How Complex Systems Fail
Richard Cook unpacks his classic essay live: there is no root cause, safety is something people continuously create, and catastrophe is the alignment of many small latent failures.
Linux Performance Tools
Brendan Gregg·2015·VelocityBrendan Gregg's tour of the Linux observability toolbox — what each tool measures, when to reach for it, and a methodology for going from 'it's slow' to a real answer.
HTTP/2 is Here, Let's Optimize!
Ilya Grigorik·2015·VelocityIlya Grigorik explains what HTTP/2 actually changes on the wire — multiplexing, prioritisation, server push — and which old optimisations you should stop doing.
Crafting quality that endures
Karri Saarinen·2025·Figma ConfigThe Linear CEO on why software quality is something a company has to value out loud — and how Linear's process keeps the bar from drifting as it scales.
The Wet Codebase
Dan Abramov·2019·DeconstructAbramov on what DRY actually costs once you've lived with a too-clever abstraction — and why writing the same code twice is sometimes the right answer.
Observability: It's Not Just an Ops Thing
Charity Majors·2018Majors on why instrumenting your services is a developer responsibility — and why high-cardinality, event-based data beats dashboards of pre-aggregated metrics.
Platform as a Reflection of Values
Bryan Cantrill·2017·Node SummitWhy every platform — language, OS, runtime — encodes a particular ordering of competing virtues, and why a good fit is really an alignment of values.