Reading List
Books, whitepapers and articles, with the one thing I took away.
DONEDesigning Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann
The best mental model for replication, partitioning and consistency trade-offs. Re-read every couple of years.
System Design- Paper
Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database
Corbett et al.
DONESpanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database
Corbett et al.
TrueTime turns clock uncertainty into an explicit, bounded quantity you can wait out.
Technical 
IN PROGRESSDatabase Internals
Alex Petrov
Storage engines and distributed protocols side by side; the B-tree chapters are excellent.
Technical
DONEA Philosophy of Software Design
John Ousterhout
Deep modules and small interfaces: complexity is the enemy, and it accumulates quietly.
Technical- Paper
The Dynamo Paper
DeCandia et al.
IN PROGRESSThe Dynamo Paper
DeCandia et al.
Eventual consistency as a product decision, not just an engineering compromise.
System Design 
WANT TO READThinking in Systems
Donella Meadows
Feedback loops and leverage points explain many organisational and technical failures.
Non-Fiction
WANT TO READSite Reliability Engineering
Beyer et al.
Error budgets align product velocity with reliability in a way that ends the argument.
System Design