Reading List

I read widely, both technical and not. And have collected a list of some of the pieces I’ve found exceptionally fun and/or interesting.

Books

2026

4 books

• You Can’t Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television
• Never Finished
• Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track
• The Mamba Mentality: How I Play
• Team of Teams

2025

8 books

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications
• Best Seat in the House: 18 Golden Lessons from a Father to His Son
• Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation
• Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable about Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business
• Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
• Steve Jobs
• Mastering One-On-One Meetings: A comprehensive and quick guide to better leadership
  
  
  

Articles / Media

Systems & Infra

• AWS HFT Latency Optimization Best Practices
• The Basics of the InnoDB Undo Logging and History System
• Why Strong Consistency?
• Simplicity of a Database, but the Speed of a Cache: OLAP Caches for DuckDB
• Using MotherDuck with PlanetScale
• TIL: 8 versions of UUID and when to use them
• How Stripe’s document databases supported 99.999% uptime with zero-downtime data migrations
• How when AWS was down, we were not
• Dynamo, DynamoDB, and Aurora DSQL

AI, Applied Engineering

• Machines of Loving Grace
• The Overthinking Problem in AI
• Code execution with MCP: Building more efficient agents
• Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior
• Falkor DB: a graph database built specifically for LLM agents
• Meet Ramp Research: Our Agentic Data Analyst
• Measuring Agents In Production

Education

• As Schools Embrace A.I Tools, Skeptics Raise Concerns
• The Programmers Brain and Mastery Based Learning
• The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers

Web & Developer Platforms

• Bun Joins Anthropic
• Planetscale, Vitess, and the Slack Chief Architect
• The Strange Story of the Teens Behind the Mirai Botnet

Product & Execution

• How to Change Your Architecture Without Halting Delivery — A Practical Guide to Incremental Design
• Collaboration Sucks
• Escaping the Build Trap - Melissa Perri
• Understanding the Job
• The Strange Story of the Teens Behind the Mirai Botnet

Personal, Perspective, and Craft

• The Self-Promotion Horror Show
• Berkshire Hathaway Letter To Shareholders (Nov 2025)
• Work and Meaning Excerpt
• Brian Armstrong on working with smart people

• @HyperliquidX: How to Win in Crypto (By building for users, not VCs)

  
  
  
  
  

Last updated: January 2026