Written by Gautam

Papershelf

Papers I've read and want to remember.

  • Machine learningReading
    Attention Is All You Need

    Vaswani et al. · NeurIPS · 2017

    Rereading this slowly, alongside an implementation, since half of my day now involves systems built on top of this architecture.

  • Distributed systemsFinished
    In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm

    Ongaro & Ousterhout · USENIX ATC · 2014

    Raft's whole pitch is understandability, and it delivers — I finally trust I could implement leader election from memory.

  • Systems designWant to read
    The Tail at Scale

    Dean & Barroso · Communications of the ACM · 2013

    Queued up after seeing it cited in three other papers this month for tail-latency mitigation techniques.

  • Distributed systemsFinished
    Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store

    DeCandia et al. · SOSP · 2007

    The paper that made eventual consistency and vector clocks feel like practical engineering choices, not just theory.

  • Data processingFinished
    MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

    Dean & Ghemawat · OSDI · 2004

    Less useful as a blueprint today, more useful as a lesson in how a good abstraction hides real infrastructure pain.