MLH Fellowship Insider: Week 2
This summer, I’m doing the Major League Hacking (MLH) Site Reliability Engineering Fellowship which is run in partnership with Meta. The MLH Fellowship is a 12 week technical program where fellows complete an educational curriculum, build open source software, and receive mentorship from professional engineers to learn more about the world of site reliability engineering. I wanted to journal my experience as I go through the program and share it to provide more insights for anyone interested in applying!
Week 2
This week, we focused on solidifying our knowledge of Linux operating system (OS) fundamentals and working with virtual private servers (VPSs).
Linux is a preferred OS because it is stable and reliable, has efficient process management mechanisms (e.g., use “kill” command to stop only the abnormal process without disrupting others), has tools and utilities that are helpful for production engineering (e.g., monitoring system performance), and supports automation. It is the OS on which Meta infrastructure primarily runs. To build our comfort with using Linux, the fellowship had us explore the Linux file system and practice navigating it/manipulating files through the command line.
We also learned how to use a VPS. A VPS is a virtual machine that provides a private server environment where users have the freedom to install their own software/applications within a shared server. We used DigitalOcean Droplets to set up a VPS and deploy our websites from week 1. This allowed us to access our projects from outside of our development environments, and it was really exciting for me when I was able to visit my team’s website on my phone.
A memorable event was the “What is [Production Engineering (PE)] at Meta” panel. Coming into the fellowship, I had a minimal idea of what PE was and this event inspired me to have a deeper interest in the field. The panel featured 4 production engineers at Meta. They answered questions and explained that PE is about scalability, reliability, automation, and recovery scenarios (i.e., making systems “fail less”). It is about figuring out how to scale services/products to billions of users and knowing how to prioritize. The best production engineers are often indistinguishable from software engineers, and the field is exciting because there is always something new to learn/that can be improved. What struck me in particular about the session was how passionate the panelists were, and how much they really believed in the importance of their work. One person spoke about privacy concerns that are discussed in the media. She explained how she thinks about this in her everyday work, how her job allows her to make a real impact on systems to better protect privacy, and how this is important to her. Her care for the results of her work on people resonated with me. I appreciated that she brought this side of PE into the discussion, and it is something I want to think about more as I continue into the next weeks of the fellowship.
