Ryan Peterman

The best engineering comes from a deep understanding of why.

This is James Cowling, formerly the most senior engineer at Dropbox and now CTO at Convex, and we dived into all the technical work of his career.

He also had some interesting takes on technical leadership.

I've had many friends whose promotions were rejected because their work wasn't complex enough.

Is there any career advice that majorly changed in the last five years?

Here's the full episode.

Well, first off, your PhD thesis was huge.

It's 156 pages.

I didn't know thesis.

I thought papers, maybe 10 pages or something like that.

It's its own book.

you know, about the research, like if you could kind of describe the problem that Granola was solving and, you know, how it solved it, those types of things.

Can we talk about that?

You mentioned transactions and I saw on the paper, there's this idea of an independent transaction.

And if I'm understanding correctly, a lot of the efficiency in a distributed system is lost

by needing to get consensus and to vote for consensus.

And I saw that in your research, you found out a way to avoid needing to vote to reach consensus.

And how did you do that?

When I think about distributed systems, I think about you're at a big company and you got a bunch of machines.

But when you were at MIT building this thing, how did you build and test it?