Papers

Relatively few Staff-plus Engineers are avid readers of Computer Science papers. However, most are familiar with a handful of foundational papers, and the small subset who do spend time reading papers tend to get quite a bit out of it.

If you aspire to join the category of frequent paper readers, there’s no better place than Adrian Colyer’s the morning paper, which will send you a summary of a computer science paper every weekday. If you’re more interested in getting some foundational exposure to some well-known papers, first read one of How to Read an Academic Article by Peter Klein or How to Read a Paper by S. Keshav, and then jump into this list of recommended papers:

• Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
• On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services
• No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering
• Out of the Tar Pit
• The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems
• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
• Raft: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm
• Paxos Made Simple
• SWIM: Scalable Weakly-consistent Infection-style Process Group Membership Protocol
• Hints for Computer System Design
• Big Ball of Mud
• The Google File System
• CAP Twelve Years Later: How the Rules Have Changed
• Harvest, Yield, and Scalable Tolerant Systems
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
• Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure
• Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing
• Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg
• Mesos: A Platform for Fine-Grained Resource Sharing in the Data Center
• Love classic papers?
• 1978: Communicating Sequential Processes
  • implemented in Go
• 2003: The Google File System
  • replaced by Colossus in 2012
• 2004: MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
  • mostly replaced by Cloud Dataflow?
• 2006: Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
  • An Inside Look at Google BigQuery
• 2006: The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems
• 2007: Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
  • The Dynamo paper kicked off the NoSQL revolution
• 2007: What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (very long, and the author encourages skipping of some sections)
• 2010: Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure
• 2010: Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets
• 2012: Google’s Colossus
  • paper not available
• 2012: AddressSanitizer: A Fast Address Sanity Checker:
  • paper
  • video
• 2013: Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database:
  • paper
  • video
• 2014: Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt
• 2015: Continuous Pipelines at Google
• 2015: High-Availability at Massive Scale: Building Google’s Data Infrastructure for Ads
• 2015: TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems
• 2015: How Developers Search for Code: A Case Study
• 2016: Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes
• 2 Minute Papers
• Bell System Technical Journal, 1922-1983
• Best Paper Awards in Computer Science
• Facebook
• Google Scholar (choose a subcategory)
• Microsoft Research
• Functional Programming Books Review
• MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab Publications
• MIT’s Distributed System’s Reading Group
• arXiv Paper Repository
• SciRate
• cat-v.org
• y-archive
• netlib
• Services Engineering Reading List
• Readings in Distributed Systems
• Gradual Typing Bibliography
• Security Data Science Papers
• Research Papers from Robert Harper, Carnegie Mellon University
• Lobste.rs tagged as PDF
• The Morning Paper