If there's one field that works hard on understanding computer performance concerns but also has insane opsec to keep a near iron clad grip on the things they learn, it's high frequency trading. I'm not competent to understand how you can make more money if you're faster, but some people are apparently doing it. Here's at least a paper to get some insights into what they're doing. Some interesting insights in there too.
Too many developers are taught computer architecture like it's 1975. Here is why, reason by reason, hardware just isn't going to get exponentially faster ever again. Why programming sequentially is fundamentally dead, And why the future is in efficiently managing memory, not compute.
An exceptional primer on the physics and theory underpinning quantum computing. It's not magic. It's not a faster digital computer. It's something completely different. If we can get a real machine to execute the architecture from theory, at the scale we need, we should be able to compute some functions in fewer operations than required by a Von Neumann machine (what every existing digital computer is). Nothing says how fast these operations would be on a real machine.
I hadn't heard of The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, but I've lost count of how many times I've heard this idea regurgitated and recycled. Glad someone helped lay out where the idea came from and why it doesn't work outside fiction.
Being one of the earliest systems in AWS, S3 has a bunch of quirks unlike many other systems. Now that it's become a de-facto internet protocol for better or worse, it's worth really understanding it deeply, because changing it isn't something anyone can really do at this point. It also means the knowledge is now somewhat broadly applicable. That, or at least by understanding it deeply, you can begin to understand how and why other implementations have the quirks they do.
Great lecture by the creator of STP. I love the thought that it's maybe, just maybe, it's worth teaching students networking concepts other than just how to use TCP/IP. I'd argue we've stooped lower to just teach HTTP and leaved the rest as irrelevant details. Either way, a great lecture cutting through all the dogma of networking, trying to get you to understand how networking works as a concept.
