Papershelf
The papers I keep returning to — and the one line that made each one stick.
DeCandia et al., Amazon · SOSP
Where I finally understood eventual consistency, quorums, and why availability is a business decision, not just a technical one.
Dean & Ghemawat, Google · OSDI
A masterclass in hiding hard distributed-systems problems behind a tiny, teachable API.
Ghemawat, Gobioff & Leung, Google · SOSP
Design around your failure model, not around a clean abstraction. Commodity hardware failing is the normal case, not the exception.
Ongaro & Ousterhout, Stanford · USENIX ATC
Proof that 'understandable' is a real design goal. Made consensus click in a way Paxos never did for me.
Vaswani et al., Google · NeurIPS
The transformer paper. Re-read it after building a RAG app and half of the design choices suddenly made sense.
Chang et al., Google · OSDI
The row-key is the whole game. Changed how I think about designing for access patterns first.