Listen On: Spotify , Anchor.fm , Apple , Google Podcasts

Mushtaq Ahmed: From Doctor to Coding Architect - Episode #5

In this episode on Expertease , we have an honest and insightful conversation with a dear friend and colleague Mushtaq Ahmed , Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks Pune. We cover topics ranging from his interests, his journey from studying to be a Doctor, then becoming a BA, then a Developer and now a Senior Technical Leader; and his passion for programming. He is a Scala evangelist. In the later part of the podcast we discuss his work with Thirty Meter Telescope and architecture principles for building systems at Astronomical scale.

Mushtaq Ahmed
Mushtaq Ahmed

In this podcast…

  • 2:20: Rapid Fire Round - Getting to know Mushtaq.
  • 12:40: Journey from being a doctor to becoming a programmer.
  • 15:30: LifeSciences, BioInformatics and RadioAstronomy.
  • 24:50: Joining Thoughtworks as a BA. And then switching to becoming a programmer.
  • 30:30: What would be your advice to new programmers in the industry to become really good at their craft?
  • 45:45: Mushtaq’s transition from Programmer to Senior Tech Leader on Optical Telescope Mega-Project (TMT). And how to delegate and cultivate team members.
  • 1:00:00: How do you engineer a system for scale – which is at Astronomical scale (literally!)?
  • 1:11:00: Low Latency Streaming of Events (not using Kafka) & Delta Lake.
  • 1:15:25: Where will all the TMT systems be deployed? Which Cloud?
  • 1:17:30: How Mushtaq leverages the power of twitter for learning.

Episode Length 1h:23m

Show Notes

  1. Intellij
  2. Fork software for git
  3. Hackers and Painters (Paul Graham): Book & Article
  4. Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule - Paul Graham
  5. R Programming Language
  6. TMT Project is OpenSource: Website , Code on Github
  7. Mushtaq on Twitter mushtaqa
  8. Talk by Mushtaq on Demysitfying Reactive Jargons (Youtube)

Thirty Meter Telescope
Thirty Meter Telescope

Credits

  1. Background Music by BenSounds