Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann/2017
The clearest map I've read of the trade-offs behind every “we picked X” decision — replication, consistency, batch vs stream. Every backend case study on this site owes it something.
03 / Library
Things I keep coming back to.
Books, papers, and talks that shaped how I think. Not a Goodreads dump — a small shelf I actually reread, each with a one-paragraph reason to be here.
11 entries/4 sections/shelf last touched July 2026
Books
A Philosophy of Software Design
John Ousterhout/2018
Short book, sticky ideas. “Deep modules” is the vocabulary I now reach for whenever I'm arguing about API surface area or premature abstraction.
The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman/1988
The book that made me stop blaming users. If a person is confused, the product is broken — not them. Half of my accessibility instincts trace back to this.
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Michael Feathers/2004
Convinced me the harder skill isn't writing code from scratch — it's changing code you don't own without breaking it. Still the most useful book I've read about being on a team.
On Writing Well
William Zinsser/1976
Applies to code comments, PRs, case studies, and Slack messages. The best programming book that isn't about programming.
Papers
Out of the Tar Pit
Ben Moseley & Peter Marks/2006
Names the disease — accidental complexity — with a rigour I hadn't seen elsewhere. I reread it once a year and something new lands each time.
A Note on Distributed Computing
Waldo, Wyant, Wollrath, Kendall/1994
Old paper, still right. “The network is not transparent” is the sentence I've quoted most in design reviews. Anyone shipping distributed systems today is still relearning it.
No Silver Bullet
Fred Brooks/1986
Every generation of tooling promises to make software easy. Brooks explained — forty years ago — why it won't. Every generation is surprised again.
Talks
Growing a Language
Guy Steele/1998
The most elegant argument I've seen for why the users of your abstraction become its co-authors. Also the most disciplined 40-minute talk I've ever watched.
Simple Made Easy
Rich Hickey/2011
Split my vocabulary in two. “Simple” and “easy” are not the same thing, and confusing them is what makes codebases expensive to live in.
On the desk
Currently readingThe Making of Prince of Persia
Jordan Mechner/2011
A programmer's journal, published verbatim. It's a good reminder that great things get built between the doubt paragraphs, not despite them.