[cgopalan]

I am trying to see if I can work on more interesting problems. Julia Evans has this great quote: "I have one main opinion about programming, which is that deeply understanding the underlying systems you use (the browser, the kernel, the operating system, the network layers, your database, HTTP, whatever you’re running on top of) is essential if you want to do technically innovative work and be able to solve hard problems."

My using snowflake on the job made me more curious about modern analytical databases, so much that I want to get more into the internals. I am on a journey that's making me read more about database internals, take free courses online, and this in turn is leading me to some auxiliary things I need to know for knowing about databases, like cpu architecture (cache handling, branching etc) and further down the rabbit hole. To some extent, it's helping me overcome the feeling of inadequacy due to not having a computer science education even though I have been in the software field for more than a couple of decades. Not that it has harmed me much - I have always felt that you could learn things on the job in software development. But it just feels somewhat right to go back to the basics.