Ad tech is one of those engineering challenges where dealing with scale at low latency is key to running your business. It’s simply impossible to grow without building each and every component for scale because in the end if you cannot complete your transaction in a few milliseconds, you will be trumped no matter how great you are at other things. The other fact which distinguishes ad tech from many other large scale application is that ad tech is also a write/update intensive system. With video advertising the number of events triggred per impression have increased manifold compared to a classic display ad. The high amount of read and writes makes the process of narrowing down components for your subsystem more important and critical for long term because a lot of software written today has low shelf life which is not a great. If you compare ad tech to a typical social or ecommerce platform, I am sure the number of primary reads v/s the writes would be much higher for the minimal business transaction.

Team members who are high on delivery and motivation are usually very serious about career progression and are always looking at opportunities to contribute more to the company and have a greater impact on the products. However, it’s never easy for an individual to figure out once he joins a team or a company as to how he will grow and how does his job become complex. It’s also important that a company promotes a culture where expectation setting and career progression are not just at the will of manager’s but there is a clear articulation of what the company values and it promotes a culture which thrives on those values. If the goal is to define career progression for a function in a lean way, so that a single sheet could give a bird’s eye view of what are some of the key tactical, strategic and behavioral expectations, you could follow a similar process to come up with a version which aligns to your companies requirements.

A lot of times some people on your team may not be able to visualize the scale of the opportunity they have on their hands. How do you help them visualize the scale ?

Hiring the right talent, at the right time with the right resources is key to any companies success. If you are not able to get your hiring plans on track and ensure that you are always hiring great people, it’s going to get very challenging for you both internally and externally. I still feel hiring is still a lot of art than science and it needs a lot of focus and priority to get it right. While each company has it’s own hiring strategy on the kind of talent it wants to pursue, it always helps to follow a lean hiring process which can move fast and be responsive to a candidate. If you really like someone, you should be able to seal the deal pretty quickly, rather than linger on due to process and productivity issues in your hiring team.

In India people hardly share their experiences as they are either too shy about it or too ignorant about it. As we graduate from college to begin the real life, no one has ever told you what it could be like out there and what could matter. Our college teaches us how to make a living but not how to live, they actually just taught the easier part and forgot to share anything else. Below are excerpt’s from an open letter to a dear one when he moved out of college.

There are a lot of use cases which require running jobs aka units of repeatable tasks. The job may be required to run at runtime or at fixed regular intervals. Building a standard Java Scheduler server on top of Quartz is pretty simple or you could use it as an embedded service in any of your current nodes, but the best use case is to have a separate Scheduler or Job Server as some people may call it, whose primary use is to exeute jobs. As jobs can involve long running transactions , be resource intensive or may span for long times it ensures that there is a clear functional sepration and are of responsibility of such a server. Having a dedicated Scheduler / Job server ensures that you are dealing with the cron hell and beyong point it becomes so difficult to keep track and audit of what is running where.