book digital

This page is an assortment of interesting links and ressources I collect over time. Links to the major topics:

Database

Database Internals: Working with IO | Pavel Emelyanov

comment: Discusses IO operations for databases.

info: 2024-11-25 00:00:00


DBSP: Automatic incremental view maintenance for rich query languages | Murat Demirbas

keywords: database, incremental loading

comment: Programming language to express incremental data in streams. Includes a Rust library.

info: blog | 2024-11-19 00:00:00



Deep Learning

A Visual Guide to Quantization | Maarten Grootendorst

keywords: deep learning, quantization

comment: The website provides very helpful visuals to understand quantization, which is often used for LLMs to run on less capable hardware.

info: blog | 2024-07-22 00:00:00


Defusing Diffusion Models | Paweł A. Pierzchlewicz

keywords: diffusion models, math

comment: Introduction to diffusion model maths with very nice visualizations.

info: blog | 2023-02-14


How diffusion models work: the math from scratch | Sergios Karagiannakos, Nikolas Adaloglou

keywords: diffusion models, math

comment: Walkthrough of math in diffusion models.

info: blog | 2022-09-29


Linear Diffusion: Building a Diffusion Model from linear Components

keywords: diffusion models, midjourney, dalle

comment: Explains the principles of a diffusion model and applies it to a linear approach to generate MNIST digits.

info: blog | 2023-04-23


Perspectives on diffusion

keywords: diffusion models, midjourney, dalle

comment: Introduction to diffusion models with a decent chunk of visualizations and sources.

info: blog | 2023-07-20



Distributed Systems

Verifying Kafka transactions | Jack Vanlightly

keywords: distributed systems, kafka

comment: Blog series discusses how one might try to formally verify Kafka transactions using TLA+

info: blog | 2024-12-02



Finance and Monetary System

Activist Treasury Issuance | Hudson Bay Capital

keywords: monetary policy, quantitative tightening, treasury issuance

comment: The report outlines mechanisms how adjusting the maturity profile of the treasury’s issuance could counteract the quantitative tightening efforts, thereby limiting the expected downside in the near term

info: research report | 2024-07-01


Code based illustration of the Silicon Valley Bank Failure | Ashwin Rao

keywords: bank failure, leverage, bond risk

comment: Interactive and code based explanation of the Silicon Valley Bank failure.

info: python google colab notebook


Dirk Ehnts über Staatsschulden & die Modern Monetary Theory | Jung & Naiv

keywords: monetary policy, government deficit, modern monetary theory

comment: Dirk Ehnts is an advocate of modern monetary policy (MMT). In most cases I personally disagree with the assessments from advocates of the MMT school. However, I still find it interesting and valuable to follow the discussion and then come up with arguments as to why I disagree and would not recommend to follow the policy implications. Certainly the polar opposite to the lecture by Lars Feld.

info: youtube | 2023-11-29


Modern Monetary Theory – An Overview

keywords: monetary policy, government deficit, modern monetary theory

comment: Report from the German Bundestag that lays our major points of criticism regarding the practical application of Modern Monetary Theory.

info: report | 2023-01-27 00:00:00


Money still matters for monetary policy presentation by Isabel Schnabel (ECB) | Isabel Schnabel (ECB)

keywords: inflation, money supply, macroeconomics, monetary policy

comment: After the recent decade of low inflation and nominal interest rates before covid, I thought it was quite interesting to read the view by the ECB on the inflation surge. Especially since it was argued in different outlets (talk shows, news papers, agencies) that the inflation was primarily a supply side shock, this analysis from the ECB seems quite balanced and acknowledges the potential inflationary pressure, depending on the regime a sovereign state is in.

info: blog | 2023-09-25


The benefits and costs of asset purchases | Isabel Schnabel (ECB)

keywords: monetary policy

info: speech transcript | 2024-05-28 00:00:00


Why governments are 'addicted' to debt | Financial Times

keywords: debt, government debt, inflation

comment: Collection of different perspectives on rising government debt in times where governments can no longer count on extremely low bond yields.

info: youtube | 2025-03-27


Zur Sinnhaftigkeit von Schuldenbremsen und Fiskalregeln | Lars Feld (IFO Institute)

keywords: debt management, interest rates, debt brake, fiscal deficits

comment: This talk lays out the basic arguments for fiscal rules in general and specifically the debt brake in Germany. Since the topic is so frequently in media and talk shows, it is quite interesting to have the pro side of this debate laid out compactly. Aspect I would have liked a few words about: Focus on nominal debt vs interest expenses against background of recent low interest environment.

