A living document of some nice real life dev experiences, documented elsewhere on the internet:

Title Notes
How Notion Scaled to 100 Million Users Without Their Database Exploding Doubling down on Postgres, scaling horizontally using shards and pgbouncer
Brendan Gregg: The Speed of Time Flamegraphs discovers reading current time took longer on Ubuntu than CentOS
How Instagram Reduced Web Page Load by 50% Many optimization patterns for front-end, from HTTP transportation, to asset fetching order, to caching locally (and avoiding conflicts with new state updates)
How Instagram Scaled to 14 Million Users With Only 3 Engineers Postgres: pgbouncer, ID strategy for finding correct shard, (stateless) Django, Gearman, etc.
Unix and Google 'Coding at the perimiter', an approach to tackle the n^3 matrix of system ✕ feature ✕ platform - write programs that work together (pipes, everything-is-a-file, etc.). Examplifies with Multics vs UNIX