borncrusader

I'm at the juncture of my career where I want to focus more on Distributed Systems and specialize more in it. Short of reading seminal papers, understanding existing data systems like Spark, Kafka etc., how do I gain more working knowledge so as to improve my implementation skills of such a system.

While I haven't really worked on a major project that explores core problems, I'd like to spend the next year or two learning more about it.

Looking forward to learning from the pioneers in this field who have implemented many such systems.

I have briefly studied Pitman Shorthand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand) in the past and I've wondered how easy it is to concisely represent a lot of information in a few pencil strokes.

For those of you who take notes regularly - short of improving typing speed, is there a shorthand-like alternative to taking notes or encoding information digitally? Are there any efforts that have been made in this regard?

I've been a fairly voracious reader but over the last 4-5 years, I've noticed that I skim-read a lot (which has apparently become the norm - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf) thanks to technology. But over time I realize that I don't pay that much attention to important pieces of information that need deeper and a more conscious effort in reading. As a result, I tend to not retain much of what I read unless I write it down.

So, how do I make a conscious effort in slowing down and reading so as to improve my retention.

I'm looking for relatively fast-paced companies that work on high scale, distributed systems other than the ones that make business through ads/social media/entertainment. That rules out Facebook, Google and Netflix. There's Amazon but I'm curious to know about other companies - large and small that I can learn from.

I'm looking to learn about the nitty gritty details about how companies like Facebook/Google track users. While I've glossed over some articles online, I've noticed that they're extremely watered down to cater to folks with little insight into how computers/networks work. Where can I find information about this from a programmer/hacker's point of view?