At first, it was clean code, then automation and developer tooling. Nowadays, the topic that is piquing my curiosity is distributed systems, with a special interest for databases. I find it to be a good mix of theoretical research and practical concerns that help me grow as a software engineer.

Curating a good list of resources to learn about a topic is not easy, thanks to the internet’s enshittification. It takes time, but jumping from one source to another, you hopefully end up with relevant sources of information.

I also find myself often being too passive in my learning and not actively building things to consolidate my readings and listening. I must also deal with the fact that most of it happens when eating my cereal or when doing the weekly home cleaning 🤓.

Enough about me, let’s see what I have so far!

Books

Designing Data-Intensive applications This is the most cited book when it comes to distributed systems. It covers many concepts and is a must-read. The author is working on a second edition.
Database Internals The author is also hosting a Discord server with a book club.
Distributed Systems Co-authored by Tannenbaum, well-known for his textbooks on OS and networking. The book is available for free. I don’t think I managed to finish it, it is quite expansive, and I found some sections less interesting than others.

Research papers

I’m not going to list them individually here but there are many foundational papers that are worth reading. However, I find papers hard to read, I just don’t get the two-columns format, probably good to read them on physical paper.

Some lists to get started:

Individual blogs

These are the hardest to find because they are sometimes well hidden. It is also tricky to find active blogs (hey, I’m not going to criticize here, just look at this blog). Thanks to those authors for taking so much of their personal time to share their knowledge!

Alex Miller
Micah Lerner
Pat Helland, not active but the old posts are worth reading.
Justin Jaffray
Eaton Phil, also runs a Discord server that is quite active and filled with super smart people (and me trying to understand what they are saying).
Murat Demirbas, researcher, often reviews research papers that are way more understandable than the original content.
Chris Riccomini
Marc Brooker, works at AWS and shares details about projects he works and a lot about distributed systems in general, highly recommend.
Mahesh Balakrishnan
Jack Vanlightly, works at Confluent, in-depth posts related to data streaming but not only.
Database architects
Pierre Zemb, oh a 🇫🇷 developer, one of the few I know writes about distributed systems.

I miss High Scalability, that was a great source too.

Vendor blogs

Vendors being vendors, they are here to sell you their product, but it is often interesting to understand the inner workings of what they build.

Tiger Data
PlanetScale
Hacking SaaS
add your preferred commercial database, check their blog

Company tech blogs

There is less bias than in vendor writing and what works for them might not work for you, but at least they are usually sharing some grounded experience. They do not write about distributed systems specifically but they often have a post or two about a tricky database migration.

Podcasts

Great when driving, cooking or whatever chore you find boring.

The GeekNarrator, deep dives on specific products, often with their creators.
The BugBash Podcast from Antithesis.
Software Engineering Radio, a generic podcast on many different topics, some about databases and distributed systems.
Big Data Hebdo, in 🇫🇷, more about big data than distributed systems.

Videos

The good thing is that many conferences are recorded and made available for free online. Generic conferences like Devoxx can be a starting point. There are also more specialized conferences like:

Posette about Postgres
SystemsDistributed by TigerBeetle

Universities are also putting their classes online, a good one is Introduction to database systems from CMU.

That’s it for me. Hopefully you have discovered at least one new source to learn more about distributed systems.