About a decade ago, I was working with a guy who was getting a PhD in search engine design, which I knew/know nothing about.
It was actually a lot of fun to chat with him, because he was so enthusiastic about how searching works and how it can integrate with databases, and he was eager to explain this all to anyone who would listen. I learned a fair amount from him, though admittedly I still don't know much about the intricacies of how search engines work.
Some day, I am going to really go through the guts of Apache Solr and Lucene to understand the internals (like I did for Kafka a few years ago), and maybe I'll finally be competent with it.
As I have gotten older, I have grown immense respect for older people who can geek out over stuff.
It’s so easy to be cynical and not care about anything, I am certainly guilty of that. Older people who have found things that they can truly geek out about for hours are relatively rare and some of my favorite people as a result (and part of the reason that I like going to conferences).
I like my coworkers and they’re certainly not anti-intellectual or anything, but there’s only so long I can ramble on about TLA+ or Isabelle or Alloy before they lose interest. It’s not a fault on them at all, there are plenty of topics I am not interested in.
It seems a common problem in our profession that you can’t really talk to anybody about what you are doing. My friends have a vague idea but that’s it.
I work with music streaming, it is mostly just a lot of really banal business rules that become an entangled web of convoluted if statements. Where to show a single button might mean hitting 5 different microservices and checking 10 different booleans
It was actually a lot of fun to chat with him, because he was so enthusiastic about how searching works and how it can integrate with databases, and he was eager to explain this all to anyone who would listen. I learned a fair amount from him, though admittedly I still don't know much about the intricacies of how search engines work.
Some day, I am going to really go through the guts of Apache Solr and Lucene to understand the internals (like I did for Kafka a few years ago), and maybe I'll finally be competent with it.