This whole paper is galaxy-brain - from the fact that Facebook built a load balancer that leveraged users connectedness to the graph that shows 500 million database queries per second. Full of interesting ideas, and mind-boggling numbers - Taiji: Managing Global User Traffic for Large-Scale Internet Services at the Edge is an excellent read.
Dating from last May, the paper on Accelerated Networking in Azure is interesting both as a reminder of how hard the hosting providers are working to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their compute, and as another example of how reducing team handoffs (in this case hardware to software) leads for better delivery
GatsbyJS now has support for hot schema rebuilds - I've been caught out by not restarting gatsby develop when updating the schema, so this is a welcome addition. No announcement post yet, but you can see the detail in this pull request.
I love Netlify - never has a platform done exactly as it's promised quite so easily. Turns out there is a whole lot more to Netlify than just hosting though, and the complete intro to Netlify has an excellent set of notes that enumerate the rather impressive set of features.
If you're interested in online experimentation then the morning paper's coverage of the PlanAlyzer paper is a great place to start, and I found myself following every link. The PlanOut documentation is fantastic, as is the paper that introduces PlanOut:
Another Microcode update that's coming along to indiscriminately cause performance issues. To put this most recent change into context, an excellent paper that covers how syscalls have only gotten worse over time (and you'll note a few significant regressions associated with the Spectre update):
Choose boring technology is an evergreen idea, and it's nice to get the occasional story of how choosing not-boring code ended up being a (wait for it) bad idea, and the boring code won out in the end: