"NoSQL" Systems

• Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services - a database built on top of Bigtable. It is probably better known in the form of [Google Cloud Datastore](https://cloud.google.com/datastore/docs/concepts/overview).
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data - The *other* original NoSQL datastore. Bigtable is interesting mainly because of its single-machine I/O optimizations.
• Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database - version concurrency control.

• blog

General Databases

• Readings in Database Systems - aka *the* red book (for databases, not the other one), new and in website form. Awesome introductory readings on databases.
• The Gamma Database Machine Project - popularized -- but did not introduce -- the concepts of sharding, and hash join algorithms.

DHTs

• Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric

"Big data"

• The Google File System - an early example of a modern distributed file system.
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters - A very simple abstraction for doing large-scale data processing.
• Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstraction for In-Memory Cluster Computing - an abstraction that improves over (and subsumes) MapReduce in a few ways. It is probably more well-known as the core of a system called [Spark](http://spark.apache.org/).

Consensus

• The Part-Time Parliament - Leslie Lamport's super confusing paper on the Paxos protocol.
• Paxos Made Simple - A somewhat simpler to understand paper on the same topic, by the same author.
• In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm - introduced Raft, a consensus algorithm that seems to be becoming more popular than Paxos.
• The Part-Time Parliament - Leslie Lamport's super confusing paper on the Paxos protocol.
• Paxos Made Simple - A somewhat simpler to understand paper on the same topic, by the same author.

Distributed Transactions

• Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems
• MaaT: Effective and scalable coordination of distributed transactions in the cloud

Operating Systems

• Showstopper! - About the development of Windows NT. Given the amount of computing analogies, I think this is intended for a nontechnical audience. Still a great read regardless, with lots of insight into various OS design decisions.

Cluster Management

• The Datacenter as a Computer
• The Datacenter Needs an Operating System - Zaharia et al. makes a very good case for why we need OS-like functionality for large clusters of machines.
• Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center - Also by Zaharia et al.; introduced the idea of a two-level datacenter scheduler.
• Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg - Unbeknownst to everyone, Google has had a datacenter operating system for more than a decade. This is the precursor to the open-source [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/).
• Omega: flexible, scalable schedulers for large compute clusters - documents a project that attempted to replace Borg. Interestingly, this was published *before* the Borg paper.
• The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems - describes how Google does metadata storage for distributed systems.

Misc.

• The Night Watch

Misc.

• ZeroMQ - The Guide - Good intro to messaging patterns and ZeroMQ.
• Scaling Pinterest
• How We've Scaled Dropbox
• Facebook and Memcached
• Storage Systems at a Rapidly Scaling Startup with a Small Team - A story from Data@Scale of how Instagram scaled their datastores.
• How Does a Relational Database Work?
• Why You Should Never Use MongoDB
• Adventures in message queues
• Edgestore

Misc.

• Composing Music With Recurrent Neural Networks
• Machine Learning is Fun

Misc.

• Good and Bad Reasons to Become an Entrepreneur
• Founders at Work - Collection of interviews with various tech entrepreneurs.
• Secrets of the Rockstar Programmers - Interviews of software experts.
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things - on the unglamorous parts of running a company.
• Viral Loop - How successful tech startups grow virally.
• Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good - A look at the startup world just before the 2008 crisis.
• What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’? - explains the concept of Silicon Valley Time, i.e. stages of a tech startup.
• Are "Better" Ideas More Likely to Succeed? An Empirical Analysis of Startup Evaluation
• Work Hard, Live Well
• Meta-Programming: A Software Production Method - a paper on organizing software developers for productivity.
• Three Stories
• Secrets of the Rockstar Programmers - Interviews of software experts.
• Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good - A look at the startup world just before the 2008 crisis.
• Early Excite History - slides on the history of Excite. Has some discussions near the end about why Google survived and Excite didn't.
• Startup Product Development

Misc.

• 10x not 10%

Misc.

• Breakout Career Notes - Collections of career tips from tech entrepreneurs and VCs.

Misc.

• Brian Bi on K&R C - Blog post about early installment weirdness in the C language.
• Codepen Thing - A really awesome visualization of a Fourier transform.

Misc.

• Jamie Zawinski - well-known Netscape/Mozilla engineer.
• Purple Motes - Interesting stuff from history
• Ben Horowitz - one half of a16z.

Misc.

• The Codeless Code - Zen koans, but for software development.
• Bay Area to Standard American English Translator