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đź“š A curated list of papers for Software Engineers

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Papers for Software Engineers

A curated list of papers that may be of interest to Software Engineering students or professionals.


  1. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Turing (1950).
    • Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation. Wiener (1960).
    • ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Weizenbaum (1966).
  2. The Education of a Computer. Hopper (1952).
  3. A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes. Huffman (1952).
  4. On the Shortest Spanning Subtree of a Graph and the Traveling Salesman Problem. Kruskal (1956).
  5. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine. McCarthy (1960).
  6. Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits. Moore (1965).
    • Validity of the Single Processor Approach to Achieving Large-Scale Computing Capabilities. Amdahl (1967).
    • A Simple Capacity Model of Massively Parallel Transaction Systems. Gunther (1993).
  7. Scatter storage techniques. Morris (1968).
  8. Goto Statement Considered Harmful. Dijkstra (1968).
  9. A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. Codd (1970).
  10. On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules. Parnas (1971).
  11. The UNIX Time- Sharing System. Ritchie, Thompson (1974).
  12. A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication. Cerf, Kahn (1974).
  13. Programming with Abstract Data Types. Liskov, Zilles (1974).
  14. Computer Programming as an Art. Knuth (1974).
  15. The Mythical Man Month. Brooks (1975).
  16. New Directions in Cryptography. Diffie, Hellman (1976).
  17. Communicating sequential processes. Hoare (1976).
  18. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. Lamport (1978).
  19. End-To-End Arguments in System Design. Saltzer, Reed, Clark (1984).
  20. No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering. Brooks (1987).
  21. Why Functional Programming Matters. Hughes (1990).
    • Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?. Backus (1978).
    • The Semantic Elegance of Applicative Languages. Turner (1981).
    • Church's Thesis and Functional Programming. Turner (2006).
  22. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine. Brin, Page (1998).
  23. Dynamo, Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value store. DeCandia et al (2007).
  24. On Designing and Deploying Internet Scale Services. Hamilton (2007).
  25. Bitcoin, A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Nakomoto (2008).
    • Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform. Buterin (2014).
  26. Thinking Methodically about Performance. Gregg (2012).