info: youtube | 2023-11-20



Machine Learning and Statistics

Science as Amateur Software Development | Richard McElreath

keywords: bayesian statistics, statistical inference, scientific research

comment: Talk by Richard McElreath (highly recommended content in general) about the importance of software development in science.

info: youtube | 2023-09-14


Statistical Rethinking (Bayesian Statistics) | Richard McElreath

keywords: bayesian statistics, statistical inference, scientific research

comment: Starts from the very principles and explains how we can reason about the world coming from a Bayesian point of view. Basically any content by Richard McElreath is of insanely high quality. Check out the Book “Statistical Rethinking” and accompanying code.

info: youtube | 2023-01-02


Stumpy docs

keywords: time series analysis, machine learning, feature transformation

comment: Python library to compute matrix profile. Represent time series as nearest neighbor distance of a sliding window. Can be used to represent a time series and identify outliers.

info: docs



Natural Language Processing and LLMs

BERTopic | Maarten Grootendorst

keywords: large language model, topic modeling, clustering

comment: Topic mining library based on BERT and c-TF-IDF. Haven't used it myself but looks very promising.

info: library


Chunking Visualizer for RAG

keywords: large language model, retrieval augmented generation

comment: Helps to visualize different approaches for chunking that is relevant when building RAG apps.

info: web app


Interactive LLM Visualization in Browser | Brendan Bycroft

keywords: natural language processing, large language model, evaluation

comment: Insanely cool visualization of the dimensions of the matrices in a transformer model. Together with the tutorial videos by Karpathy really helps to create a good intution for the structure of LLMs.

info: web app


RAG over complex PDFs

keywords: natural language processing, large language model, evaluation

comment: Goes into detail how to set up a python app to perform retrieval augmented generation (RAG) over complex PDFs.

info: youtube | 2023-12-07


Transformer Slide Deck | Lucas Beyer (Google Deepmind)

keywords: natural language processing, large language model

comment: Nice slide deck on the transformer logic.

info: powerpoint



Python

A comprehensive guide to python project management

comment: Blog on python project management that includes the uv library

info: blog


From Async/Await to Virtual Threads | Armin Ronacher

keywords: python

comment: The author discusses the drawbacks he sees of using async / await syntax and how it could be improved.

info: blog | 2025-07-26


fstrings.wtf | Armin Ronacher

keywords: python

comment: Interactive web app that shows all the things that can go wrong with f strings in Python.

info: web app | 2025-07-19


Writing Python like it's Rust | Kobzol

keywords: python, rust

comment: Describes what the author has learned from using Rust and how that informs the designs how he writes Python code. Interesting in terms of reliability and making code more reliable.

info: blog | 2023-05-20



Rust

100 Most Watched Rust Talks Of 2024

keywords: rust, conference

comment: Huge collection of very interesting Rust talks. Spoiler: I did not watch all of them :-)

info: blog | 2025-03-24


Axum Back Series – Introduction

keywords: rust, web server

comment: Tutorial for Axum, web server form Tokio team


Blog by prominent Rust developer Steve Klabnik | Steve Klabnik

keywords: rust

comment: Blog by prominent Developer in the Rust space. Post include “Does unsafe undermine Rust’s guarantees?” or “When should I use String vs &str?” and many others. Definitely worth it to check it out.

info: blog


Building a limit order book in Rust | Jesús Flores

keywords: rust, trading

info: blog


Elements of Rust – Core Types and Traits

keywords: rust, data types

comment: Structured overview of different types and traits


Google Comprehensive Rust Tutorial


Implementation of Rust panics in the standard library | Michal Konstrubiec

keywords: rust, error handling

comment: Deep dive into implementation and use of panics in Rust.

info: blog | 2025-04-19


Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang | fasterthanlime

keywords: rust, go

comment: Interesting post on some differences between Rust and Go lang

info: blog


Modern Rust CLI tools


My Ideal Rust Workflow

keywords: rust

comment: Blog post on working with rust. But the whole blog is briliant, also check out the other artices.

info: blog | 2021-10-26


Nanosecond precision benchmarking for HFT systems in Rust | Jesús Flores

info: blog


Operating System in 1,000 Lines


Rust container cheat sheet


Rust for Everyone | Will Crichton

keywords: rust, ownership, traits

comment: Researcher Will Crichton presents insights on working with and understanding Rust ownership and traits


