Articles
Worth reading
A short take on pieces worth your time — architecture, AI, system design, and engineering careers — each one linked back to its original source.
7 articles
Microservices
The essay that put a name and a definition to an architectural style most of us were already half-doing by instinct — nine characteristics, from componentization via services to decentralized data management, laid out with none of the conference-talk hype the term later picked up. What holds up more than a decade later is the honesty about the cost side: microservices trade simplicity for operational complexity, and Fowler and Lewis say so plainly rather than selling it as a free upgrade. If you only ever read one primary source before an architecture debate about services vs. monolith, make it this one.
The Tail at Scale
The paper that explains why your p50 latency dashboard is lying to you: at scale, it's the tail — p99, p999 — that decides whether users experience your service as fast, because any single request has to survive every slow component in its path. Dean and Barroso's techniques for taming it, especially hedged and tied requests, are still the starting point for anyone designing a fan-out call pattern or arguing for stricter SLOs on a critical dependency. Dense, but every page earns its place — required reading before you design anything with fan-out on the critical path.