systems

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week. Area: Databases. Author: E. F. Codd (IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 377–387 DOI: 10.1145/362384.362685 Why the paper still matters Codd’s paper is eight pages long, contains no system, no benchmark, and no evaluation section. It would very likely struggle to get past a modern program committee. It is also, by a wide margin, the most economically consequential paper in the history of computer science — the entire relational database industry, SQL, the query optimizer as a discipline, and by extension most of what we call “data infrastructure” descend from it....

Weekly Video Notes — Classic of the Week. A foundational talk revisited, with source video and key frames embedded throughout. Most Turing Award lectures are a victory lap through the technical contribution. Stonebraker refuses. He shows up without the tie the videographer asked for (“that just isn’t me”), announces that the audience isn’t a database crowd so he’ll have to teach them some database first, and then delivers 75 minutes braiding two stories together: the design and near-death of Postgres, and a tandem bicycle trip he and his wife rode across America....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-15 CS paper digest. Area: Operating Systems / Systems. Authors: Yuan Si (University of Waterloo), Yufeng Lin (Independent), Daming Li (Independent), Jialu Zhang (University of Waterloo, corresponding) arXiv: 2608.12103 · PDF TL;DR A trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model routes each token through a small, input-dependent slice of its weights — in the production model studied here, an accepted token costs on average 1585 expert reads of 17....

Fourteen years on, this is still the talk that most reliably rewires how an engineer thinks about their own work. It is remembered for the live-coding demos — and those demos did seed a decade of tooling, from hot reload to Swift Playgrounds to every notebook environment you use. But the demos are the setup. The talk’s actual argument arrives in the last fifteen minutes, and it is not about programming at all....

There are perhaps a trillion active SQLite databases in the world. Roughly half the filesystem I/O on the phone in your pocket goes through it. And it is maintained by three committers. That ratio — planetary deployment, three-person team — is the actual subject of this talk. Richard Hipp, SQLite’s creator, spends 54 minutes explaining the machinery that makes it possible, and the answer is not cleverness. It is a testing regime borrowed wholesale from the avionics industry, plus a willingness to redesign the product itself so it can be tested at all....

Jonathan Blow gave this hour-long talk at DevGAMM in 2019, and in the seven years since it has quietly become one of the most-cited critiques of modern software engineering. Blow — the game designer behind Braid and The Witness, and the creator of the Jai programming language — makes a claim most programmers instinctively resist: technological knowledge is not on a monotonic climb. Civilizations lose capabilities all the time. Ours is probably losing them right now, and software is one of the leading indicators....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-07-11 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing / Systems. Authors: Hannah Atmer, Thiemo Voigt, Yuan Yao, Stefanos Kaxiras (Uppsala University) arXiv: 2607.08407 · PDF TL;DR DRAM is the choke point of the current generative-AI buildout. HBM3e stacks are backordered, contract prices are up, and hyperscalers are absorbing a large fraction of global DRAM output just to fan the same model weights out to ever more accelerators....

Every so often the seminal-talk slot lands on something older than every framework it critiques. This one runs a full 27 minutes and it is not a re-enactment: it is the actual 1982 Bell Labs promotional film, with Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Alfred Aho, Stu Feldman, and Lorinda Cherry on camera explaining, in their own voices, why the system they built looks the way it does. The AT&T Archives channel has now cleared it for wide release, so the classic-of-the-week pick this week writes itself....

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....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-06-13 CS paper digest. Area: Operating Systems / Systems. Authors: Zhuoping Yang, Yiyu Shi, Alex Jones arXiv: 2606.06697 · PDF TL;DR The GPU has quietly become a multi-tenant device — applications no longer just dispatch compute kernels, they call into vendor libraries (cuFFT, cuBLAS, NCCL), interact with GPU-resident services, and touch storage and network adapters through GPUDirect paths. But the CUDA programming model still hands each process the full keys to the device: its own context, raw device pointers, runtime handles, module loader, and direct kernel launch....