Shadowing Practice: Learning to code: How Pavel Durov learned to program | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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you're a programmer from an early age you started coding at 10 first things you built
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or a video game at 11
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and then eventually 10 years later 21 you programmed the initial
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versions of vk single -handedly can you talk to me about your programming journey
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that led to the creation of vk what was the vk
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stack as a php mostly how did you figure out how to program websites all
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that i wasn't interested in programming websites at first i didn't even have access to the internet
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when i was 10 years old
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but i liked video games i didn't have enough of them
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and the scarcity forced me to start building them more computer
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games just to play myself yeah it's actually an interesting thing
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that we sometimes don't realize it but scarcity leads to creativity
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and one of the reasons you have
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so many people who love to code coming from the soviet union
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or other places which didn't have much access to modern technology
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and more importantly modern entertainment is that perhaps we were not
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so much distracted by all this abundance of different entertainment options
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which is not to say it's bad to have those options it's just a fact that we sometimes don't appreciate
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so i started to build computer games my brother would sometimes guide me for example i would create a turn -based strategy
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of course two -dimensional backhand three -dimensional is too much for me but it wasn't as
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sleek in terms of the scrolling fps frames per second um parameter
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and i asked my brother how to optimize it he would guide me and this kind of
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learning and
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training really shaped my coding skills
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when i was younger then i started to create video games for my classmates
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when we played for example tic -tac -toe on an infinite field in my class during the breaks you know
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and not tic -tac -toe the three in a row this is five in a row
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and an infinite field this is a much more interesting game
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and it gets quite complicated if you keep playing it my classmates used to love it
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and some of my classmates were really smart you know champions of math olympiads sons
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and daughters of professors at the university
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and i decided no i want to win every single time i don't want to lose even a single time
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so how do i win i need to practice more
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but how do i practice more i need an opponent stronger than myself
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so i coded this game so that i would play against the computer
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and the computer would calculate I think four moves in advance to choose the optimal strategy
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that wasn't enough four moves in advance I would still win over it
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if I tried to calculate five or six it was too slow
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so I asked my brother to help me out here so he made this algorithm eventually I
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trained myself to win every single time even with the computer back then we didn't have
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modern CPUs and I could still retain some self -confidence we'd go back to school during breaks play with my classmates
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and soon people started to lose interest none of my classmates wanted to play this game anymore I killed the game
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so after that when I got into the St. Petersburg State University
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it was quite boring just to study because it was too easy
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so I thought what can I do there I created a website for the students of my faculty first
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I organized the creation of digital answers to all exams and digitalized version of all lectures,
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which was something very unique back then.
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Remember, it was 25 years ago.
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I would put together a website where I would publish all these materials.
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Pretty soon it became super popular.
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I opened a discussion forum there.
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In a few years, I expanded to the university with all of its other departments and then to other universities.
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We ended up having tens of thousands of users just as a student's portal.
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We had all kinds of social features there, friends lists, photo albums, profiles,
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blogs, all of it, was quite successful.
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And after I graduated the university,
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one of my ex -classmates from the school reached out to me after reading about my successes in a newspaper,
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the main business newspaper of St. Petersburg.
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And he asked me, are you trying to build a Russian Facebook?
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i said i'm not sure what's facebook
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so we met he since he graduated an american university two years before
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that he showed me facebook i thought well i can already have all of this technology
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but it's valuable to know which elements i should get rid of in order to scale this thing
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and have millions of users.
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This is also something people don't appreciate, that sometimes in order to move forward and have more success,
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you have to get rid of things, including technology.
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Getting rid of features is super important.
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Simplify, both for scaling and for making it amenable to just growing the user base where people get it immediately.
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Yes.
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Otherwise, it's just too complicated for the new user.
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The existing users will be happy.
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They'll be praising you.
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They will be asking you to add more stuff to make it even more complicated.
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So it's easy to lose track and get disoriented if you're only relying on the feedback of existing users.
