Bookmarks

Collection of articles, documentation and applications that are useful. There is no real ordering or ranking to the links; new discoveries are appended to the bottom of a section. Periodically I may go through to bring some sort of order.

Useful Technical Articles

• SSH Setup at Facebook
• Definitive Guide to Linux Syscalls
• Stack Overflow: A Technical Deconstruction
• How to Build a Highly Available System Using Consensus - Butler Lampson
• How Facebook is using QUIC
• Zero Downtime Releases
• What’s in a Linux Executable - HN Discussion
• io_uring and uBPF in Linux
• Coding Interview University
• The effect of switching to TCMalloc on RocksDB memory use - (TCMalloc Design)
• An Introduction To Building And Sending HTML Email For Web Developers
• How I cut GTRA Online loading times by 70% - HN
• Decoded: GNU coreutils
• What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages [HN Discussion]
• Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story - [HN Article]
• Kernel Bypass - Cloudflare Blog
• DevTools - Leverage - HN Article
• Open-sourcing a more precise time appliance - Facebook - HN Article
• How to win at CORS - Jake Archibald - HN Article
• What I learned from making a DNS client in Rust - Adam Chalmers - [HN Discussion]
• The complete guide to protecting your APIs with OAuth2 - Stack Overflow Blog - [HN Discussion]
• Dev tools: The ex-Googler guide
• How to Build Software like an SRE - [HN Discussion]
• Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers
• Your API Shouldn’t Redirect HTTP to HTTPS - jviide - [HN Discussion]
• Noisy Neighbor Detection with eBPF - Netflix Tech Blog

Networking

• How NAT Traversal Works - Tailscale
• The Case of the 50ms request

SDLC & Process

• How they SRE
• Founding Uber SRE - [HN Discussion]
• The Spotify Model - Squads, Tribes, Chapters, and Guides
• FCA Publication: Implementing Technology Change
• Feature Toggles - Martin Fowler
• GitHub presentation on how to begin an effective InnerSource program at your organization
• No-bullshit tenets for faster decision-making
• Dev environments as code
• Choose Boring Technology - Dan McKinley - On new projects you have 3 innovation tokens. You can spend these on new technologies.
• Continuous Load Testing - Slack Engineering
• Conventional Commits
• Why T-shaped people? - Jason Yip
• Cloud Native Maturity Model

DDD (Domain Driven Design)

• Domain Driven Design Reference - Eric Evans - [HN Discussion]

Standards

• Unicode in Five Minutes
• A Warm Welcome to ASN.1 and DER
• UTF-8 is a Brilliant Design - Vishnu’s Pages
• UTF-8 Everywhere

Interesting Articles

• Facebook Redesign
• To all jobs I had before - [HN Discussion]
• How we build the Github Globe - [HN Discussion]
• Algorithmic Trading on AWS with Amazon SageMaker and AWS Data Exchange
• Docker without Docker - fly.io - [HN Discussion]
• You should use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community - [HN Discussion]
• I/O Rings – When One I/O Operation is Not Enough
• What does a Principal Software Engineer do?
• A simple argument for investing in your pricing - cranberry blog
• Roblox Return to Service 10/28-10/31 2021 - Postmortum
• Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications
• The Scoop: Inside Fast’s Rapid Collapse - [HN Discussion]
• Scaling lessons learned at Dropbox, part 1 - [HN Discussion]
• Three Architectures for a Responsive IDE
• Singapore Government Tech Stack - [HN Article]
• I Regret my $46k Website Redesign - [HN Article]
• Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database
• Google Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database

Software

• Plausible - Google Analytics alternative that can be self hosted
• Listmonk - Self-hosted open source newsletter and mailing list manager - HN
• Commento - Disqus Alternative that can be self hosted
• ORY - Open Source OAuth 2.0/OIDC Server
• mtail - Generate metrics from logs
• ConsoleMe: A Central Control Plane for AWS Permissions and Access - Netflix
• Figma - Design and Prototyping tool
• CodeSandbox - Prototype web code in your browser
• CyberChef – The Cyber Swiss Army Knife - GCHQ - [HN Discussion]
• TailScale - Zero config VPN - Great for securely accessing home network
• Liquibase - Track, version, and deploy database changes
• trigger.dev - [HN Discussion]

