Master reading list

Books — read in this order

1. Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin Kleppmann. Still the single best book on these topics. Re-read every 2 years.
2. Database Internals — Alex Petrov. Pairs with DDIA; goes deeper into storage engines and distributed protocols.
3. Release It! 2nd ed — Michael Nygard. Failure-mode-first design. Bulkheads, circuit breakers, etc.
4. Site Reliability Engineering + The SRE Workbook — Google. Free online. SLOs, error budgets, capacity. sre.google/books
5. Streaming Systems — Tyler Akidau et al. For event-time, watermarks, exactly-once.
6. Understanding Distributed Systems — Roberto Vitillo. Tighter than DDIA; modern.

Engineering blogs — subscribe

• AWS Builder's Library — highest signal-per-page on the internet.
• Stripe Engineering — idempotency, ledgers, online migrations.
• Discord Engineering — large-scale messaging.
• Cloudflare Blog — network and infra.
• Slack Engineering
• GitHub Engineering
• Figma Engineering
• Uber Engineering
• Honeycomb Blog — observability mindset.
• Notion Engineering
• Netflix Tech Blog
• High Scalability — older case studies; archive is gold.

Papers — read the originals

• Dynamo (2007) — Amazon's KV store. Consistent hashing in production.
• Bigtable (2006) — LSM-trees + Chubby.
• Spanner (2012) — global strong consistency via TrueTime.
• Raft (2014) — the consensus paper that's actually readable.
• Paxos Made Simple — Lamport's accessible Paxos.
• Cassandra (2009)
• A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels
• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events (Lamport, 1978) — 8 pages, foundational.

Courses + lectures

• MIT 6.824 Distributed Systems — full lectures + labs. The course where you build Raft from scratch.
• CMU Database Group YouTube — Andy Pavlo's Intro and Advanced Database Systems are world-class.
• Hillel Wayne — formal methods, TLA+, clear-thinking essays.

People worth following

• Kyle Kingsbury (@aphyr) — Jepsen, distributed systems empiricist.
• Marc Brooker — AWS principal engineer; queues, retries, capacity.
• Cindy Sridharan (@copyconstruct) — observability, distributed tracing.
• Charity Majors (@mipsytipsy) — observability mindset; Honeycomb.
• Martin Kleppmann (@martinkl) — DDIA author; CRDTs, local-first.
• Hillel Wayne — formal methods, careful thinking.
• Colm MacCárthaigh — AWS principal; TLS, networking, fail-safe design.
• Andy Pavlo — database internals.
• Brendan Gregg — perf, observability, flamegraphs.

How to use this list

Don't read it all. Pick one topic from this guide where you feel weakest, read the corresponding chapter in DDIA, then read the 2-3 best blog posts on that topic (linked above), then write a 200-word summary in your own words. That sequence produces actual depth.

Reading without writing is shallow. Writing without reading is empty. Doing both, on one topic at a time, is how you go from "knows the words" to "thinks like a staff engineer."