GoKawiilFive Years of Running a Systems Reading Group at Microsoft
March 2026
I started a reading group in 2021, a few months after joining Microsoft as a new grad on the Azure Databases team. The group was initially focused on database internals, which was my favorite subject at UW. Databases touch so many areas of CS: compiler construction in the query engine, memory management with the buffer pool, storage systems, algorithms, networking. It's almost a microcosm of the whole field. There's also plenty of active research and conferences, like SIGMOD and VLDB, so it never gets old.
How it started
My day job is on the backend distributed storage engine for Cosmos DB, so I spend most of my time thinking about LSM-trees, B-trees, and distributed systems. When I joined Microsoft, I wanted to find other people who were curious about these topics beyond what their immediate work required.
The first paper we read was Algorithms Behind Modern Storage Systems. A handful of people showed up. The format was simple: everyone reads the paper on their own, we meet for an hour, and we talk through it. Pretty informal, just a conversation about the paper.
From there we went through a mix of database internals classics and systems papers:
That was basically the format for the first couple of years. Someone would suggest a paper, we'd vote on it, and then we'd meet and discuss. We also had a side channel where people shared engineering blog posts and talks that caught their attention. That informal sharing turned out to be just as valuable as the readings.
How it evolved
The more database papers we read, the more we found ourselves pulling on threads that led outside of databases. A storage engine paper would turn into a conversation about memory hierarchies. A replication paper would lead us into consensus protocols. Over time we started deliberately reading papers on adjacent topics, like What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory and Paxos Made Simple.
... continue reading