Murat Demirbas

i think it's largely culture. academics are "graded" based on how many papers they publish. depending on your geography, quality matters too.

but in most cases they aren't measured by how much non-peer reviewed publications they have.

there is also a technical barrier that works both ways. most don't have the capability to have a regularly updated website with content that otherwise would have been put in the file drawer. and the other side of that coin is what audience will actually find / read it online.

twitter is becoming the defacto medium of dissemination, however, so that may bode well for promoting other types of publishing medium.

edit
ALSO note that there are some academics who publish high-quality blogs. i'm thinking of [murat demirbas](http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/). i'm not familiar with any that publish actual results, however. the threat would be someone else might "steal" the idea and publish it elsewhere, particularly in competitive fields like bio.

The linked blog post at the top of this article - https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/01/is-scalable-oltp-in-cloud-solved.html - provides graphics that give extremely useful context. And here's the repo for the paper that discusses: https://github.com/DataManagementLab/ScaleStore

The idea that one of many writer-compute-nodes can literally reach into a memory buffer that is shared across machines, atomically flip some lock bits and propagate some cache-coherence messages, and use that to build a multi-writer distributed database without needing to partition (and where any writer-compute-node can handle any message, so you can just round-robin a firehose of messages at them)... and that there's a chance (though not yet implemented) that one could implement ACID on top of this? It's absolute madness, and wildly exciting.

It can be used to optimize consensus and transaction protocols.

Consensus example - check out Nezha (https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.03285), they came up with an interesting 'Deadline Ordered Multicast' (DOM) primitive

> DOM follows Liskov's suggestion of "depending on clock synchronization for performance but not for correctness"

Transactions example - look no further than DynamoDB, https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/08/distributed-transactions-at-scale-in.html

> In order to relieve your anxiety before you read further, no, correctness does not depend on timestamps, clock synchronization only helps to improve performance, as more accurate clocks result in more successful transactions and a serialization order that complies with real time.

Right .. the AMPLab was set up in 2011. The Djikstra prize for distributed computing was set up in 2006 .. people like Djikstra and Lamport and Jim Gray and Barbara Liskov won Turing Awards for a lifetime's worth of work.

Now, Berkeley has been a fount of research on the topic, no question about that. I myself worked there (on Bloom, with Joe Hellerstein). But forgetting the other top universities of the world is a bit ... amusing?

Let's take one of the many lists of foundational papers of this field:

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2021/02/foundational-distributed-systems-papers.html

How many came out of Berkeley, let alone a recent entry like the AMPLab?

I have many recommendations of different kinds:

## Blogs:

- http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/

- https://bartoszsypytkowski.com/

- https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/

- https://www.the-paper-trail.org/

- https://blog.acolyer.org/

- https://pathelland.substack.com/

## Other web resources

- https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ - set of resources from Amazon about building distributed systems

- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_HdUFe97RItdiB - lecture series from Cambridge

## Books

- https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1213/PrincComm/mfcn.pdf - A great book on the maths of networking (probability, queuing theory etc...)

mad44 is I believe the author of the blog that OP linked, so the blog is just the OP, http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ .

I don't see any direct articles about process as Murat characterizes himself as a researcher first and thus doesn't necessarily have much to say about “how do you fit this into your 9-to-5,” but he does give some reading advice,

"Deep Reading", http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2022/02/deep-reading.html?m=1

"Read papers, not too much, mostly foundational ones", http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2021/02/read-papers-not-too-much-mostly.html?m=1