Show full list in chronological order:
  1. As We May Think. Bush (1945)
  2. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Turing (1950)
  3. The Education of a Computer. Hopper (1952)
  4. A Method for the Construction of Minimum-Redundancy Codes. Huffman (1952)
  5. On the Shortest Spanning Subtree of a Graph and the Traveling Salesman Problem. Kruskal (1956)
  6. A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs. Dijkstra (1959)
  7. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine. McCarthy (1960)
  8. Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation. Wiener (1960)
  9. Recursive Programming. Dijkstra (1960)
  10. An Experimental Time-Sharing System. CorbatĂł, Merwin Daggett, Daley (1962)
  11. Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits. Moore (1965)
  12. Solution Of a Problem in Concurrent Program Control. Dijkstra (1965)
  13. ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Weizenbaum (1966)
  14. Validity of the Single Processor Approach to Achieving Large-Scale Computing Capabilities. Amdahl (1967)
  15. Scatter storage techniques. Morris (1968)
  16. Goto Statement Considered Harmful. Dijkstra (1968)
  17. The Structure of the "THE"-Multiprogramming System. Dijkstra (1968)
  18. How do committees invent?. Conway (1968)
  19. An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming. Hoare (1969)
  20. A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. Codd (1970)
  21. Space/Time Trade-offs in Hash Coding with Allowable Errors. Bloom (1970)
  22. Managing the Development of Large Software Systems. Royce (1970)
  23. On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules. Parnas (1971)
  24. Program development by stepwise refinement. Wirth (1971)
  25. Reducibility among Combinatorial Problems. Karp (1972)
  26. The Humble Programmer. Dijkstra (1972)
  27. Information Distribution Aspects of Design Methodology. Parnas (1972)
  28. A Design Methodology for Reliable Software Systems. Liskov (1972)
  29. The UNIX Time- Sharing System. Ritchie, Thompson (1974)
  30. A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication. Cerf, Kahn (1974)
  31. Programming with Abstract Data Types. Liskov, Zilles (1974)
  32. Computer Programming as an Art. Knuth (1974)
  33. Ordered hash tables. Amble, Knuth (1974)
  34. Monitors: An operating system structuring concept. Hoare (1974)
  35. Self-stabilizing systems in spite of distributed control. Dijkstra (1974)
  36. The Mythical Man Month. Brooks (1975)
  37. New Directions in Cryptography. Diffie, Hellman (1976)
  38. Communicating sequential processes. Hoare (1976)
  39. Big Omicron and big Omega and big Theta. Knuth (1976)
  40. A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression. Ziv, Lempel (1977)
  41. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System. Lamport (1978)
  42. The Art of the Interpreter. Steele, Sussman (1978)
  43. Ethernet: Distributed packet switching for local computer networks. Metcalfe, Boggs (1978)
  44. A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems. Rivest, Shamir, Adleman (1978)
  45. On the Duality of Operating System Structures. Lauer, Needham (1978)
  46. Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?. Backus (1978)
  47. Designing Software for Ease of Extension and Contraction. Parnas (1979)
  48. The paradigms of programming. Floyd (1979)
  49. How To Share A Secret. Shamir (1979)
  50. The Emperor’s Old Clothes. Hoare (1981)
  51. The Semantic Elegance of Applicative Languages. Turner (1981)
  52. The Byzantine Generals Problem. Lamport, Shostak, Pease (1982)
  53. Hints for Computer System Design. Lampson (1983)
  54. Ironies of automation. Bainbridge (1983)
  55. End-To-End Arguments in System Design. Saltzer, Reed, Clark (1984)
  56. The Modular Structure of Complex Systems. Parnas, Clements, Weiss (1984)
  57. Reflections on Trusting Trust. Thompson (1984)
  58. Literate Programming. Knuth (1984)
  59. Amortized Computational Complexity. Tarjan (1985)
  60. On understanding types, data abstraction, and polymorphism. Cardelli, Wegner (1985)
  61. Programming as Theory Building. Naur (1985)
  62. Impossibility of Distributed Consensus With One Faulty Process. Fisher, Lynch, Patterson (1985)
  63. Making data structures persistent. Driscoll et al (1986)
  64. No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering. Brooks (1987)
  65. Why Functional Programming Matters. Hughes (1990)
  66. SELF: The Power of Simplicity. Ungar, Smith (1991)
  67. Lisp: Good news, bad news, how to win big. Gabriel (1991)
  68. A Simple Capacity Model of Massively Parallel Transaction Systems. Gunther (1993)
  69. Software Aging. Parnas (1994)
  70. A Note on Distributed Computing. Waldo et al (1994)
  71. How to Build a Highly Available System Using Consensus. Lampson (1996)
  72. Software Engineering: An Unconsummated Marriage. Parnas (1997)
  73. Software Transactional Memory. Shavit, Touitou (1997)
  74. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine. Brin, Page (1998)
  75. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Raymond (1998)
  76. The Part-Time Parliament. Lamport (1998)
  77. The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. Page, Brin, Motwani (1999)
  78. How Complex Systems Fail. Cook (2000)
  79. Paxos made simple. Lamport (2001)
  80. K-Anonymity: A Model For Protecting Privacy. Sweeney (2002)
  81. Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC): Motivation, Definition, Techniques, and Case Studies. Patterson et al (2002)
  82. The Google File System. Ghemawat, Gobioff, Leung (2003)
  83. Crash-Only Software. Candea, Fox (2003)
  84. MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. Dean, Ghemawat (2004)
  85. Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis. Dwork et al (2006)
  86. Out of the Tar Pit. Moseley, Marks (2006)
  87. Church's Thesis and Functional Programming. Turner (2006)
  88. Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data. Chang et al (2006)
  89. Dynamo, Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value store. DeCandia et al (2007)
  90. On Designing and Deploying Internet Scale Services. Hamilton (2007)
  91. Bitcoin, A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Nakomoto (2008)
  92. ZooKeeper: wait-free coordination for internet scale systems. Hunt et al (2010)
  93. Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing. Kreps, Narkhede, Rao (2011)
  94. Thinking Methodically about Performance. Gregg (2012)
  95. CAP Twelve Years Later: How the "Rules" Have Changed. Brewer (2012)
  96. In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm. Ongaro, Ousterhout (2014)
  97. Consistency, Availability, and Convergence. Mahajan, Alvisi, Dahlin (2014)
  98. The Network is Reliable. Bailis, Kingsbury (2014)
  99. Ethereum: A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform. Buterin (2014)
  100. Nines are Not Enough: Meaningful Metrics for Clouds. Mogul, Wilkes (2019)

This list was inspired by (and draws from) the Papers We Love project and the Ideas That Created the Future book by Harry R. Lewis. I also found the morning paper blog to be an extremly useful resource.

Selection criteria

  1. The list should stay short. Let's say no more than 30 papers.
    • The idea is not to include every interesting paper that I come across but rather to keep a representative list that's possible to read from start to finish with a similar level of effort as reading a technical book from cover to cover.
    • I tried to include one paper per each major topic and author. Since in the process I found a lot of noteworthy alternative, related or follow-up papers and I wanted to keep track of those as well, included them as sublist items (some of these sublists are currently longer than they should).
  2. The papers shouldn't be too long. For the same reasons as the previous item, I try to avoid papers longer than 20 or 30 pages.
  3. They should be self-contained and readable enough to be approachable by the casual technical reader.
  4. They should be freely available online.
  5. Although historical relevance was taken into account, I omitted seminal papers in the cases where I found them hard to approach, when the main subject of the paper wasn't the thing that made them influential, etc.
    • That being said, where possible I preferred the original paper on each subject over modern updates or summary papers.
  6. I tended to prefer topics that I can relate to my professional practice, typically papers originated in the industry or about innovations that later saw wide adoption. Likewise I tended to skip more theoretical papers, those focused on mathematical foundations for Computer Science, on electronic aspects of hardware, etc.

Disclaimer: I'm not a frequent paper reader, so I made this list as a sort of roadmap for myself. I haven't read all of the papers in the list yet; as I do, I may find than some don't meet the described criteria after all and remove them, or decide to add new ones.

And, yes, this repository is a way to procrastinate on the actual reading after I finished making the list.

Meta reads

A few interesting resources about reading papers from Papers We Love and elsewhere: