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.
Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir My favourite book. A lone astronaut wakes up millions of miles from Earth with no memory, tasked with saving humanity. Wildly fun, scientifically clever, one of those books that makes you genuinely excited about science again.
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry — Neil deGrasse Tyson The universe in under 200 pages. Dense with wonder, light on jargon. Best read on a commute or right before bed when your brain still wants to be amazed.
Wings of Fire — A.P.J. Abdul Kalam The autobiography of India’s missile man and 11th President. A story of humility, curiosity, and relentless scientific ambition. Hard not to come away inspired.
The Psychology of Money — Morgan Housel Wealth isn’t about spreadsheets, it’s about behaviour. Short chapters, enduring lessons on how money and human psychology intersect in ways most finance books never touch.
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)
Magazines & Series
- Tell Me Why — Manorama A monthly magazine series I grew up reading obsessively. Each issue covered one topic: Universe, Computers, Festivals, Psychology. Just enough depth to leave you wanting more, and I’d read the Universe and Computers ones cover to cover more than once. A big part of why curiosity stuck.
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.