A reading room for system design

How the hardest systems are actually built.

A curated archive of engineering writing from Netflix, Meta, AWS, Cloudflare, Stripe, and others — distilled into concepts, patterns, and systems you can actually cite.

1,178Articles read

178Distilled

568Concepts

405Patterns

523Systems

16Companies

Start here

• Concept

  Control Plane / Data Plane Separation

  The single most-cited pattern in the corpus: keep the fast path independent from the thing that configures it.

• Concept

  Observability

  Logs, metrics, traces — and the unresolved debate about what belongs in each.

• Concept

  Write-Ahead Logging

  How databases, message queues, and filesystems all survive crashes the same way.

• Concept

  Eventual Consistency

  What you actually get when you scale a read-heavy system past one region.

• Concept

  Backpressure

  Unbounded queues are the most common production bug. This is how systems push back.

• Concept

  Tail Latency at Scale

  Why the p99.9 matters more than the mean, and the hedged-request playbook for taming it.

• Concept

  Blast Radius

  The discipline of designing so a single failure doesn't take everything with it.

Latest additions

1. 2024-02-15Fly.io — Globally Distributed Object Storage with TigrisFLYIO
2. 2025-01-17Scaling Large Language Models for e-Commerce: The Development of a Llama-Based Customized LLM
3. 2026-04-17Shared Dictionaries: compression that keeps up with the agentic web
4. 2026-04-21Figma — Server-side sandboxing — Containers and seccompFIGMA
5. 2026-04-17Cloudflare — Agents that remember: introducing Agent Memory
6. 2026-04-21Cloudflare — Moving past bots vs. humansCLOUDFLARE
7. 2026-02-11Google Research — Scheduling in a changing world: Maximizing throughput with time-varying capacityGOOGLE
8. 2025-10-30Toward provably private insights into AI use (Google Research, 2025-10-30)
9. 2024-08-15We're Cutting L40S Prices In HalfFLYIO
10. 2025-02-14We Were Wrong About GPUsFLYIO
11. 2026-04-16Building the foundation for running extra-large language models
12. 2024-03-07Fly.io — Fly Kubernetes does more now (FKS beta)FLYIO

Browse

• Reference

  Concepts — 568

  The primitives: CAP, WAL, consistent hashing, backpressure, leader election.

• Reference

  Patterns — 405

  Repeatable solutions: circuit breaker, sidecar, saga, event sourcing, outbox.

• Reference

  Systems — 523

  Named systems in production: Dynamo, Kafka, Spanner, Borg, Colossus.

• Primary source

  Sources — 178

  Every ingested article with full metadata, tags, and backlinks.

How this works

An ingestion pipeline pulls engineering blog posts from ~30 company feeds, de-duplicates them, and runs each through a curator agent that distills the piece into structured notes and cross-links it against the existing concept graph. See the overview for the full methodology and corpus stats.

The LLM-readable catalog mirrors every page for agent consumption.