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Professional Programming

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.

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.

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

Other general material and list of resources

Courses

Topics

Algorithm and data structures

Let's be honest: algorithms can be a pretty dry topic. This quora question lists some funnier learning alternative, including:

API design

Attitude, habits, mindset

Automation

Biases

Biases don't only apply to hiring. For instance, the fundamental attribution bias also applies when criticizing somebody's code written a long time ago, in a totally different context.

Career growth

Characters sets

Coding & code quality

Computer science

Configuration

  • The downsides of JSON for config files, Martin Tournoij.
    • Can't add comments
    • Excessive quotation and syntax noise
    • Using DC (declarative configuration) to control logic is often not a good idea.

Databases

Data formats

Data science

Debugging

Design (visual, UX, UI)

I highly recommend reading The Non-Designer's Design Book. This is a pretty short book that will give you some very actionable design advices.

Design (OO modeling, architecture, patterns, anti-patterns, etc.)

Here's a list of good books:

Articles:

I maintain a list of antipatterns on another repo. This is a highly recommended read.

You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site. (Frank Lloyd Wright)

Design: simplicity

  • Simple Made Easy 🎞, Rich Hickey. This is an incredibly inspiring talk redefining simplicity, ease and complexity, and showing that solutions that look easy may actually harm your design.

Dev environment & tools

Tools

Diversity & inclusion

Check out my list of management resources.

Documentation

Dotfiles

Articles

Editors & IDE

Engineering management

Checkout my list of management resources.

Exercises

The best way to learn is to learn by doing.

Incident response (alerting, outages, firefighting)

Internet

Interviewing

Note: this is about you as an interviewee, not as an interviewer. To check out my list of resources for interviewers, go to my engineering-management repository.

Learning & memorising

Learn how to learn!

  • How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math: subtitled the building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition.
  • One Sure-Fire Way to Improve Your Coding: reading code!
  • Tips for learning programming
  • You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential: forgive the clickbait title, it’s actually a good article.
  • How to ask good questions, Julia Evans.
  • Stop Learning Frameworks
  • Learning How to Learn: powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects
  • Why books don’t work, Andy Matuschak.
    • "As a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it."
    • "In learning sciences, we call this model “transmissionism.” It’s the notion that knowledge can be directly transmitted from teacher to student, like transcribing text from one page onto another. If only!"
    • "By re-testing yourself on material you’ve learned over expanding intervals, you can cheaply and reliably commit huge volumes of information to long-term memory."
  • Strategies, Tips, and Tricks for Anki: those advices work for any tool actually
    • Add images. Our brains are wired visually, so this helps retention.
    • Don't add things you don't understand.
    • Don't add cards memorizing entire lists.
    • Write it out. For wrong answers, I'll write it on paper. The act of writing is meditative. I really enjoy this.
    • Keep on asking yourself why? why does this work? why does it work this way? Force yourself to understand the root of a topic.
    • Cornell Method: when reading a topic, write out questions on the margins to quiz yourself.
    • Pretend you have to teach it
    • Use mnemonics phrases like PEMDAS for lists and other hard-to-remember topics.
    • Delete cards that don't make sense or you don't want to remember anymore.
  • Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge
    • Build upon the basics
    • Stick to the minimum information principle: the material you learn must be formulated in as simple way as it is
    • Cloze deletion is easy and effective: Kaleida's mission was to create a ... It finally produced one, called Script X. But it took three years
    • Graphic deletion is as good as cloze deletion
    • Avoid sets
    • Avoid enumerations
    • Combat interference - even the simplest items can be completely intractable if they are similar to other items. Use examples, context cues, vivid illustrations, refer to emotions, and to your personal life
    • Personalize and provide examples - personalization might be the most effective way of building upon other memories. Your personal life is a gold mine of facts and events to refer to. As long as you build a collection for yourself, use personalization richly to build upon well established memories
    • Provide sources - sources help you manage the learning process, updating your knowledge, judging its reliability, or importance
    • Prioritize - effective learning is all about prioritizing.

Richard Feynman's Learning Strategy:

  1. Step 1: Continually ask "Why?”
  2. Step 2: When you learn something, learn it to where you can explain it to a child.
  3. Step 3: Instead of arbitrarily memorizing things, look for the explanation that makes it obvious.

Problem solving

Project management

See Project management section on my engineering-management list of resources.

Programming languages

I would recommend learning:

  • JavaScript and maybe another interpreted language (Python, Ruby, etc.). Interpreted languages are useful for quick one-off automation scripts, and fastest to write for interviews. JavaScript is ubiquitous.
  • A compiled language (Java, C, C++...).
  • A more recent language to see where the industry is going (as of writing, Go, Swift, Rust, Elixir...).
  • A language that has first-class support for functional programming (Haskell, Scala, Clojure...).

A bit more reading:

Python

For Python feel free to checkout my professional Python education repository.

JavaScript

JavaScript is such a pervasive language that it's almost required learning.

FP vs. OOP

Over-engineering

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

John Gall, General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975 (this quote is sometime referred as "Galls' law")

"Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers."

Rob Pike, Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering

Reading

  • Papers we love: papers from the computer science community to read and discuss. Can be a good source of inspiration of solving your design problems.
  • The morning paper: one CS research paper explained every morning.

Releasing & deploying

Security

Shell

System architecture

Scalability

  • I already mentioned the book Scalability rules above, but there's also a presentation about it.

Stability

  • I already mentioned the book Release it! above. There's also a presentation from the author.

Resiliency

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Technical debt

Testing

Tools

Version control (Git)

Work ethics & work/life balance

Web development

Writing

  • Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well
    • From the HN discussion: "Writing a couple of pages of design docs or an Amazon-style 6 pager or whatever might take a few days of work, but can save weeks or more of wasted implementation time when you realise your system design was flawed or it doesn't address any real user needs."

Writing for performance

Concepts

Glossary