http://carlos.bueno.org/optimization/mature-optimization.pdf Internal performance optimization manual for facebook.
Dynamo is easily understandable and a good intro to distributed eventually consisted databases. http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs239-w08/decandia07dynamo.pdf
Paper: Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations
Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations (Bailis et al.) A very recent but excellent paper.
Intro material on hot compatibility and relation to distribution + gradual rollouts.
Book: Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions
Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions - recommended by @statik.
Paper: Crew Resource Management
Crew Resource Management: a Positive Change for the Fire Service Best article-length resource I've been able to find so far, probably can replace the current Wikipedia link.
Paper: Your Server as a Function
by Marius Eriksen from Twitter Available from: http://monkey.org/~marius/funsrv.pdf Abstract: Building server software in a large-scale setting, where systems exhibit a high degree of concurrency and ...
Basic material on capacity planning. Best suggestion so far is 'The Art of Capacity Planning' as discussed in #21.
Some good URLs around this that I know of: Kafka: A Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing (Kreps et al.) The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying ...