Carl's Required Reading

I personally hate YAGNI, because it so often leads to balkanized APIs that only implement the "needed" features and omit things that a reasonable person would expect because they weren't needed initially. Far better to have a clear and explicable model that is fully and consistently implemented.

The Grug Brain article is fantastic, and even better if you run it through an LLM to convert from caveman. This thing is a gem.

DDIA is great. I read and re-read the small section about LSM merge tree in the first and second edition of the book and got interested in this stuff. It is always a pleasure to read about internals.

Grug.

Thanks for a drop of humanity in this place. I feel saner