Interview with Shopee Backend Engineer Draven on Technical Writing, Go Language Design, and Cloud‑Native Development

Draven is a backend engineer on the Shopee Engineering Infrastructure team and also a prolific technical writer.

He began blogging in his sophomore year after a senior suggested that writing a blog could help his future job prospects. What started as personal notes later attracted readers, prompting him to keep publishing.

Technical writing is part of his OKR; this year he devoted half a year to preparing the book Go Language Design and Implementation , which caused a temporary pause in his regular blogging.

The book originated from two motivations: the scarcity of comprehensive Go language resources and his desire to deepen his own understanding of Go’s design and implementation.

He contrasts writing a book with writing a series of blog posts. A book requires stronger continuity, larger scope, and a longer, more demanding writing cycle, making it painful but ultimately rewarding. Blog series are more flexible, allowing topics to be dropped or switched without a fixed deadline.

When transitioning to a new technical domain, Draven advises using search engines to gather keywords, then performing both deep and broad exploration of the results, allocating dedicated time, and leveraging community knowledge.

For learning new tech stacks, he focuses on practical usage—learning components only when they are needed—because his time is limited, and he selects reading material carefully.

Currently he is revisiting operating systems, networking, and C++ (reading “UNIX Network Programming” and “Effective C++”) and follows recent research such as SOSP ’21 papers on scheduling and distributed systems.

The article also includes a promotional segment for a World Book Day giveaway, inviting readers to recommend technical books for a chance to win a copy of Draven’s Go book.