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so as a result i started the website called vkontakte
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or vk it means in touch in russian initially to solve
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my own personal problem i graduated the university the same year
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and i wanted to be in touch remain in touch with my ex -classmen from from the university
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and the other fellow students
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and of course as a 20 year old i wanted to meet other people including good looking girls
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so i started to build it from scratch for
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that one i thought i'm not going to use any third party libraries modules
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because i want to make it as efficient as possible i was obsessing over every line of code
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but then how do you start something
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that large like i didn't have any prior experience of creating a project of that scale which would involve everything
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before i would reuse some existing solutions here i wanted to build from scratch
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so i i called my brother he was a postdoc student in germany at
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that time in the max planck university and i asked him what should i start from and he told me just build
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a module to authorize users just don't not not just to
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log in you know yeah not even to sign up just to log in
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because you can pre -populate the database with with credentials
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and emails and passwords doesn't really matter but once you see
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that you can type in your password and email and you're in
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and it tells you hello using your name then you will
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have a clear understanding where to go from there yeah i
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mean that's true that's one of the best advice i've ever
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got in my life is it worked perfectly by the way i started to build it
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and before i knew it i would have
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there on the website photo albums private messages this guest book we used to call the wall back on aka
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and i guess in the early days of facebook we'd end
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up building something even more sophisticated than facebook at the time
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with more features i had a girlfriend at the time i
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here we need to somehow come up with a database of all russian schools and universities and departments and subdivisions.
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She did a great job trying to source all this information online or sometimes writing emails to universities saying,
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which departments do you have exactly at this point?
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We need to know.
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Or reaching out to the Department of Education, both in Russia and then in Ukraine, and then eventually in Belarus and in Kazakhstan
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and other countries where vk ended up to be the largest and most popular social network
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so we did a few things that were quite unique at the time and for the first
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almost a year i was the single employee of the company i was the back -end engineer the front -end engineer,
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the designer, I was the customer support officer, I was the marketing guy as well,
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coming up with all the awardings and announcements,
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coming up with competitions to promote VK, which worked quite well.
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That was an incredible experience that gave me knowledge of every aspect of a social networking platform.
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Also understanding of how much a single person can do.
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Exactly.
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It's one of the reasons why I'd like to think I'm an efficient project manager
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and product manager inside Telegram because I will not...
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take anything but ambitious deadlines from my team members
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if somebody gives me oh i need three weeks to do
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that i would reply well i built the first version of
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vk in just two weeks why would you need three weeks
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it seems like something you could make real in these three
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days three weeks what are you going to do the rest of the three weeks apart from these three days
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and you know the team knows me
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and uh that's why we are able today telegram to move at a very good
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pace of innovation every month we're pushing several meaningful features
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i think out competing everybody else in this industry in terms
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of what you can do within a short time frame so yes that experience was invaluable
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as for the stack i started from php and mysql debian linux but very soon i realized
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i need to optimize this i started using memcached apache servers
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were not enough anymore we had to set up engine x
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and my brother was still living in germany
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so he couldn't help me much for the first year of
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building bk sometimes i would manage to get through to him
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through a call i would use an old school phone to call him with wires I said, what do I do?
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How do I install this thing called Nginx?
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I'm not a Linux guy If he felt particularly kind that day and not too busy,
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he would show me the way to do it or set it up himself
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but for the most part I had to rely on just myself
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Having him there though helped when we started to grow fast and started to scale it.
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Because at first, you realize one server is not enough.
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I need to buy another one.
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Then another one, and another one.
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The database should be in a different server.
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Then you have to split the database into tables.
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Then you have to come up with a way to shard the tables using some criteria
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that would make sense that wouldn't break your user experience.
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When we got to over a million users and beyond a dozen observers,
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surviving without the input from my brother in terms of taking care of the scaling aspect of it became impossible.
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I remember asking him to come back.
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He said, you need to help me with this thing.
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It's starting to be really big.
