Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

This is one of the bread-and-butter books; read it a long time ago and the org-noter notes for it are just ported over to this blogging system for now, these notes are yet to be polished.

The preface of this book starts with an essential moral reminder:

Technology is a powerful force in our society. Data, software, and communication can be used for bad: to entrench unfair power structures, to undermine human rights, and to protect vested interests. But they can also be used for good: to make underrepresented people’s voices heard, to create opportunities for everyone, and to avert disasters. This book is dedicated to everyone working toward the good.

Whenever things are about designing systems, Picasso’s Le Taureau comes to mind.

In the series, Picasso redraws a bull again and again – each iteration stripping away detail: muscles disappear, shading vanishes, lines collapse. In the final frame, it is just a handful of strokes that remain; yet the bull is somehow more bull than before.