Distributed Systems Are a UX Problem
Tyler Treat·2018·QCon·40 minTreat reframes consistency, latency, and partial failure as user-facing concerns — and shows what good distributed-system UX looks like.
Building a Distributed Message Log from Scratch
Tyler Treat·2018·GOTOWhat you learn when you implement a Kafka-style log yourself: replication, leader election, fsync semantics, and the limits of 'just use a queue.'
Unexpected Benefits of Going Local-First
Tuomas Artman·2024·Local-First ConfLinear adopted local-first to make the app feel instant — and ended up with a team that ships faster than the architectures it replaced. Artman on what fell out of the decision.
The World Is Asynchronous
Werner Vogels·2022·AWS re:InventVogels makes the case that loose coupling and event-driven architecture aren't a style choice — they're how the world actually works.
When To Use Microservices (And When Not To!)
Sam Newman, Martin Fowler·2020·GOTONewman and Fowler talk through the cases where microservices earn their keep — and the much larger set where they don't.
The Language of the System
Rich Hickey·2017·Clojure ConjHickey on the fact that the language inside your process is rarely the language between your processes — and what that should imply for system design.
Distributed Sagas: A Protocol for Coordinating Microservices
Caitie McCaffrey·2017·J on the BeachA pragmatic protocol for keeping a multi-service transaction consistent without two-phase commit, built on a fault-tolerant log of compensating actions.