Martin Kleppmann

And LinkedIn didn't directly get anything out of it in response other than like a book that they could use for internal training purposes.

Well, shout out to LinkedIn for this.

Yeah, absolutely.

Though then I did find then that actually trying to write a book in parallel with doing a software engineering job and being on call, etc.

I just wasn't able to do it.

So it's just too much context switching.

And it's very easy for the urgent things from the on call to dominate and

and then not to have the freedom that you need in order to write something new.

And so then after a while I decided, okay, it's probably better if I focus full-time on the book.

So I then left LinkedIn and just took a sabbatical, unpaid sabbatical, i.e.

unemployment, to just focus full-time on the book for a while.

And then it's only after that that I actually even considered getting into academia.

I had an idea that, of course, the final product ended up looking somewhat different, but the

The overall goal, I think, stayed the same.

So what I knew I wanted to write something that was a broad conceptual overview.

So not about how you use any one specific system or tool, but comparing the trade-offs between many different types of tools.

And I knew that I wanted to be practitioner focused, like not a theoretical textbook, but something that people could use to build real systems.

That was basically like the goal with which I approached it.

And this was exactly the book that I wish I had had when I was starting out and working at Reportive, for example.

because we were all like searching around in the dark where we're having performance problems with our database and we had no idea what to do, basically, because we were totally lacking the foundations to actually understand what was going on and how to diagnose the issues.