#software-engineering

The canonical, timeless reference for POSIX socket programming, IP routing, client/server architectures, and low-level networking in C.

• Essential fundamentals for distributed systems and custom network transports.

Rigorous economic and hardware analysis of serving LLMs at scale.

• Models memory bandwidth limits vs compute-bound FLOPs across prefill and decode stages.
• Breaks down token cost structures and batching efficiency.

Clear mental models breaking down how packets traverse routers, switches, DNS lookups, TCP handshakes, and NAT tables.

• Great refresher for backend and distributed systems engineering.

Lilian Weng’s comprehensive guide on building robust evaluation harnesses that allow AI agents to iteratively improve their own performance.

• Focuses on environment feedback loops, automated failure analysis, and benchmark integrity.

Architectural arguments for standardizing context storage and state machines independently of vendor-specific agent frameworks.

• Emphasizes portable memory representations and interoperable agent tool interfaces.

Lee Han Chung examining the operational friction of testing LLM agents in CI/CD.

• Addresses sandbox state contamination, flaky non-deterministic tool mockings, and cost bloat.

Eugene Yan on designing automated evaluation environments for offensive and defensive AI security agents.

• Emphasizes capturing exploit mechanics, deterministic scoring sandboxes, and defense-in-depth metrics.

Max Liani’s meditation on why software craftsmanship, engineering taste, and deep systems understanding matter more than ever in the era of code generators.

Cameron Wolfe’s extensive breakdown on constructing agent benchmarks.

• Evaluates unit test assertions, trajectory fidelity, tool argument correctness, and human-in-the-loop rubrics.

Reflections on designing APIs that start simple for novices but gracefully unfurl full lower-level control as user needs deepen.

• Great principles for framework and tool design.

Harshal’s walkthrough of phonetic alignment, voice dataset curation, and code-switched Hindi-English speech synthesis.