Curated List of Engineering Blogs from Top Tech Companies
These blogs publish detailed write-ups of real production systems, architectural decisions, and lessons learned.
They are the closest thing to looking inside how these systems actually work.
FAANG and Major Tech
- Netflix Tech Blog (netflixtechblog.com)
- Meta Engineering (engineering.fb.com)
- Google Research Blog (research.google/blog)
- Amazon Builder's Library (aws.amazon.com/builders-library)
- Apple Machine Learning Journal (machinelearning.apple.com)
- Microsoft Engineering (devblogs.microsoft.com).
Infrastructure and Platform
- Uber Engineering (eng.uber.com)
- Airbnb Engineering (medium.com/airbnb-engineering)
- Stripe Engineering (stripe.com/blog/engineering)
- Spotify Engineering (engineering.atspotify.com)
- LinkedIn Engineering (engineering.linkedin.com)
- Twitter/X Engineering (blog.x.com/engineering)
- Pinterest Engineering (medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering)
- Dropbox Tech (dropbox.tech).
Scale and Performance
- Cloudflare Blog (blog.cloudflare.com)
- Discord Engineering (discord.com/blog/engineering)
- Slack Engineering (slack.engineering)
- DoorDash Engineering (doordash.engineering)
- Figma Engineering (figma.com/blog/engineering)
- Shopify Engineering (shopify.engineering)
Databases and Infrastructure
- CockroachDB Blog (cockroachlabs.com/blog)
- PlanetScale Blog (planetscale.com/blog)
- Timescale Blog (timescale.com/blog)
- ClickHouse Blog (clickhouse.com/blog)
Recommended Papers and Publications
These papers shaped the systems we build today.
Reading even the abstracts gives you a deeper understanding of why distributed systems work the way they do.
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"MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" (Google, 2004).
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"The Google File System" (Google, 2003).
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"Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store" (Amazon, 2007).
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"Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data" (Google, 2006).
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"Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing" (LinkedIn, 2011).
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"The Raft Consensus Algorithm" (Stanford, 2014).
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"Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database" (Google, 2012).
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"Attention Is All You Need" (Google, 2017, the transformer paper).
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"Scaling Memcache at Facebook" (Facebook, 2013).
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"TAO: Facebook's Distributed Data Store for the Social Graph" (Facebook, 2013).
Open-Source Projects to Study
Reading the source code and documentation of these projects deepens your understanding of system design in practice:
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Redis (elegant data structures and networking)
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etcd (Raft consensus implementation)
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Kafka (distributed log architecture)
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Elasticsearch (distributed search)
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Kubernetes (container orchestration)
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Envoy (proxy and service mesh data plane)
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Vitess (MySQL sharding)
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CockroachDB (distributed SQL)
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Prometheus (monitoring and time-series).