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And what was worse is that since we became popular, somebody started to do D2S attacks on us.
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As it always happens.
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Right.
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And then we had people that wanted to buy a share of VK.
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And interestingly, every time we had a negotiation day, they did those attacks intensified.
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So we had to come up with a way to fight it.
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I remember having many sleepless nights trying to figure it out.
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So that was your introduction to all kinds of bad actors.
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DDoS, business.
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Then later you'd find out there's such a thing called politics, and then later geopolitics.
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But this is the initial stages.
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It's not just about creating cool stuff.
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It's having to deal with, as you now have to deal with the telegram, is seas of bad actors trying to test the limits of the system,
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trying to break the system.
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unfortunately if we didn't have bad actors and pressure it would be the best job ever you just get to create yeah
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and so the help from your brother like you mentioned NGINX and sharding the tables some of the scaling
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issue is algorithmic in nature it's almost like theoretical computer science it's not just about buying more computers it's figuring out
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how to algorithmically make everything work extremely fast.
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So some of it is mathematics.
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Some of it is pure engineering, but some of it is mathematics.
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Yeah, so at that stage I could do the basic stuff.
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I could understand how I implement scalability into the code base,
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how I shared my tables in the database where I included memcached instead of direct requests to the database.
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That was quite easy because it was still PHP back in the day.
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When my brother got back from Germany somewhere around 2008,
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I asked him can we make it even more efficient can we make it super fast
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and at the same time so that we would require even
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fewer servers to maintain the load and he said yes but PHP is not enough I'll have to rewrite
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a big part of your data engines in C and C++ I said okay let's do that he invited
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the friend of his helped him,
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another absolute champion in the world's programming contest twice in a row.
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And they put together the first customized data engine,
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which was far more efficient than just relying on MySQL and Memcached because it was,
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first of all, more specialized, more low -level.
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So they rewrote in CC++?
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A large chunk of it.
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Like, for example, the search, the ad engine, because VK had targeted ads, they built that.
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It was very efficient what they did.
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Eventually, the private messaging part, the public messages part.
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At some point, we realized there are very few websites online
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that load faster than VK nice i remember in 2009 i went to silicon valley
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and i met mark zuckerberg first time
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and some of the other core team members of early facebook remember facebook was just four
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or five years old and
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and everybody kept asking me how come even here in silicon
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valley decay loads faster than facebook everything seems to appear instantly on your website what's the secret sauce
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that was one of the things that made them very curious
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and that was always important to you to have very low latency to make sure the thing loads
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and because that's one of the things telegram is really known for even on crappy connections and all
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that kind of stuff it just works extremely fast everything is
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fast as one of the core technological ideas we prioritize speed we think
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that people can notice the difference even if it's just like 50 million millisecond difference the difference is subconscious
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it also allows us not just to be faster and more responsive
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also more efficient when it comes to the infrastructure the expenses
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because if your code executes faster it means you need fewer computational resources to run it
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so there is no way you can lose in making things faster
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and that's why we have always been very careful when hiring people
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I would only hire a person if I'm ultimately certain it's the best option
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if you hire somebody who is maybe a little bit distracted unexperienced you may end up with
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inefficiencies in your codebase that results in tens of millions of dollars of losses
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and think about the responsibility like if we jump to today from the VK days,
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Telegram was used by over a billion people.
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They open it dozens of times every day.
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Imagine the app opens with a slight delay, say, half a second delay, multiplied by dozens of times by a billion.
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It's centuries, millennia lost for humanity without any reason other than just being sloppy.
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That is so important to understand and so wise that it's actually, if you're just a little bit careless as a developer,
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you can introduce inefficiencies that are going to be very difficult to track down
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because you don't know that it can be faster.
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Like the code doesn't scream at you saying this could be much faster.
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So you have to actually, as a craftsman, be very careful when you're writing a code and always thinking, can this be done much more efficiently?
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And it can be tiny things because they all propagate throughout the code.
