library

A long-term collection of texts I revisit, in five layers. Culture is the foundation; everything else stands on it.

• programming: how we implement ideas
• tests: quality, design, verification
• engineering process: how the work is structured
• culture: the foundation
• others: high quality, fits nowhere else

Programming

How we implement ideas

• Knuth – Programming as an Art
• Peter Naur – Programming as Theory Building
• OSTEP — the definitive OS textbook.
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
• Simple Made Easy
• Joe Armstrong Thesis — concurrency and fault tolerance.
• Peter Norvig – Good Style
• Peter Norvig – Design Patterns
• Armstrong – Why OOP Sucks
• PACELC Theorem — latency vs consistency.
• Tiger Style — system design philosophy.
• 5 Rules Programming (Rob Pike)
• Napkin Math — intuitive performance math.
• Hyrum’s Law
• The Wrong Abstraction
• Write Code That Is Easy to Delete
• Ousterhout – Modular Design
• The Error Model
• Notes on Structured Concurrency
• Wirth – Program Development by Stepwise Refinement
• Perlis – Epigrams in Programming
• Antirez – Code Comments

Tests

Quality: Design, strategy, and verification

• How to Test
• Dirty Database
• Bad Tests
• Unit and Integration Tests
• Don’t Write Bugs
• TODOS Aren’t for Doing
• SMURF – Beyond the Test Pyramid
• Toilet Tests (Risk Driven Testing)
• Test Sizes (Google)
• Testing With Expectations (Janestreet)
• Testing With Expectations 2
• Testing on error handling code
• Catch Flakes on Main
• Write Tests. Not Too Many.

Engineering Process

How we work together to build.

• Effective design docs
• Modern CI
• The Evolution of SRE at Google
• Cognitive Load is What Matters
• How to Communicate in a Remote Startup
• Google Platform Rant
• Performing for the Job Title
• Clean Code, Horrible Performance
• The Only Unbreakable Law
• The Configuration Complexity Clock
• Cognitive Load (GitHub)
• Fast (Catherine Jue) — speed as process philosophy.
• Refactoring English – Essays That Shaped Me
• Six Programmers and Type System
• Google Engineering Practices
• Russ Cox – Our Software Dependency Problem
• Against Innovation Tokens
• Always Be Blaming
• 20 Years of SRE Lessons Learned
• Plan-Execute Pattern

Culture

The base that supports everything else.

• Le Guin Precepts
• Feynman - What Problems to Solve
• Basic Things
• Cold-Blooded Software
• Grug Brain Developer — complexity bad.
• Programming Sucks
• The Importance of Off Topic
• Feynman – Cargo Cult Science
• Feynman Blackboard
• Are You OK
• Most Tech Content is Bullshit
• Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software
• Chinese Tech Terms
• Oil Shell Blog (Spolsky) — language and clarity.
• Debugging Leadership — people before process.
• Process Debt
• Rocket Science of Meetings — meetings that matter.
• Agile Manifesto
• Engineering Ladders
• Negotiate Anything
• How to Ship
• Antirez – We Are Destroying Software
• Kitchen Sink
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• The Best of edw519
• Programming Aphorisms
• Rachel – Scale
• Suspicious Discontinuities

Others

High-quality references that don’t fit perfectly elsewhere

• A Distributed Systems Reading List
• Brendan Gregg - Linux Performance
• Memory Allocation — visualizing allocators.
• Beej Guides — C, networking, Git.
• Programming Languages (Pierce)
• The Copenhagen Book — fundamentals of auth design.
• Algorithms for Modern Hardware
• SRE Google - Example Postmortem
• Scalability! But at what COST?
• Queues Don’t Fix Overload
• CAP Is Nearly Irrelevant
• Meet Alice, Alice Is Impatient
• The Distributed Computing Manifesto (1998)
• Jails – FreeBSD
• A Decade of Major Cache Incidents at Twitter
• Teach Yourself CS
• Software Engineering at Google
• Jepsen – Consistency Models
• Rust Atomics and Locks

More references in my monthly log.