Building Software Systems at Google and Lessons Learned — Jeff Dean (Stanford, 2010)
This is the talk every backend engineer eventually watches. Jeff Dean walks Stanford’s distinguished lecture audience through eleven years of evolution in Google’s search infrastructure — from a single-machine inverted index in 1999 to a planet-scale system serving thousands of queries per second with sub-second updates. The value of the lecture isn’t the specific numbers; it’s how he reasons about each rewrite as a response to one constraint becoming unbearable, and the design patterns that survived across seven major rewrites....