Table of Contents
- Professional Programming - about this list
- Principles
- Contributing to this list
- Must-read books
- Must-read articles
- Other general material and list of resources
- Topics
- Accounting
- Agentic coding
- Algorithm and data structures
- API design & development
- Attitude, habits, mindset
- Authentication/authorization
- Automation
- Best practices
- Beyond software engineering & random
- Biases
- Business
- Buy vs. Build
- Cache
- Career growth
- Characters sets
- Chess
- Clouds
- Code reviews
- Coding & code quality
- Communication
- Compilers
- Configuration
- Continuous Integration (CI)
- Data analysis & data science
- Data semantics
- Databases
- Data formats
- Data science/data engineering
- Debugging
- Design (visual, UX, UI, typography)
- Design (OO modeling, architecture, patterns, anti-patterns, etc.)
- Dev environment & tools
- Docker
- Documentation
- Dotfiles
- Editors & IDE
- Email
- Engineering management
- Exercises
- Experimentation
- Fonts
- Functional programming (FP)
- Games development
- Generative AI
- Graphics
- Hardware
- HTTP
- Humor
- Incident response (oncall, alerting, outages, firefighting, postmortem)
- Internet
- Interviewing
- Kubernetes
- Large Language Model (LLM)
- Learning & memorizing
- Licenses (legal)
- Linux (system management)
- Low-code/no-code
- Low-level, assembly
- Machine learning/AI
- Math
- Marketing
- Network
- Observability (monitoring, logging, exception handling)
- Open source
- Operating system (OS)
- Over-engineering
- Performance
- Personal knowledge management (PKM)
- Personal productivity
- Perspective
- Privacy
- Problem solving
- Product management for software engineers
- Project management
- Programming languages
- Programming paradigm
- Public speaking (presenting)
- Reading
- Refactoring
- Regex
- Releasing & deploying
- Reliability
- Search
- Security
- Research papers
- Shell (command line)
- SQL
- State
- System administration
- System architecture
- Scalability
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Technical debt
- Testing
- Tools
- Type system
- Typography
- Version control (Git)
- Work ethics, productivity & work/life balance
- Web development
- Writing (communication, blogging)
- Resources & inspiration for presentations
- Keeping up-to-date
- Concepts
- My other lists
Professional Programming - about this list
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. (Abraham Lincoln)
A collection of full-stack resources for programmers.
The goal of this page is to make you a more proficient developer. You'll find only resources that I've found truly inspiring, or that have become timeless classics.
Principles
- This page is not meant to be comprehensive. I am trying to keep it light and not too overwhelming.
- The selection of articles is opinionated.
- I don't necessarily agree with or endorse every single line that is written in every single one of those resources. The same applies to their authors: I don't endorse everything each of those authors has said and will ever say.
Items:
- 🧰 : list of resources
- 📖 : book
- 🎞 : video/movie extract/movie/talk
- 🏙 : slides/presentation
- ⭐️ : must-read
- 📃 : paper
Contributing to this list
Feel free to open a PR to contribute!
I will not be adding everything: as stated above, I am trying to keep the list concise.
Must-read books
I've found these books incredibly inspiring:
There are some free books available, including:
Must-read articles
- Practical Advice for New Software Engineers
- On Being A Senior Engineer
- Lessons Learned in Software Development: one of those articles that give you years of hard-earned lessons, all in one short article. Must read.
