Systems & Performance blogs

Dan Luu, a software engineer, writes data-driven posts on performance, latency, hardware, and how tech companies work.

Top post: Computer latency: 1977-2017

A site documenting the architectures of large websites and the lessons from scaling them.

Top post: PlentyOfFish Architecture

Raymond Chen, a Microsoft engineer, writes about Windows history, API design quirks, and low-level programming.

Top post: It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway (2006)

Discord's engineering and company blog covers its infrastructure, including Rust, Elixir, and message storage, along with policy and privacy updates.

Top post: Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust (2020)

Meta's engineering blog, where its engineers describe infrastructure, messaging, open-source releases, and large-scale systems work.

Top post: Fighting spam with Haskell at Meta (2015)

Julia Evans writes about systems, networking, containers, and debugging, and makes illustrated zines on technical topics.

Top post: Get your work recognized: write a brag document

Adrian Colyer wrote daily summaries of computer science research papers, mostly on systems, databases, and software engineering.

Top post: To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript

Google Research's blog and publications site, covering ML, systems, and applied research such as camera technology and tabular models.

Top post: Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System (2019)

Facebook's engineering blog on infrastructure, open source projects, Haskell, Mercurial, storage, and licensing.

Top post: Scaling Mercurial at Facebook

Daniel Lemire, a computer science professor, writes about squeezing speed out of software, covering SIMD, number parsing, and low-level optimization.

Top post: Reusing a thread in C++ for better performance

Rachel Kroll writes about her experience in systems engineering, covering debugging, operations, reliability, and software oddities.

Top post: W

Engineering blog of Dropbox covering storage infrastructure, compression, machine learning, and large-scale code and product engineering.

Top post: Rewriting the heart of our sync engine

Brendan Gregg, a performance engineer known for his work at Netflix, writes about Linux performance analysis, eBPF tracing, and flame graphs.

Top post: Linux Performance

John Regehr, a computer science professor, writes "Embedded in Academia" on compilers, undefined behavior in C and C++, and software correctness.

Top post: A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++ (2010)

Microsoft's official .NET blog, with release announcements, language features, and yearly deep dives into runtime performance improvements.

Top post: Performance Improvements in .NET 5

Chris Siebenmann, a sysadmin at the University of Toronto, writes short technical notes on Unix, Go, storage, and running servers.

Top post: I think you shouldn't digitally sign things casually

Netflix engineers write about architecture, performance debugging, video encoding, and resilience on the company's engineering blog.

Top post: The Netflix Cosmos Platform: Orchestrated Functions as a Microservice

Netflix engineers write about cloud infrastructure, resilience testing, performance analysis, and recommendations, with early posts on Chaos Monkey and AWS.

Top post: Chaos Monkey released into the wild

Jeff Geerling writes about Raspberry Pi, homelab hardware, clustering, benchmarks, and Apple and Linux tinkering.

Top post: I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud

Colin Percival is the founder of Tarsnap and a FreeBSD developer, and writes on cryptography, security and operating systems.

Top post: Hacker News Daily

Howard Oakley writes about how macOS works, covering Apple Silicon, virtualisation, security checks, Time Machine and system behaviour.

Top post: Virtualisation on Apple Silicon

Databricks' engineering blog covers Apache Spark, data lakehouses, LLM training and inference, and the company's tooling and benchmarks.

Top post: Free Dolly: Introducing the First Truly Open Instruction-Tuned LLM

Lennart Poettering, creator of systemd, writes on init systems, socket activation, file locking and Linux boot security.

Top post: Rethinking PID 1 (2010)

Chris Wellons writes about C, Emacs, low-level programming tools and small software projects such as Endlessh.

Top post: Prospecting for Hash Functions

Agner Fog publishes CPU instruction tables and optimization manuals for C++ and assembly, covering Intel, AMD and VIA processors.

Top post: Software optimization resources for C++, assembly, Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS

Russ Cox, a Go core developer, writes about regular expression engines, concurrency and the history of Unix tools.

Top post: Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast

ClickHouse's company blog covers its open-source analytics database, with engineering posts on performance, large deployments and new features.

Top post: ClickHouse: We Stand with Ukraine

Bruce Dawson, a Chrome engineer, writes about Windows performance debugging, floating-point math, and CPU and OS bugs he has tracked down.

Top post: There are only four billion floats, so test them all (2014)

The V8 team at Google writes about the JavaScript and WebAssembly engine used in Chrome and Node.js, covering performance and new features.

Top post: The cost of parsing JSON

Dave Cheney, a Go programmer and conference speaker, writes about Go language design, error handling, cgo, and API patterns.

Top post: Cgo is not Go

Ted Unangst, an OpenBSD developer, writes about C, security, cryptography, and operating system internals.