SaaS

• Smee - Webhook Delivery for localhost development

APM & Observability

• Grafana
• Datadog
• Splunk
• New Relic
• Selector
• Sloth - Prometheus SLO Generator

CLI

• rg - Ripgrep - Grep in Rust with extras
• fzf - CLI fuzzy finder
• fd - Find replacement
• procs - ps replacement
• bat - cat with syntax highlighting
• exa - ls replacement
• miller - Like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for name-indexed data such as CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON
• gping - Graphical ping CLI written in Rust
• stress-ng - Stress testing tool for Linux systems
• fio - IO testing tool
• wrk - a HTTP benchmarking tool
• k9s - Kubernetes TUI for visualising/managing clusters
• httpjail - Tool for monitoring/restricting HTTP access for applications, like Claude ((Blog Post)[https://ammar.io/blog/httpjail])

Languages

Bash

• Bash Error Handling
• ShellCheck
• Shell keybindings to make life easier
• Illustrated Redirection Tutorial - Bash Hackers

F#

• Why use F#
• Thinking Functionally

Golang

• Ask HN: Which are the best Go repositories to read to learn the language?
• I Want Off Mr Golangs Wild Ride - [HN Discussions 1 2 3]
• Practical Go Lessons - HN Discussion
• Golang Standards: Project Layout
• Different approaches to HTTP routing in Go - Ben Hoyt
• How I write HTTP services after eight years

Java

• A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 15
• Metaspace improvements in Java 16
• Thread-Local Allocation Buffers in JVM
• The Exceptional Performance of Lil’ Exception
• JMC Tutorial - JMC 8 Binary Releases Blog Post - Marcus Hirt
• violations-lib - Easily convert between code analysis formats
• The JDK Flight Recorder File Format - Gunnar Morling - [HN Discussion]

JavaScript

• The Modern JavaScript Tutorial

Rust

• Rust Cheatsheet - cheats.rs

• Periodic Table of Rust Types

• A half hour to learn Rust

• Learning Rust from a Gopher

• Starter Kit 2020 - HN

• Reasons Rust compiles slowly

• Rust’s Most Unrecognized Contributor

• Rust’s Runtime - Michael Gattozzi

• Traits and static dispatch in Rust

• Status quo stories - How developers are using Rust

• Arc and Mutex in Rust | Its all about the bit - [HN Discussion]

• Beginner’s Series to Rust - Microsoft - [HN Discussion]

• A half-hour to learn Rust - fasterthanlime

• The promise of Rust

• coreutils - Rewrite of GNU coreutils in Rust

Rust Tools/Projects

blessed.rs has recommended crates for different situations. Hacker News discussed it, too.

• cargo-geiger - A program that analyses your Cargo.toml file and shows you the proportion of code that is using unsafe {}
• clap - One of the more popular command line argument parsing solutions
• TiKV - Open source, distributed, transactional KV store written in Rust using Raft
• Monoio - A thread-per-core Rust runtime with io_uring

Rust @ _

The Rust in Production podcast is a great resource.

• Inside Rust at Embark
• Rust in production at 1Password

WASM

• Hands on WebAssembly: Try the basics
• How Prime Video updates its app for more than 8,000 device types - [HN Discussion]

Architecture

• Distributed Systems Lecture Series - Cambridge University
• Monolith First
• Modules, Monoliths and Microservices
• Microsoft Cloud Architecture Patterns
• Systems design for advanced beginners
• The Architecture of Open Source Applications
• One Man SaaS Architecture - Anthony Najjar Simon
• Delos: Simple, flexible storage for the Facebook control plane
  • Similar:
  • The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems
• Managing risks in research

Deployment

• Why you should take a look at Nomad before jumping on Kubernetes

Docker, OCI, and Kubernetes

• What Happens When… Kubernetes Edition
• The tool that really runs your containers: deep dive into runc and OCI specifications
• An Updated Performance Comparison of Virtual Machines and Linux Containers - IBM Research Report
• Two reasons Kubernetes is so complex [HN Discussion]
• cilium: eBPF-based Networking
• Introduction to Cilium - Linux Foundation - edX

