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.
Deep-Dive Technical Blogs
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.
Knowledge Maps & Repos
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 & Systems Thinking
- 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.