Collection · Essays
Favorite Systems Essays
The canon I keep returning to when designing distributed systems.
A short list of the canonical reads that have shaped how I design and operate systems. Most are short; all are dense. Re-read on a yearly cycle.
Life Beyond Distributed Transactions
Pat Helland
The cleanest argument for embracing eventual consistency I've ever read.
On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services
James Hamilton
Operational rules that still hold in 2026.
Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
Leslie Lamport
The paper. Every distributed-systems concept downstream is a footnote to this.
The Tail at Scale
Jeffrey Dean & Luiz André Barroso
Why p99 latency is the metric that pays the bills.
Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods
Jeff Hodges
If a teammate is new to distributed systems, this is the first link I send them.