- Things I Learnt The Hard Way
- Spec first, then code
- Tests make better APIs
- Future thinking is future trashing
- Documentation is a love letter to your future self
- Sometimes, it's better to let the application crash than do nothing
- Understand and stay away of cargo cult
- "Right tool for the job" is just to push an agenda
- Learn the basics functional programming
- ALWAYS use timezones with your dates
- ALWAYS use UTF-8
- Create libraries
- Learn to monitor
- Explicit is better than implicit
- Companies look for specialists but keep generalists longer
- The best secure way to deal with user data is not to capture it
- When it's time to stop, it's time to stop
- You're responsible for the use of your code
- Don't tell "It's done" when it's not
- Pay attention on how people react to you
- Beware of micro-aggressions
- Keep a list of "Things I Don't Know"
- Signs that you're a good programmer (not everything in here is great - some of the points are counterproductive)
- The instinct to experiment first
- Emotional detachment from code and design
- Eager to fix what isn't broken
- Fascinated by the incomprehensible
- Compelled to teach
- Incorruptible patience
- A destructive pursuit of perfection
- Encyclopedic grasp of the platform
- Thinks In Code
- When In Rome, Does As Romans Do
- Creates their own tools
- Indifferent to Hierarchy
- Excited by failure
- Indifferent to circumstances
- Substitutes impulse for commitment
- Driven by experiences
- 7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer
- Early in your career, you can learn 10x more in a supportive team in 1 year, than coding on your own
- Every company has problems, every company has technical debt.
- Being overly opinionated on topics you lack real-world experience with is pretty arrogant.
- Many conference talks cover proof of concepts rather than real-world scenarios.
- Dealing with legacy is completely normal.
- Architecture is more important than nitpicking.
- Focus on automation over documentation where appropriate.
- Having some technical debt is healthy.
- Senior engineers must develop many skills besides programming.
- We’re all still junior in some areas.
- How to Build Good Software
- A good high-level summary of fundamental engineering practices.
- The root cause of bad software has less to do with specific engineering choices, and more to do with how development projects are managed.
- There is no such thing as platonically good engineering: it depends on your needs and the practical problems you encounter.
- Software should be treated not as a static product, but as a living manifestation of the development team’s collective understanding.
- Software projects rarely fail because they are too small; they fail because they get too big.
- Beware of bureaucratic goals masquerading as problem statements. If our end goal is to make citizens’ lives better, we need to explicitly acknowledge the things that are making their lives worse.
- Building software is not about avoiding failure; it is about strategically failing as fast as possible to get the information you need to build something good.
- How to be a -10x Engineer
- Nullify the output of 10 engineers.
- Hold 10 engineers hostage in a technical discussion.
- Waste 10 weeks of wages on cloud costs.
- Waste 400 hours of engineering on bad architecture.
- Incur 400 hours of bug triage.
- A Bunch of Programming Advice I'd Give To Myself 15 Years Ago
- If you (or your team) are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun
- Assess the trade-off you’re making between quality and pace, make sure it’s appropriate for your context
- Spending time sharpening the axe is almost always worth it
- If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing
- Try to solve bugs one layer deeper
- Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs
- Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code
- Make debugging easier
- When working on a team, you should usually ask the question
- Shipping cadence matters a lot. Think hard about what will get you shipping quickly and often
- Expert Generalists, martinfowler.com, proposes an interesting take on the "T-shaped engineer"
- The Characteristics of an Expert Generalist: Curiosity, Collaborativeness, Customer Focus, Favor Fundamental Knowledge, Blend of Generalist and Specialist Skills, Sympathy for Related Domains
- Assessing Expert Generalists: hiring and career progression
- Growing Expert Generalists: From Tools to Fundamentals
- "Why does our attention keep drifting toward tool expertise? It isn't because people are shortsighted or lazy; it's because the fundamentals are hard to see amid the noise."
- Expert Generalists still need Specialists
- Expert Generalists in the Age of LLMs
- "Similarly to a specialist, an LLM can rapidly answer questions that an Expert Generalist will have when working in a new domain."
- "Rather than looking for “the answer”, they prompt them to generate questions, explaining mechanisms, and providing examples and even tools that help explore the underlying mechanisms of an idea."
Other general material and list of resources
Other lists
Books
Articles
Axioms
- Precepts - Urbit
- Data is better than code.
- Correctness is more important than performance.
- Deterministic beats heuristic.
- One hundred lines of simplicity is better than twenty lines of complexity.
- If your abstractions are leaking, it's not due to some law of the universe; you just suck at abstracting. Usually,
It's a curated collection of learning resources (articles, books, talks, papers) meant to make software engineers more well-rounded professionals, covering everything from algorithms to career growth to system architecture.