ByteByteGo is a newsletter on large-scale system design, covering architectures of companies like Twitter, Shopify, Discord, and Cursor.
Commenters often recommend it in newsletter lists, praising its broad range of explanations on software design topics, though one says the content is often very abbreviated.
So there's two things here: TILs and projects. I'm running a dev writers' retreat next week and happen to be thinking about this, want to suggest more:
- Superlatives: An interesting story about the first/last/best/worst experience when you did X. You see a lot of these in Rachelbythebay's work (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=https%3A%2F%2Frachelbythebay.com%2F&sort=byPopularity&type=story) . Mtlynch focuses more on documenting his journey semi-realtime (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=mtlynch.io&sort=byPopularity&type=story)
- Data & News: This is a lot of work but collect data for yourself and publish it for others and others will find that useful. This is the strategy I am adopting for AI stuff https://lspace.swyx.io/p/open-source-ai. Dan Luu does this a lot to back up his work https://danluu.com/ The cutting edge of data is news, and you can see this on Gergely's substack (https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/) but you're basically a journalist at that point
- How $POPULAR_THING Works: This is Fly.io's (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=fly.io%20sqlite&sort=byPopularity&type=story) and Alex Xu's strategy https://blog.bytebytego.com/
- Overviews: What your part of the dev ecosystem looks like to you. It'll never be perfect, it can't be. Some folks on HN will tear you to shreds for missing something obvious. But it will be immensely helpful to people just behind you in…
Learning by doing is obviously the best way, but not every role has that kind of opportunity. You can build something on the side and scale it, but it's easier to just do that in a company :)
I'm no expert on system architecture, but I have noticed that reading a lot of docs and blogs on how other companies do things successfully has helped me:
Quastor: quastor.org - Engineering blog posts and summaries
Engineer's Codex: read.engineerscodex.com - Case studies and summaries of Big Tech systems and software architectures
SWE Quiz: swequiz.com - Bunch of useful questions that has helped me a lot at work
TLDR Web Dev: tldr.tech/webdev - Good for keeping up on engineering-specific stuff in general.
I have a Feedly set up with these blogs too: https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/79-engineering-blogs-to-level-up
ByteByteGo is good too, though that's an obvious one that everyone already knows about.
Here are few more:
1. http://highscalability.com/
2. https://www.infoq.com/architecture-design/presentations/
3. https://blog.bytebytego.com/ - the book from same author is a good starting point too
4. https://gist.github.com/vasanthk/485d1c25737e8e72759f
General search on Google & YouTube also will get you ton of materials.
Incidentally, I see no evidence in those links or elsewhere that either Walmart or Netflix is using node to meditate interactions with upstream data sources. What I do see elsewhere is the usual suspects: some databases and message queues, and then lots of Java
https://blog.bytebytego.com/p/ep76-netflixs-tech-stack
ByteByteGo https://blog.bytebytego.com/
A ton of explanations of various software design patterns, architectures, deep explanations of things a lot of developers will only understand at a higher level like HTTPS, proxies, SQL, how live streaming works, how credit card payments work. It's a fountain of knowledge.
Huge fan of Pragmatic Engineer as well.
I also subscribe to:
- Hardcore Software[0]
- ByeByteGo[1]
- JavaScript Weekly[2]
- Bytes[3]
[0]: https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/
[1]: https://blog.bytebytego.com/
[2]: https://javascriptweekly.com/
[3]: https://bytes.dev/