Top post: Honk: An ActivityPub server with minimal setup and support costs

Shopify's engineering team writes about Ruby, YJIT, Rust, infrastructure scaling, React Native and WebAssembly.

Top post: Deconstructing the Monolith – Shopify Engineering

Joyent's blog covers its cloud platform, SmartOS, Manta object storage, and Node.js production experience.

Top post: The Power of a Pronoun

Datadog's blog covers its monitoring platform, engineering work like the Husky event store, and reports on cloud, container, and serverless adoption.

Top post: Husky, Datadog's Third-Generation Event Store

News site covering the OpenBSD operating system, with release notes, security advisories such as OpenSSH bugs, and developer write-ups.

Top post: Cgi

The Asia-Pacific internet registry's blog, with technical posts on routing, DNS, IPv6, and transport protocols.

Top post: BBR, the new kid on the TCP block

Justine Tunney writes on portable executables, Cosmopolitan Libc, pledge on Linux, and fast LLM inference on CPUs.

Top post: Actually Portable Executable

Development blog of the PyPy project, an alternative Python implementation with a JIT compiler.

Top post: Writing an Interpreter with PyPy, Part 1

Bryan Cantrill, systems engineer and DTrace co-creator, writes about operating systems, performance, Rust, and software economics.

Top post: The relative performance of C and Rust

Engineering blog of Atomic Object, a custom software consultancy, with posts on programming, tooling, and embedded development.

Top post: How and Why to Log Your Bash History

Andy Wingo, a compiler engineer and Guile maintainer, writes about garbage collection, Scheme, WebAssembly, and language implementation.

Top post: An opinionated guide to Scheme implementations (2013)

Kyle Kingsbury (Aphyr) publishes Jepsen's tests of distributed databases and explanations of consistency models.

Top post: Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6

The engineering and company blog of PlanetScale, a hosted database company, covering MySQL, Postgres, indexes, and Go performance.

Top post: Generics can make your Go code slower

Marc Brooker, an AWS distinguished engineer, writes about distributed systems, databases, load balancing, and reliability.

Top post: The power of two random choices

Fabian Giesen, a game and demoscene programmer at RAD, writes on graphics pipelines, low-level optimization, compression and data structures.

Top post: A trip through the graphics pipeline (2011)

Poul-Henning Kamp, a FreeBSD developer and creator of Varnish Cache, writes on web caching, HTTP and software design.

Top post: So what's wrong with 1975 programming? (2008)

Unity's official blog, where the game engine's developers write about scripting, performance, garbage collection, and platform features.

Top post: Data-Oriented Tech Stack C++ & C#

Netflix engineers write about the company's infrastructure, including containers, content delivery, data caching, notebooks, and security.

Top post: Beyond Interactive: Notebook Innovation at Netflix

Chips and Cheese publishes detailed technical analyses and benchmarks of CPU, GPU, and memory microarchitecture, funded through reader support.

Top post: AMD's Ryzen 9950X: Zen 5 on Desktop

The Dolphin emulator team writes progress reports and technical breakdowns on emulating the GameCube and Wii, including graphics and shader work.

Top post: Ubershaders: A Ridiculous Solution to an Impossible Problem

The PyPy team writes about its alternative Python implementation, covering JIT performance, compatibility, transactional memory, and fundraising.

Top post: PyPy's Call for donations to support Python3

Twitch's engineering team writes about running its streaming platform, including Go performance, PostgreSQL use, and policy updates.

Top post: Go memory ballast: How I learnt to stop worrying and love the heap

Ilya Grigorik, a Google web performance engineer, writes on networking, latency, storage engines, Ruby internals, and blockchain basics.

Top post: Minimum Viable Block Chain

NVIDIA's developer blog covers GPU architectures, CUDA programming, deep learning and self-driving research, and data analytics.

Top post: Volta: Advanced Data Center GPU

Mitchell Hashimoto, HashiCorp co-founder and creator of the Ghostty terminal emulator, writes on programming, terminals, Nix, and AI use.

Top post: Ghostty

Company blog of Modular, Chris Lattner's startup behind the Mojo language, covering AI compute, GPU programming, and compilers.

Top post: The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software

Programmer ridiculousfish, who wrote Hex Fiend and revived the fish shell, writes on compiler optimizations, division, and performance.

Top post: The Treacherous Optimization (2006)

Markus Winand writes about SQL indexing, query performance and modern SQL features for application developers.

Top post: Do Not Use Offset for pagination (2014)

Mike Ash writes technical posts on Apple platforms, covering Objective-C internals, ARM64, and low-level performance.

Top post: ARM64 and You

Fred Hébert writes about Erlang, system reliability, overload handling, and the human side of automation.

Top post: The Zen of Erlang