Prática de Shadowing: Learning to code: How Pavel Durov learned to program | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo
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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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Contexto e Fundo
O vídeo conta a jornada de programação de Pavel Durov, criador do VK e do Telegram, desde os 10 anos, quando começou a desenvolver jogos por escassez de entretenimento, até a fundação de redes sociais de sucesso. A conversa é rica em detalhes sobre aprendizado, simplicidade e eficiência, o que a torna uma ótima oportunidade para aprender inglês com vídeos — especialmente para quem quer praticar listening e shadowing.
5 Frases Chave para Comunicação Diária
- "Scarcity leads to creativity" (A escassez leva à criatividade) — útil para falar de soluções inovadoras.
- "Simplify both for scaling" (Simplifique tanto para escalar) — perfeita para discussões sobre projetos.
- "I was obsessing over every line of code" (Eu estava obcecado com cada linha de código) — expressa dedicação a um trabalho.
- "It's a counterintuitive idea" (É uma ideia contraintuitiva) — ideal para debater conceitos surpreendentes.
- "You have to focus on one task" (Você tem que se concentrar em uma tarefa) — essencial para falar de produtividade.
Guia Passo a Passo para Shadowing
O shadowing é uma técnica poderosa para melhorar a pronúncia em inglês e a fluência. Siga estes passos com o vídeo:
- Escute uma frase por vez: Pause o vídeo após cada frase (2-3 segundos) e repita imediatamente, copiando a entonação e o ritmo.
- Repita até a fluência: Se a frase for longa (como "Getting rid of features is super important"), divida-a em partes e pratique cada uma separadamente.
- Compare com o original: Grave sua voz e compare com o áudio do vídeo para ajustar acentuação (ex: "algorithm" ou "scalability").
- Pratique a conversação: Use as frases chave em diálogos fictícios (ex: "Simplify both for scaling" ao falar de um projeto). Isso ajuda na prática de conversação em inglês.
Lembre-se: o objetivo é se sentir confortável com o fluxo natural do inglês. Um shadowing site pode ajudar a controlar o tempo, mas com paciência, você verá progressos rapidamente! 🚀
Gramática neste vídeo
As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:
| Estrutura | No vídeo |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verbo — um hábito ou estado do passado que não é mais verdade | used to love · used to call |
| Orações relativas who / which + oração — informação extra sobre uma pessoa ou coisa | people who love · somebody who is · guy who created |
| Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem faz | is really known · be done · is distracted |
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.