behavior (if any), and how to read stack traces like a native.
2. Data modeling and storage fundamentals
Relational modeling, constraints, isolation levels, indexes, query plans, locks, deadlocks, migrations, backup/restore, partitioning. Most “scaling” problems are schema + query shape problems.
3. Distributed systems basics that actually show up in prod
Consistency vs availability, timeouts, retries, idempotency, backpressure, message ordering, leader election, clock skew, eventual consistency, and what happens during partial failures.
4. API design and contracts
Versioning, pagination, filtering, error models, idempotency keys, rate limits, backwards compatibility, and how to avoid breaking mobile clients for months.
5. Performance and capacity engineering
Latency budgets (p50/p95/p99), tail latency causes, load testing, queueing theory intuition, connection pools, CPU vs IO bound, and capacity planning with real numbers.
6. Reliability engineering
SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, alerting that does not spam, error budgets, graceful degradation, feature flags, circuit breakers, bulkheads.
7. Observability like a pro
Structured logs, metrics, tracing, correlation ids, RED/USE metrics, sampling strategies, and how to debug “it is slow sometimes” without just guessing.
8. Security fundamentals
AuthN/AuthZ, least privilege, secrets management, token expiry, OWASP basics, SSRF, injection, secure defaults, audit logs, threat modeling for your own services.
9. Messaging and async systems
Kafka/Rabbit/SQS semantics, at-least-once vs exactly-once (and why “exactly once” is mostly a marketing term), consumer groups, retries, DLQs, replay, dedupe.
10. Caching with correctness
Cache invalidation strategies, TTLs, stampede protection, read-through/write-through, negative caching, and when caching makes bugs harder than latency.
11. Infrastructure literacy
Linux basics, networking (DNS, TCP, TLS), containers, k8s concepts, autoscaling, deployment strategies (blue/green, canary), and what your cloud bill is really paying for.
12. System design, but with tradeoffs
Designing is picking pain. Learn to write down constraints, failure modes, data growth, and operational cost. Staff is judged on tradeoffs, not diagrams.
13. Codebase leadership
Design docs, RFCs, review quality, mentorship, aligning teams, reducing complexity, owning a subsystem end-to-end, making boring systems that do not wake people at 2am.
14. Pick ONE domain to go deep
Payments, search, streaming, identity, infra, data platform, etc. Staff engineers are “the person for a hard area”, not generic API writers.
Stop hopping stacks every month. Pick a lane, build proof of reliability, and become the person people call when prod is on fire. That is Staff.
@ptr_to_joel Do people not discuss the architecture with other senior devs before coding? I got assigned to make changes to our kafka service and I remember discussing for 2 hours with a senior and he asked me to wait as he wanted to get the business sign off first.
So stay inside on your phone for the rest of your life. Don’t make friends, don’t travel, don’t try new restaurants, don’t find hobbies. See if I give a shit
I’m excited to be the Chief AI Officer of @Meta, working alongside @natfriedman, and thrilled to be accompanied by an incredible group of people joining on the same day.
Towards superintelligence 🚀
Brenda Song reveals she sat down with the president of Disney after the company didn’t want to let her appear in the movies ‘The Social Network’ and ‘Gran Torino’:
"I was just like, 'I am an actor. When you hired me, I was not a hotel heiress. If I have ever done anything in my personal life to ever draw bad attention to your company, I understand. But this is the last season of the show, and this is the opportunity of a lifetime.’”