Sun Jun 14 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)#meta1 min read142 words
Reading list
Papers, books, and posts that shaped how I think about systems.
A small, opinionated list — not "everything I read," just things I come back to.
Books
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Kleppmann. Still the best one-volume tour of the storage/streaming/consensus stack.
- The Pragmatic Programmer — Hunt & Thomas. The 20th anniversary edition.
- Thinking in Systems — Meadows. Not a software book; the best software book.
- A Philosophy of Software Design — Ousterhout. Short. Sharp.
Papers
- The Google File System (2003)
- Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store (2007)
- Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database (2012)
- Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems
Posts I re-read
- Joe Armstrong, Why OO Sucks. Not for the title — for the framing.
- Hillel Wayne, anything on formal methods for working engineers.
- Dan Luu's latency posts.
If you have something I should add, tell me.