Rust Performance Book

keywords: rust, performance


The definitive guide to error handling in Rust | Angus Morrison

keywords: rust, error handling

comment: If you see Box in Rust code and wonder what is going on, this blog can help to better understand it.

info: blog


The power of interning: making a time series database 2000x smaller in Rust | Guillaume Endignoux

keywords: rust

comment: Discusses how the interning pattern can help to represent JSON data in a compressed way.

info: blog | 2025-03-03


Type theory for busy engineers | Niko Matsakis

keywords: rust, type theory

info: youtube | 2024-06-04


Understanding Serde | Joshua Mcguigan

keywords: rust, serialization

comment: Deep dive into the widely used and integral Serde rust package

info: blog


Writing an OS in Rust | Philipp Oppermann

keywords: rust, operating system

comment: Series of posts that describe the components of implementing an operatig system in Rust with concrete code examples.

info: blog | 2022-01-01


Zig and Rust | Alex Kladov

keywords: rust, zig, programming languages

comment: This post compares Rust and Zig, which are quite popular at the moment, in terms of design and tooling. But this blog has in general many insightful articles.

info: blog | 2023-03-26



Software Development

Best practices for RESTful web API design

keywords: api

comment: General best practices for RESTful API design by Microsoft.

info: documentation | 2025-05-08


Building and scaling Notion’s data lake | Notion Employees

keywords: data warehouse, postgres, spark, kafka

comment: The blog details the data architecture that notion uses and some key considerations related to it.

info: blog | 2024-07-01


CIS 194 Introduction to Haskell | Upenn

keywords: functional programming

comment: Lecture on Haskell and functional programming in general.

info: youtube | 2013-01-14


CS 253 Web Security | Stanford

keywords: web security, http

comment: Playlist for a full Stanford lecture on web security.

info: youtube | 2019-10-06


Jane Street: Why OCaml

keywords: functional programming, finance

comment: Talk by Jane Street (quant trading and market making) about why they use OCaml.

info: youtube | 2016-03-31


Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know | Originally Peter Norvig

keywords: latency, high performance


Lessons from scaling PostgreSQL queues to 100k events per second | Aris Tzoumas

keywords: postgresql

comment: Outlines the challenges and they faced and potential fixes when trying to implement a high throughput queue in PostgreSQL.

info: blog | 2025-07-14


Mediocre Engineer’s guide to HTTPS | Devon Peroutky

keywords: http, web development

comment: Provides some nice visualizations on the http lifecycle

info: blog


OAuth from First Principles

keywords: oauth, authorization

comment: Blog explains with visuals how oauth helps compared to a solution without it.

info: blog


Roadmap.sh PostgreSQL

keywords: database, postgresql

comment: The website has a collection of roadmap diagrams to help learn about a variety of topics (databases, python, etc.) in a structured way.

info: website


Testing Distributed Systems | Andrey Satarin

keywords: distributed systems, database


The Elements of APIs | John Holdun

keywords: web development, api design

comment: The author outlines a number of principles how to design APIs. Quite brief, helpful for a quick scan.

info: website | 2021-2024


The internals of PostgreSQL | Hironobu Suzuki

keywords: database, postgresql

comment: Gives an overview of postgresql database internals with nice visualizations.

info: blog


What Color is Your Function? | Bob Nystrom

keywords: python, javascript, rust, async

comment: The blog discusses the issue of colored functions and the problems we encounter when trying to combine non-async and sync code.

info: blog | 2015-02-01



Various

How fast the days are getting longer | Joe Antognigni

keywords: interesting stuff

comment: Provides nice visualizations to show how much longer or shorter the days get throughout the year, considering latitude.

info: blog | 2023-03-30 00:00:00


Lesswrong

keywords: cognitive biases

comment: Popular blog dedicated to learning about cognitive biases and improving rational reasoning.

info: blog


Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better | Domenic Denicola

keywords: learning

comment: Discussed advances in spaced repetition systems. Towards the end is a collection of resources for a further deep dive into the topic.

info: blog | 2025-05-18 00:00:00


Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space | phiresky

keywords: visualization

comment: Visualization of ISBN address space

info: blog | 2025-01-31 00:00:00



Virtual Reality

Lecture on virtual or digitized Humans at MPI Tübingen

keywords: virtual reality, machine learning

comment: Since I am a big fan of virtual reality, the concepts of trying to digitize humans is very interesting to me.

info: youtube | 2023-10-19