Zebras All the Way Down
Bryan Cantrill·2017·Uptime·50 minCantrill 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
CRDTs: The Hard Parts
Martin Kleppmann·2020·HydraYears after CRDTs went mainstream, Kleppmann revisits the awkward corners — moving list items, deletions, garbage collection — that papers gloss over.
Jepsen 9: A Fsyncing Feeling
Kyle Kingsbury·2018·GOTOKingsbury takes a flamethrower to databases that promise more than they deliver, and shows how Jepsen catches them lying about consistency.