I am Cuban and from Miami. The culture here is very similar where people will sacrifice everything in order to stay living close to family and "home". Here it stems a lot from the financial anxiety passed down from our parents and a culture where you relied a lot on your entire family. I think it really holds a lot of people back.
If you're Cuban and living in Miami, you are literally not near your "home", and probably not near your family? Or rather, physically close but still a plane ride and a diplomatic cold zone away.
Sounds like you haven't been to Miami before or don't know about the city demographics. Cuban population is massive, more people speak Spanish in and around miami than English these days. So yeah, he's home.
I think the best approach is to start taking things apart that interest you, and learn along the way. For example - on my blog I use things like arcade cabinets and home routers to introduce some hardware reversing concepts:
There is also nothing wrong with getting some of the arduino starter kits on amazon and using those to learn how to interact with various peripherals, etc.
Adafruit tutorials and Neopixels can be fun with a very low barrier to entry. Get into sensors and networking from there. The RP2040 by Raspberry Pi is a great chip to start learning with micropython.
Also, cheap electronics kits can be a great way to get your sea legs, especially if you take the time to work out why the circuits are designed as they are.
My favorite RSPS was 2speced. It was probably one of the most famous 317 servers. I still remember the forum names of the developers, Tyler and Blurr. I sometimes wonder what they do now. The RSPS scene was awesome.
What they do over at Koenigsegg is amazing, i feel like most people arent aware at the incredible things they do, CVK is an amazing engineer too and its awesome watching him speak about the cars.
Koenigsegg does innovate a lot in manufacturing car parts for their hypercars, if you watched Christian von Koenigsegg speak about the engineering they do its really impressive.
In some alternate universe CVK is making cars that compete with Tesla and are better. Although they make amazing products i wish he and his team of brilliant engineers would work on inexpensive cars, im almost certain they could innovate in the space.
Standing on the shoulders of giants, Netflix engineers didn't have blog posts from other companies on how to handle the scale they started facing. Facebook didn't have blog posts to reference when they scaled to 1B users. They pay for talent that have built systems that had not been built before and they have seen a return on it so they continue to do it.
Sure? "After an early beta test in Oct. of that year, Hulu was made available to the public on March 12, 2008—a year after Netflix launched its own streaming service."
Youtube is very different than Netflix from a technical problem perspective. They serve free videos to anyone around the world that are uploaded by users.
It's closer to a live streaming problem than pre-encoded video like Netflix.
Having worked at Netflix I can say that the YouTube problem is much more complex.
I wonder what portion of Youtube's request traffic can be served with cache servers at the edge with a few hundred terabytes of storage. There's a very long tail but i would guess a significant portion of their traffic is the top ~10,000 videos at any given moment.
There was a Google organised hackathon on this topic. Given a set of resources, locations, and (estimated) popularity, Optimise for video load time by determining what should be moved to the cache when and where.