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And so there's a real cost in having a careless developer anywhere in the company.
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Because they can introduce that inefficiency and all the other developers won't know.
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They'll just assume it kind of has to be that way. And
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so there's a real responsibility for every single individual developer that's
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building any component of an app like telegram to just always
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ask okay can this be done more efficiently can this be done more simply
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and that's like one of the most beautiful aspects the art forms of programming right oh yes
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because when you manage to discover a way to simplify things make them more efficient you feel incredibly happy
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and proud and accomplished
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and to your point I can recall a few instances in
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my career where firing an engineer actually resulted to an increase
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in productivity say you have two Android engineers building the app
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and then just they just make it they're not keeping up with the pace of the really repeat your release schedule and
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you think i probably have to hire a third one but then you notice that one of them
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is really weird falling behind the schedule complaining some of the time doesn't assume responsibility
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and you ask so what if i just fire this person and you fire this person
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and a few weeks you realize you actually don't need and you never needed a third engineer
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the problem was this guy who created more issues and more problems than he solved that is so counterintuitive because
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you know in developing
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tech projects we tend to think that you just throw more people into something and then
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things get solved miraculously by themselves just because more people means more retention from them
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that's again extremely powerful you know Steve Jobs talked about A players
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and B players and there's something that happens when you have B players
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which is kind of like the folks you're talking about introduced
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into a team they can somehow slow everybody down they demotivate everybody
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and it's very counterintuitive that you basically is part of the work of creating a great team is removing the B players.
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It's not just hiring more, generally speaking.
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It's finding the A players, quote unquote, and removing the people that are slowing things down.
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Oh, yes.
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Because the other thing that people don't realize is how demotivating working with the B player is.
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everybody can tell if the other person the other engineer they're working with
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is really competent and if it's very visible
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if the person is not comfortable they're asking the wrong questions they keep lagging behind
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and at a certain point if you're an a player
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you get this dissatisfaction this feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential
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accomplish what you're really meant to accomplish
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because of this person working next to you
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or pretending to work next to you
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and by the way in some cases it's not
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because the person is lazy some cases it's just you know
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the mental the intellectual ability is not there it's not about experience most often it's about natural ability
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and persistence in 90 % of percent of cases is just
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the inability to focus on one task for an extended period of time not everybody has this ability
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so And for people who do have this ability,
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it's an insult to work alongside someone who is distracted and cannot go deep in the projects that they're responsible for.
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Thank you.
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Learn English While Exploring Pavel Durov's Coding Journey
If you’re looking to boost your english speaking practice, the conversation between Lex Fridman and Pavel Durov is a goldmine. Not only does it share insights into building VK and Telegram, but its conversational flow makes it perfect for shadowspeak—mimicking speech patterns to improve fluency. Let’s break down how to use this video to level up your English.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
- “Scarcity leads to creativity” – A great way to explain how limitations spark innovation.
- “Get rid of features” – Useful for discussing simplification in work or projects.
- “Obsessing over every line of code” – Shows dedication to detail (works beyond tech!).
- “Sleepless nights trying to figure it out” – Relatable for describing tough problem-solving.
- “Subconscious difference” – Perfect for talking about subtle but noticeable changes.
Step-by-Step Shadowing Guide for This Video
This dialogue has a mix of casual and technical language, so start slow. First, listen to 10-second clips and repeat immediately—this is shadow speech. Focus on Durov’s calm tone and Fridman’s curious intonation. Use a shadowing app to record yourself and compare. Next, practice tricky phrases like “algorithmic in nature” or “sharding the tables” to improve pronunciation. Finally, role-play: pretend you’re interviewing Durov and respond to his answers. This not only builds speaking skills but also helps you think in English.
By combining engaging content with focused practice, you’ll turn this coding story into a tool for confident English communication. Happy shadowing!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to love · used to call |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who love · somebody who is · guy who created |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is really known · be done · is distracted |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.