4 ms·

I was fortunate enough to happen to be live at LISA13 where AFAIK, Brendan gave his first public flamegraphs demo. I'm glad I saw it. I love learning about area

I was fortunate enough to happen to be live at LISA13 where AFAIK, Brendan gave his first public flamegraphs demo. I'm glad I saw it. I love learning about areas (performance engineering) where I'm weaker. Great demos! I've tried to keep my personal live demos at a high quality too. Can't wait to see what he comes up with next!

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
Flame graphs completely blew my mind, but most people I talk to about them just don't seem to get it. I'm a generalist, but I've been thinking lately if performance engineering is something I should be specialising in. I'd love to hear any advice from those in the field.
- jakub_g 5y ago
  Specializing in anything is good if you have 5+ years of exp IMO. It's always good to stand out from the crowd of generic developers. The other plus is, if you frame yourself as a specialist in X, it might be easier to explain not knowing Y. You can't simply know everything, especially if you invest heavily in specializing in other things. Personally I've been a web performance (i.e. mostly JavaScript/HTML) guy lately and it's been fun. There's a million of React devs in the world, but only a few dozen web perf guys with web presence (Twitter / blogs), and I almost know all of them by name at this point. Of course it depends what you want to do. Typically it's big corps who look for specialists. Small companies prefer generalists.
  - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    Thanks for the advice! My problem with picking a niche is that ones that are easy to learn from a book are too crowded to be considered niches, and the rest can only be learned by doing in real production environments. Now there’s one where I have a foot in, and it’s one that I enjoy.
    - jakub_g 5y ago
      Yep exactly, it's difficult to learn in isolation. One must try their luck with applying to jobs that you're underqualified. And then seizing the opportunities once in :)

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago

Flame graphs completely blew my mind, but most people I talk to about them just don't seem to get it. I'm a generalist, but I've been thinking lately if performance engineering is something I should be specialising in. I'd love to hear any advice from those in the field.

jakub_g 5y ago
Specializing in anything is good if you have 5+ years of exp IMO. It's always good to stand out from the crowd of generic developers. The other plus is, if you frame yourself as a specialist in X, it might be easier to explain not knowing Y. You can't simply know everything, especially if you invest heavily in specializing in other things. Personally I've been a web performance (i.e. mostly JavaScript/HTML) guy lately and it's been fun. There's a million of React devs in the world, but only a few dozen web perf guys with web presence (Twitter / blogs), and I almost know all of them by name at this point. Of course it depends what you want to do. Typically it's big corps who look for specialists. Small companies prefer generalists.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  Thanks for the advice! My problem with picking a niche is that ones that are easy to learn from a book are too crowded to be considered niches, and the rest can only be learned by doing in real production environments. Now there’s one where I have a foot in, and it’s one that I enjoy.
  - jakub_g 5y ago
    Yep exactly, it's difficult to learn in isolation. One must try their luck with applying to jobs that you're underqualified. And then seizing the opportunities once in :)