Collection · Essays
Essays That Changed My Thinking
Pieces that rewired how I look at systems, work, and the act of writing software.
Every essay here is short — most fit on a single page. Their density is the point. I revisit each one a couple of times a year and find something new.
How Complex Systems Fail
Richard Cook
Eighteen short observations. Each one is the kind of thing you only fully agree with after the next outage.
The Network is Reliable
Peter Bailis & Kyle Kingsbury
Required reading the first time you debug a partition.
Worse is Better
Richard P. Gabriel
The tension between elegance and shipping, named precisely.
Stream Processing: A Deep Dive into Kafka and Samza
Distributed Systems · Streaming
My own attempt at a clear-eyed look at streaming guarantees and the trade-offs they imply.