The Platform Engineering Maturity Model — Thoughtful framework for evaluating where your platform org sits. Useful for building the case for investment without overselling.

How Postgres Stores Rows — Deep dive into heap tuples, TOAST, and page layout. Understanding this makes VACUUM and bloat much less mysterious.

Writing Docs That People Actually Read — Stripe’s documentation lead on structure, examples-first writing, and why API reference is not enough. Changed how I think about README files.

Prometheus: The Documentary — History of Prometheus from the SoundCloud days to CNCF graduation. Good context for understanding why it works the way it does.

Error Handling in Rust: A Deep Dive — Even if you do not write Rust, the taxonomy of error types (recoverable vs. fatal, expected vs. unexpected) is universally applicable.