Platform as a Reflection of Values
Bryan Cantrill·2017·Node Summit·32 minWhy every platform — language, OS, runtime — encodes a particular ordering of competing virtues, and why a good fit is really an alignment of values.
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.
Oral Tradition in Software Engineering
Bryan Cantrill·2016·MonktoberfestCantrill on how the craft is actually transmitted — stories, mentors, war anecdotes — and what gets lost when we pretend software is purely a written discipline.
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.
Zebras All the Way Down
Bryan Cantrill·2017·UptimeCantrill on the engineering of the data path — the unglamorous, decade-long work of building software that holds onto your bytes when everything else is on fire.
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.
Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many Programmers
Kevlin Henney·2016·NDCKevlin Henney dissects seven things programmers do reflexively — noisy comments, getters and setters, lego-naming — and what to do instead.