July 2025

Highlight of the Month

Summarize my biggest breakthrough, project, or insight in this month:

This month, I've been focusing on system design practice, and it's been an incredibly valuable experience. Preparing for these interviews has helped me strengthen my ability to break down ambiguous problems, structure my thoughts clearly, and communicate trade-offs effectively. Most importantly, I've started to think more like a systems thinker — considering scalability, availability, and reliability in every decision.

Attended

• Kubernetes Community Days Taipei 2025
  • Kepler
  • Crossplane
  • Envoy Gateway
• GDG Chunghua Meetup
• System Design Mock Interview with Kevin and Shirley
  • Design a Rate Limiter
  • Design a Ride-Sharing Service like Uber
  • Design a Ticket Booking Service like Ticket Master
  • Design a Distributed Message Queue
  • Design a Top K Heavy Hitters Service
  • Design a Messaging Service like WhatsApp

What I Created or Tried

• Published a blog post: The Lakhouse Series: Apache Iceberg Overview
• Published a blog post: The Lakhouse Series: Apache Hudi Overview
• Published a blog post: The Lakehouse Series: From Data Lakes to Data Lakehouses

What I Learned

Short reflections on what I actually learned or became more confident in:

Reflections – Beyond Just Tech

Soft-skill insights or workflow/communication/process reflections:

• This month I had interviews with three companies. While my resume optimization has been effective in getting me to the interview stage, my actual capabilities still need improvement to secure job offers.
  • The first company (Dcard) was for a Data Engineer position, where I was tested on OOP concepts and asked to design a queue class. My implementation skills need strengthening, particularly in using abstract classes and interfaces.
  • The second company (Houzz) was for a Data Infra Engineer role. The third round focused on Spark and Airflow system architecture and optimization strategies. I realized I need to deepen my understanding of system component operations and optimization methods.
  • The third company (Treasure Data) was for a Data Engineer position where dbt is heavily used internally. I reached the fourth round's behavioral interview but was completely unprepared for English behavioral interviews and was eliminated. This made me realize that beyond technical skills, behavioral interview preparation is crucial, especially for English interviews.
• When preparing for interviews, I can't afford to be selective. I must comprehensively improve all my capabilities.

What I Consumed

A list of articles, papers, courses, or videos I read/watched/completed:

Read

• Design a Ride-Sharing Service Like Uber | Hello Interview
• Consistent Hashing | Hello Interview
• DynamoDB | Hello Interview
• Kafka | Hello Interview
• Evolution to the Data Lakehouse
• What is a data lakehouse? | Databricks Docs
• Hudi vs Iceberg vs Delta Lake: Data Lake Table Formats Compared
• GitHub MCP Exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP

Watched

• Introducing Lakebase - Databricks Co-founder & Chief Architect Reynold Xin
• CAP Theorem Simplified
• System Design Was HARD - Until You Knew the Trade-Offs
• 7 System Design Concepts Explained in 10 Minutes
• Tampa Bay DE Meetup: The Who, What and Why of Data Lake Table Formats (Iceberg, Hudi, Delta Lake)
• Watch a Complete NOOB Try DuckDB and DuckLake for the first time

Goals for Next Month

Set 2–3 simple goals to stay focused and accountable: