Stay Current

A field guide for working engineers

Understand the choices.
Know when they change.

Engineering keeps moving. Understanding how the systems underneath it work makes it easier to decide what to use—and which new developments deserve your attention.

Start with a field guide to get your bearings, follow an explanation to learn how something works, or read an assessment of a change that could affect your choices.

Explore a field

Looking for a particular subject? Browse all articles →

Our first field · Working drafts

Databases and storage

Keeping an order correct, searching a catalogue and analysing billions of events ask different things of storage. Get to know the main approaches, where they fit, and the design decisions behind them.

Read the field guide

Further reading

  • Relational databasesTables, queries and reliable changes, with a collection of deeper articles.
  • Column storesAn illustrated explanation, with experiments you can try.

Other fields we plan to cover

We’re developing the database collection first. These fields will follow; there are no articles to read in them yet.

  • APIs and service communication

    REST, GraphQL and RPC; designing contracts and keeping services compatible as they change.

  • Messaging and event-driven systems

    Queues and streams; moving work between services, handling duplicates and replaying events.

  • Observability

    Logs, metrics, traces and profiles; understanding what a system is doing and why.

  • AI application engineering

    Retrieval, tools and evaluation; building useful applications around models and understanding their failures.