This page is an assortment of interesting links and ressources I collect over time. Links to the major topics:
- Database
- Deep Learning
- Distributed Systems
- Finance and Monetary System
- Machine Learning and Statistics
- Natural Language Processing and LLMs
- Python
- Rust
- Software Development
- Various
- Virtual Reality
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
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
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
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
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
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 for Everyone | Will Crichton
keywords: rust, ownership, traits
comment: Researcher Will Crichton presents insights on working with and understanding Rust ownership and traits
keywords: rust, performance
The definitive guide to error handling in Rust | Angus Morrison
keywords: rust, error handling
comment: If you see Box
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
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
keywords: oauth, authorization
comment: Blog explains with visuals how oauth helps compared to a solution without it.
info: blog
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
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