A rough record of what I’m reading. Not a review site — I just like keeping track. Updated when I finish something.

Currently reading

  • Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces · Remzi & Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau rereading
  • The Goal · Eliyahu M. Goldratt in progress
  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications · Martin Kleppmann reference

2026

  • Empire of the Summer Moon · S.C. Gwynne finished
  • The Making of a Manager · Julie Zhuo finished
  • A Philosophy of Software Design · John Ousterhout finished

2025

  • The Psychology of Computer Programming · Gerald Weinberg finished
  • Domain Modeling Made Functional · Scott Wlaschin finished
  • The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th anniversary · Hunt & Thomas finished
  • Accelerate · Forsgren, Humble, Kim finished
  • Systems Performance (2nd ed.) · Brendan Gregg reference
  • The Manager's Path · Camille Fournier finished
  • Programming Rust · Blandy, Orendorff, Tindall reference

2024

  • Database Internals · Alex Petrov finished
  • Concurrency in Go · Katherine Cox-Buday finished
  • Staff Engineer · Will Larson finished
  • TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 1 (2nd ed.) · Kevin Fall, W. Richard Stevens reference
  • The Checklist Manifesto · Atul Gawande finished
  • The Design of Everyday Things · Don Norman finished

Papers I keep revisiting

  • MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters (Dean & Ghemawat, 2004) — still the clearest paper I’ve read about distributed computation primitives.
  • The Google File System (Ghemawat, Gobioff, Leung, 2003) — the reasoning around failure modes is masterful.
  • Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database (Corbett et al., 2012) — for the TrueTime section alone.
  • Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store (DeCandia et al., 2007) — the tradeoffs discussion is older than most of my career and still relevant.
  • End-to-End Arguments in System Design (Saltzer, Reed, Clark, 1984) — I reread this every couple of years and always learn something.
  • A Note on Distributed Computing (Waldo et al., 1994) — the original “the network is not transparent” paper.
  • Out of the Tar Pit (Moseley & Marks, 2006) — the phrase “complexity is what makes large systems hard” lives rent-free in my head.

I keep a longer list in Zotero but these are the ones I end up searching for by name.

Not books, but