Observability: It's Not Just an Ops Thing
Charity Majors·2018·35 minMajors on why instrumenting your services is a developer responsibility — and why high-cardinality, event-based data beats dashboards of pre-aggregated metrics.
Observability for Emerging Infra
Charity Majors·2017·Strange LoopWhy the metrics-and-logs playbook from the LAMP era falls apart the moment your system becomes a dynamic mesh of services you can't predict in advance.
Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind
Bryan Cantrill·2017·GOTOCantrill on the discipline of debugging production systems in real time — staying analytical when the pager is screaming and the business is bleeding.
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.
Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos
Bryan Cantrill·2011·USENIXLISACantrill tells the story of OpenSolaris, the Oracle acquisition, and how the kernel engineers behind ZFS, DTrace, and Zones carried the work forward into illumos.
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.