Is there a good resource on how perps actually work? i.e a technical specification on how to implement them?
If you want to get into the deepest detail there are several decentralised perpetual futures exchanges.
Here are some open source codebases on Github:
https://github.com/vegaprotocol/vega
https://github.com/dydxprotocol/v4-chain/
https://github.com/gmx-io/gmx-synthetics
https://github.com/0xOstium/smart-contracts-public/
Vega is a stalled project, but they have good documentation:
you can go through the drift labs code to see implementation of perps