Reading List

Data Structures and Algorithms

• Pragmatic Engineer - Data Structures & Algorithms I Used Working at Tech Companies

Low-Level Systems

• Larst of Us - The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon

Databases

Indexes

• jon.chrt.dev - Things you didn't know about indexes

Scale

• OpenAI - Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800 million ChatGPT users

Frontend Development

• Christoph Nakazawa - Building a JavaScript Testing Framework

Networking

• Cloudflare - What is caching?
• Cloudflare - What is latency?
• Cloudflare - What is a DDoS attack?

Application Layer

• Cloudflare - What is HTTP?
• Cloudflare - What is DNS?

Network Layer

• Cloudflare - What is the network layer?
• Cloudflare - What is Anycast?
• Stonecharioteer on Tech - Understanding Traceroute

Load Balancing:

• The Morning Paper - Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer
• Cloudflare - High Availability Load Balancers with Maglev

Network Virtualization:

• RedHat - What is software-defined networking?

Multicast:

Case Study - Cloudflare

• Cloudflare - Load Balancing without Load Balancers

Cloudflare Workers:

• Cloudflare - Cloud Computing without Containers
• Cloudflare - Eliminating Cold Starts with Cloudflare Workers

Distributed Systems

• The Morning Paper - The Tail at Scale

Fault Tolerance

• AWS - Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter

Cluster Management

• Anant Jain - Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center
• The Morning Paper - Large-scale cluster management with Borg
• Anant Jain - Omega: flexible, scalable schedulers for large compute clusters
• Kubernetes - Borg: The Predecessor to Kubernetes
• Anant Jain - Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes

Case Study - Google

• The Morning Paper - The Google File System

Case Study - Voice Agents

• Nick Tikhonov, How I built a sub-500ms latency voice agent from scratch

Workflows

• Ally Piechowski - The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code

Business

Developer Education

• Julia Evans - Who pays to educate developers?
• Martin Kleppmann - Writing a book: is it worth it?