Apache Cassandra "the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance"
Dynamo Paper "This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an 'always-on' experience."
C++ "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."