Disclaimer. All the opinions and recommendations are my own. Do not believe in words only – test and adjust to your case.

Today we have loads 0f different technologies, hard to believe that anyone can be Expert in some of these. But I do believe that occasionally you need to get quickly a short but deep overview of what the certain technology is about.

Here is the algo I have started using some years ago and improved over the last five years working for Microsoft and Amazon. It allows me to dig out important information about the technology at a very high speed and get a sense of how, why and when it can or cannot be used.

So (for data technologies):

1. Start with the read and write path – how the data is being written and read. What temporary structures are used and where they are located, which timeouts can be set, what additional operations are being performed during the process etc.
2. Check technology limitations – functional limitations and deployment limitations. Try to find both official and non-official limitations.
3. Search for known performance issues – in which workloads it was discovered, how these issues were eliminated. Look through performance optimization best practices – it will give you a good overview of the best and the worst case scenarios of usage.
4. Watch how it fails – ideally postmortems from the customers. It will provide you with a good idea of flaws in the High-Availability and Disaster Recovery behind the marketing curtains. Also, it highlights limits of scaling.
5. Do a small research on the ways how it interacts with other technologies or system components – not everything is possible by default. You may discover some missing integrations, driver deficiencies, etc.

Applying this approach from time to time will build you muscle memory so the entire process can take around an hour or two. In addition to the five points above I would also recommend to try the tech out. Here I am typically working with the CLI-style experience as it helps to unfold some hidden things.

Of course, it doesn’t substitute the real methods of learning and works just as an emergency toolbox for getting acquainted with the technology you have never touched before or haven’t been working with for years.