This page will keep on getting organized, and re-organized

• 1948 - A Mathematical Theory of Communication - Claude Shannon
  • The bedrock of digital. Very readable.
  • Wikipedia
  • pdf

Meta

• Report - 2025 - A Deep Peek into DeepSeek AI’s Talent and Implications for US Innovation

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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.

• 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

• Concurrency

  • Article - There is no memory safety without thread safety

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

Datastores

Unclassified

• Lectures
  • ⭐ 2018 - Dr. Michael Stonebraker - 10 fears about the future of dbms field
    • Will help in thinking about the overall database meta.

• Papers

  • 2020 - Millions of Tiny Databases - usenix
  • 2023 - The Composable Data Management System Manifesto
  • 2023 - Scalable and Robust Snapshot Isolation for High-Performance Storage Engines

• Articles

  • What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like? - Marc Brooker

• 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
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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

• The Data Lakehouse: Data Warehousing and More - arxiv

  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

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

• 2023 - ScaleDB: A Scalable, Asynchronous In-Memory Database - Usenix

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

• Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database

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

Blog posts

• My subconscious doesn't like LLMs 2025 Jul 16 | 10m (1970 words)
• Computers understanding humans makes codebases irrelevant 2023 Apr 08 | 6m (1269 words)
• Own your email's domain 2023 Feb 12 | 5m (934 words)
• Isolates + storage over http + orchestrators is the future that has arrived 2023 Jan 03 | 6m (1120 words)

Articles

I learn through writing, so I write a lot. Most of these are ever evolving pieces.

• Unicode string normalization schemes in Python 2024 May 06 | 7m (1329 words)

• Links collection 2025 Jun 15 | 3m (647 words)
• Papers, books, talks etc 2025 Jun 02 | 4m (865 words)

• Partition discovery and partition read optimization in spark 2023 Nov 16 | 5m (1012 words)
• Spark Microbook 2025 Oct 16 | 29m (5351 words)
• Spark join strategies 2024 Jan 22 | 13m (2442 words)
• Spark performance optimization compendium 2025 Oct 11 | 7m (1370 words)

• JWT - a quick overview of its working and encryption algorithms 2024 Apr 02 | 12m (2321 words)

• Lecture - You and your research by Dr. Richard Hamming 2024 Oct 14 | 1hr18m (14441 words)
• Why charge more as an engineer 2025 Oct 13 | 6m (1252 words)