Stash

A running collection of things I keep coming back to — articles, videos, courses, and references that sharpened how I think.

The Human Side of Infrastructure

Modern SRE and Platform work is 50% social engineering. These folks understand that better than anyone.

Tanya Reilly: Being Glue — A career-defining talk/article for anyone in SRE or Platform. It explains the “invisible” work that keeps senior teams from falling apart.
Charity Majors: Bring Back Ops Pride — “Operations” is not a dirty word, a synonym for toil, or a title for people who can’t write code. May those who shit on ops get the operational outcomes they deserve.
Cindy Sridharan: Monitoring and Observability — Cindy’s deep dives (like this one on the “three pillars”) are legendary for their technical rigor and lack of marketing fluff.

People who explain ‘how things work’ under the hood (containers, networking, and cloud).

iximiuz (Ivan Velichko) — If you want to understand container networking or how Kubernetes actually talks to the Linux kernel, Ivan’s diagrams and “from scratch” guides are the gold standard.
The Burning Monk (Yan Cui) — The most pragmatic voice in Serverless and AWS architecture. He focuses on real-world patterns (and failures) rather than hello-world examples.
Julia Evans: Wizard Zines — While “famous,” her blog remains a masterpiece of simplifying complex systems (DNS, TCP, SQL) through curiosity-driven exploration.

GitHub repos that function as living textbooks.

binhnguyennus / awesome-scalability — Not just a list of links, but a massive organized reading list on the patterns used by companies like LinkedIn, Netflix, and Uber to stay alive.
upgundecha / how-they-sre — A curated collection of public post-mortems and SRE practices from top-tier engineering orgs. Great for seeing how others handle “the big one.”
The Book of Secret Knowledge — An incredibly dense “cheatsheet” for everything from Linux performance to security and networking.

Architecture Notes — Visual deep dives into things like “How Discord scales to billions of messages.” The illustrations help mental models “stick.”
The Pragmatic Engineer (Gergely Orosz) — While he covers the whole industry, his specific deep dives into how Big Tech builds internal platforms are invaluable for “Platform as a Product” thinking.