A running collection of things I’ve read and found worth keeping around — books that shaped how I think, papers that sharpened my technical depth, and articles I return to. Updated as I read.
📚 Books
Currently Reading
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann The book on distributed systems. Replication, partitioning, consistency models, stream processing — explained in a way that actually sticks. If you build backend systems, this is non-negotiable.
Finished & Recommended
Clean Code — Robert C. Martin Dated in places, dogmatic in others, but the core instincts around naming, function size, and commenting are habits that stayed with me.
The Pragmatic Programmer — David Thomas, Andrew Hunt Timeless. “DRY,” “orthogonality,” broken-windows theory applied to code — concepts I reach for constantly.
Grokking Algorithms — Aditya Bhargava The best visual introduction to algorithms I’ve found. Gave to a friend learning to code and they finished it in a weekend.
Atomic Habits — James Clear Not a tech book, but the framing around small, compounding changes shaped how I approach long projects.
To Read
- Database Internals — Alex Petrov
- System Design Interview (Vol. 1 & 2) — Alex Xu
- The Phoenix Project — Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford
- Site Reliability Engineering — Betsy Beyer et al. (the Google SRE book, free online)
📄 Papers
Research papers that taught me something durable about systems.
The Google File System (Ghemawat, Gobioff, Leung — 2003) The ancestor of HDFS and, indirectly, most modern distributed storage. Reading the original is worth the hour.
MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters (Dean, Ghemawat — 2004) Alongside GFS, this is the paper that gave us the big-data era.
Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store (DeCandia et al. — 2007) Consistent hashing, vector clocks, eventual consistency — the foundation for Cassandra, Riak, and DynamoDB.
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data (Chang et al. — 2006) The design still shows up everywhere. Reading this clarified a lot about how HBase and Cassandra actually work underneath.
In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Raft) (Ongaro, Ousterhout — 2014) Consensus, finally explained so a human can follow it. If Paxos left you confused, read Raft.
Parkup: Smart Parking System (Patel, co-author — IRJET, 2021) My own contribution — an IoT-based parking management system published in the International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology.
📰 Articles
Short-form writing I’ve bookmarked and returned to.
Engineering & Systems
- How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages — a great real-world Cassandra-to-ScyllaDB migration story.
- The Twelve-Factor App — old but still the cleanest statement of how cloud-native apps should be built.
- Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know — Jeff Dean’s classic. Memorize at least the orders of magnitude.
- Google’s Site Reliability Engineering Book — free online, endlessly referenced.
Career & Craft
- Things You Should Never Do, Part I — Joel Spolsky on rewrites. Two decades later, still right.
- What I Wish Someone Had Told Me — Sam Altman’s distilled advice. Short, dense, good.
- Do Things That Don’t Scale — Paul Graham, aimed at founders but applicable to engineers too.
Distributed Systems Deep Dives
- Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods — Jeff Hodges. Opinionated, practical, quotable.
- Fallacies of Distributed Computing Explained — the eight fallacies every distributed-systems engineer eventually re-discovers the hard way.
Have a recommendation? Email me — always taking suggestions.