I’ve been reading a lot of tech articles and blogs recently. Those articles are mostly from either HackerNews, reddit’s /r/programming, Pocket’s explore tab or the people I follow on twitter and facebook. I save them to Pocket and read them later on during my daily commute.

I decided to share some of those I found interesting over the past year. I skimmed through my pocket’s archive and compiled this list. It doesn’t contain the stuff I read that didn’t go through Pocket though.

• Everything you should know about certificates and PKI but are too afraid to ask. I’ve learned a lot reading this article. It’s one of my favourites for this year.
• Network Protocols for anyone who knows a programming language. The Ethernet part was very interesting.
• Building a Distributed Log from Scratch. Given that I’ve recently joined a team that built a distributed log (Logdevice) from scratch, this series was a very interesting read to me.
• A Cascading Failure of Distributed Systems. A story of an intermittent connectivity issue that took down a whole cluster at Target.
• Everything You Need To Know About Networking On AWS.
• How do you cut a monolith in half?.
• And why you might want to glue it back : Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar.
• Github talking about their MySQL High availability setup: MySQL High Availability at GitHub.
• A plain english introduction to CAP Theorem.
• How to write a good software design doc?
• What’s a memory allocator and how to build a simple one? Memory Allocators 101 - Write a simple memory allocator.
• What would you do if you find a RaspberryPi in your network closet? The curious case of the Raspberry Pi in the network closet.
• Why NOT to Build a Time-Series Database. Spoiler alert: It’s hard.
• Proving the correctness of two phase commit using TLA+. It was the first time I’ve heard about TLA+ and I was impressed.
• How CockroachDB managed to build a SQL engine on top of a distributed key value store : SQL in CockroachDB: Mapping Table Data to Key-Value Storage.
• Saher’s post about living on the edge and Lara’s post about personalized alerting. Their blog posts are very well written! Follow their blog!
• Cloudflare’s blog posts are usually very interesting. Those are the two I found in my archive: Every 7.8μs your computer’s memory has a hiccup and Cloud Computing without Containers.
• “Most people in the tech industry are brainwashed by Silicon Valley group think. These people believe that every business must have a billion dollar opportunity. This isn’t true, especially for side projects.” - a quote from How I Built A $5,000 Per Month Side Project.
• Fatih (who used to be the maintainer of vim-go), writes about his experience using an iPad Pro as his development machine.
• The two 2018 recaps that motivated me to write my own (which I’m still writing): Fatih’s Recap Year 2018 and Mosab’s 2018: State of the Union.
• And finally, The Best Fat Loss Article on the Motherfuckin’ Internet. That’s not how I’m describing it, that’s actually the name of the article.

Let me know if you think this is useful and maybe then I can do it frequently.