3 min readUpdated Oct 11, 2023

Introducing Distributed Deep Dive interviews by Ably

A video series aimed at sharing experiences and challenges faced by Distributed Systems Engineers, while building world class applications.

With an ever expanding amount and complexity of technological applications, a lot is being said and done in the Distributed Systems tech space. We all at Ably Realtime are advocates of Distributed computing and constantly find out ways in which we can improve our existing systems. In the past, we have shared a lot of interesting tech content based on our team’s experiences. Two of those articles, namely, ‘What is a distributed systems Engineer’ and ‘How we implemented consistent hashing efficiently’ were particularly well received by the tech community.

Today, we are releasing our newest effort for spreading knowledge and best practices about Distributed Systems — a tech area that many consider to be quite complex but at the same time, the most critical one to the functioning of a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. Introducing the ‘Distributed Deep Dive’ video interview series.

What is this series all about?

The goal of this series of interviews is to share knowledge emerging from experiences of certain eminent people in the tech industry, who’ve spent years working with distributed systems, have done experiments, tried certain things, failed or succeeded but learnt a lot along the way.

Ably’s CEO and Co-Founder, Matthew O’ Riordan and CTO, Paddy Byers interview a new Engineer in every episode, exchange views and experiences, talk about best practices and the challenges they faced.

Where can one find these interviews?

A sneak-peek into Ably Realtime’s YouTube channel.

All the episodes from this series will be hosted on our YouTube channel. Additionally, we’ll also publish these articles in our “engineering blog” as well as release the transcript of every interview, for those of you who fancy a quick read through instead :)

How can you participate in these interviews?

If you have any comments or views regarding the stuff that was shared in one of the interviews, you are more than welcome to respond publicly via YouTube comments on the video or blog responses on the transcript or even tweet to us @ablyrealtime. However, if you’d like to specifically discuss something not so publicly, feel free to open a ticket on our support platform and we’ll get back to you if it is worth a discussion :)

If you have sufficient experience and interesting knowledge to share, we would be glad to interview you in a future Distributed Deep Dive episode. Reach out to [email protected] and let us know more about you and why this interview series excites you!

For the first video in the series, we interviewed Paul Nordstrom, an expert in System Architecture with vast experience in building Distributed Systems for companies such as Google, Amazon and OfferUp. The focus in this interview is to tap into the hidden scaling issues of Distributed Systems and exploring the various ways in which this is addressed in the real world.

Check out the transcript of this interview: Episode #1
Hidden scaling issues: System design in the real world
or see the complete video on YouTube:


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