This page will keep on getting organized, and re-organized
- 1948 - A Mathematical Theory of Communication - Claude Shannon
Meta
Blogs list
- Database Doctor - Thomas Kejser
- I like this guy. Dude is neuro-atypical (autistic, but in a good way) with a focus on databases. So you know his stuff is going to be good.
- philippdubach.com - Quantitative Finance, AI & Technology
- https://justinjaffray.com/posts/ Justin Jaffray - datadog guy
- ben-evans.com - Benedict Evans
- wippler.dev/posts/
- meltingasphalt.com/archive/ by Kevin Simler -
- leopard.in.ua/ - Alexey Vasiliev (Postgres stuff)
- matthewstrom.com/writing - Matthew Ström - head of design stripe
- ludic.mataroa.blog/ - Australian guy writing some of the best ranty posts I've read on the internet
- sirupsen.com/ - Simon Horup Eskildsen
ajaydwivedi.com/ - sql server guy
eli.thegreenplace.net/archives/all - has covered almost all topics in cs. Recommended by Phil Eaton.
- one2n's stories - https://playbook.one2n.in/pragmatic-software-engineering-stories
- startdataengineering.com/post/ - around 1 post per month on data engineering
- practical, actionable posts. not just theoritical.
- manthanguptaa.in/manthan gupta - (3 articles on replication in distrisys articles)
- copyninja.in/ - has a nice blog
- jack-vanlightly.com/ Jack Vanlightly - Works on kafka
- justinjaffray.com/posts/ - Justin Jaffray - a database guy
- two-wrongs.com/A quant tech guy's blog. EXCELLENT articles.
- shekhargulati.com - Shekhar gulati - writes summaries of papers, blog posts etc
- rohanverma.net/archives/ - rohan verma (zerodha)
- starship-knowledge.com/- EXPERT KNOWLEDGE AT A GLANCE -
- notes.eatonphil.com/ - tigerbeetle guy
- vitalik.eth.limo/ - vitalik buterin (Ethereum)
- mitchellh.com/writing- mitchell hashimoto (hashicorp)
- davidgomes.com/ - David Gnomes - Director of Engineering at SingleStore
- brooker.co.za/blog/ - Mark Brooker, AWS
Company blogs
Blog posts I like
- Modal: Linear Programming for Fun and Profit - constraint-solver class of problems
General
- ⭐ Talk - 2012 - Inventing on Principle - Bret Victor
- ⭐ Interview - 2018 - Money as an Instrument of Change - Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital
⭐ Essay - 1989 - Worse is better
Article - The Grug Brained Developer - A layman's guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained
⭐ Book - A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
- Book - Computer systems : a programmer's perspective by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron
- Book - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Gerald Jay Sussman, Hal Abelson, and Julie Sussman
- Book - Grokking Simplicity: Taming Complex Software with Functional Thinking (Simplify software using Functional Programming principles)
Papers
- Why do we do astrophysics? (gist- the output is the person, not the research output)
Software engineering
- Paper - 1985 - Programming as theory building - Peter Naur
- Paper - 1986 - No Silver Bullet —Essence and Accident in Software Engineering - Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
Articles
- 2023 - Push Ifs Up And Fors Down
General
- ⭐ Talk - 2011 - Simple made easy - Rich Hickey
- ⭐ Talk - 2013 - Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey
- ⭐ Talk - 2016 - The Silver Bullet Syndrome by Hadi Hariri
- ⭐ Article - Choose boring technology
- Talk - 2014 - The mess we are in - Joe Armstrong
- Talk - 2011 - We really don't know how to compute - Gerald
- Video - 2020 - Developing Open Source Software is a Political Act
- Functional core, Imperative shell
Concurrency
Architecture design
- Talk - 2025 - Architecting LARGE software projects - Eskil Steenberg, 2025
- Failure os always an option - Dylan Beetle, 2024
API design
- Talk - 2021 - Correct by Construction: APIs That Are Easy to Use and Hard to Misuse - Matt Godbolt [ C++ on Sea ]
Programming
- Paper - 2007 - What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
- Lecture - 2017 - How I program C - Eskil Steenberg
AI (not theory)
- Paper - 2018 - Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications
- Article - 2020 - GPT3 and the scaling hypothesis - Gwern
- Article - 2019 - Complexity is not bar to AI - Gwern
- Article - 2022 - The Scaling Hypothesis
AI Infra
- Imbue - From bare metal to a 70B model: infrastructure set-up and scripts
- Scaling Kubernetes to 7,500 nodes - OpenAI
Datastores
Unclassified
- Lectures
- ⭐ 2018 - Dr. Michael Stonebraker - 10 fears about the future of dbms field
- Will help in thinking about the overall database meta.
- ⭐ 2018 - Dr. Michael Stonebraker - 10 fears about the future of dbms field
Papers
Articles
- ⭐Kafka's Broken Promise: There is No Goldilocks Log - Jason Gustafson, Almog Gavra
- What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like? - Marc Brooker
- The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction - Jay Kreps (THE blog post for kafka)
Books - [How Query Engines Work](https://www.howqueryengineswork.com/
General theory
Papers
- Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age
- Qd-tree: Learning Data Layouts for Big Data Analytics
- 2005 - “One Size Fits All”: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone - Michael Stonebraker
- 2014 - Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age
- In practice leads to complexity and head of line blocking
- C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS
B+Tree index structures in InnoDB by the living MySQL legend Jeremy Cole
Bigtable
- Paper - 2006 - Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
Databricks
- Photon: A Fast Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems - SIGMOD ACM (Berkeley url)
- Delta Lake: High-Performance ACID Table Storage over Cloud Object Stores - VLDB
2026 - Lakebase: Serverless Postgres over Open Lake Storage - VLDB
DynamoDb
- Paper - 2007 - Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
- Paper -2022 - Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service - Usenix
Iceberg
MySQL
Presentation - 2012 - Vitess: Scaling MySQL at YouTube Using Go
Postgres
Talk - 2023 - A Detailed Understanding of MVCC and Autovacuum Internals in PostgreSQL 14 - Avinash Vallarapu
- Video - 99% of Developers Don't Get PostgreSQL
Redshift
- Paper - 2024 - Intelligent Scaling in Amazon Redshift
ScaleDB
Snowflake
Automatic clustering at Snowflake
- Covers the greatest greatest magic of snowflake (In my opinion)
Paper - Small Materialized Aggregates: A Light Weight Index Structure for Data Warehousing - VLDB
Spanner
Networking
- Paper - Cornflakes: Zero-CopySerialization for Microsecond-Scale Networking (by Meta)
Web3
- Talk - 2018 - Blockchains Are a Bad Idea (James Mickens)
Security
- Talk - 2018 - Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? - James Mickens - USENIX Security
Human
- ⭐Buried Talents - How elites betray their own potential by Edan Kroolewicz
- The Golden Handcuffs: Why Our Brightest Minds Retreat into “Pragmatic Emptiness” by Edan Kroolewicz
Career
- No, you don't want to hire "the best engineers"
- Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued by patio11
- Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice by patio11
Management
- Modern Agile is Stupid: on why all great ideas are killed by simple-minded idiots, why Jira kills software, and how to be a good manager
- Statistical Process Control: A Practitioner’s Guide (2wrongs) (was as two-wrongs.com, now redirecting to entropicthoughts.com)
- Kelly criterion (2 wrongs) (was as two-wrongs.com, now redirecting to entropicthoughts.com)
- How to Give a Status Update To Executives - Jacob Kaplan-Moss (also has a lot of great articles in his blog)
Math
- ⭐Number theory explained from first principles by Kaspar Etter