Papers We Love
A curated, organised collection of the computer science papers worth reading, including the distributed systems classics behind almost every modern architecture. Reading one primary source properly beats twenty summaries of it.
Community
System Design
Papers We Love
Ongoing
Advanced
Free
What it is
A community maintained repository grouping significant computer science papers by topic, along with recorded talks where practitioners walk through individual papers.
Why read papers at all
The distributed systems ideas everyone uses came from a modest number of papers, and most are more readable than their reputation suggests. Reading the original gives you the assumptions and the limitations, which is precisely the material that gets stripped out of secondary explanations and precisely what an interviewer probes.
Where to start
The distributed systems section. Work through one paper properly rather than skimming five, and use the recorded talks when a paper resists a first reading.
Best for: engineers ready to move past secondary sources, and anyone who wants to understand where these ideas came from.
Ready to start?
Opens on Papers We Love in a new tab.
Stuck on something specific?
Writing only gets you so far. If you want an answer to your situation rather than the general case, book a session and we will work through it together. Every session is free; a few slots open each week.
Follow along
New writing, resources and project ideas land here first.