Databases

• What does First Normal Form actually mean? - [HN Discussion]
• Update your Database Schema Without Downtime
• 42 things I learned from building a production database - mahesh’s blog - [HN Discussion]
• Migrating bajillions of database records at Stripe - Robert Heaton
• How to Correctly Handle DB Schemas During Kubernetes Rollouts

Security

• vulhub - Github repo of vulnerable images for security testing
• HTTP Security Header Checker
• Adding salt to hashing: A better way to store passwords
• OWASP AppSec Cheatsheet
• sigstore - non-profit, public good software signing & transparency service
• Docker Security Cheat Sheet - HN Discussion
• 10 real-world stories of how we’ve compromised CI/CD pipelines - nccgroup - [HN Discussion]
• Infosec Skill Sets - [HN Discussion]
• I read the federal government’s Zero-Trust Memo so you don’t have to - BastionZero Blog [HN Discussion]
• The SaaS CTO Security Checklist Redux - [HN Discussion]
• How we secure Monzo’s banking platform - [HN Discussion]
• CISA - Security-by-Design and -Default
• Eliminating Memory Safety Vulnerabilities at the Source

How to Write

• Design Docs at Google
• Why write ADRs (Architecture Design Records) (HN Discussion) Example ADR
• Blogging for Devs
• Writing for gov.uk
  • On a similar note, Hemingway App can be good for automatically proofreading content.
• How to write in plain English
• Writing well by Julian Shapiro
• Technical Writing Handbook
• Writing tools I learned from The Economist - Ahmed Soliman - HN Discussion
• The Economist Style Guide
• 4 Pillars of Documentation - Aka Grand Unified Theory of Documentation - Divio
• Google’s Technical Writing Course
• writing one sentence per line [HN Discussion]

Diagramming Tools

• Diagrams - Mingrammer - Diagrams as Code written in Python
• React Flow - React component for building interactive diagrams

Examples of good documentation

• Stripe Documentation

UI/UX/Web

• A comprehensive list of UX design methods & deliverables
• Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid - HN
• Enterprise UX Design: Make me think
• CSS Transitions
• Building Your Color Palette
• My Current HTML Boilerplate - Manuel Matuzovic
• WebSockets vs Server-Sent Events
• Storybook: UI Component Explorer for Frontend Developers
• Defensive CSS - Ahmad Shadeed
• The 7 Tasks - 7 tasks that can be used to challenge GUI frameworks in different ways
• You probably don’t need a single-page application - Plausible Blog
• Visual design rules you can safely follow every time - [HN Discussion]

Cloud

• [https://cloud.google.com/distributed-cloud-air-gapped](Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped)

Repositories/Resources

• Iconoir - Free SVG icons

Misc

• Cameras and Lenses
• Culture Queries - The best questions to ask your interviewer
• Supply Chain of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 Vaccines
• GoLand Tips and Tricks
• Youtube Audio Library - Free Stock Music
• Track your professional stats like a pro athlete to give your resume power
• Ben Eater’s 8-bit computer
• The Peter Principle - Observation that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their “level of incompetence”
• Stripe Atlas: Guide to pitching your startup
• Rubber Duck Debugging
• Mister Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children
• How to achieve low latency with 10Gbps Ethernet - CloudFlare

Blogs

• Stay SaaSy
• Stratechery - Analysis of tech and media companies
• Brendan Gregg’s Blog
• Increment Magazine by Stripe
• Robert Heaton
• Julia Evans
• Tania Rascia
• Fabien Sanglard
• Josh W Comeau - Great write ups of Web Tech, especially CSS
• Joel on Software

Books

• Google’s SRE Book

Podcasts

• Rust in Production
• The Changelog
• Self Directed Research
• Self Hosted
• Google SRE Podcast
• Kubernetes Podcast
• Scam Inc - The Economist - An odd entry compared to the others, but this was eye opening. 8-part series looking into the industrialisation of scamming.