Table of Contents

• Professional Programming
  • Must read books
  • Must-read articles
  • Things to do
    • Attitude & habits
    • Coding
    • Incident response (outages, firefighting)
    • Interviewing
    • Managing the database
    • Reading
    • Releasing & deploying
    • Testing
    • Writing for performance
  • Things to know
    • List of things to know
    • Know your algorithm and data structures
    • Know your concepts
    • Know your editor
    • Know your database
    • Know your dev environment
    • Know your shell
    • Know your webdesign
    • Know your dotfiles
    • Know your git
    • Know how to debug
    • Know how to design
    • Know how to architect systems
    • Know your programming language
    • Know your design patterns and anti-patterns

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 been become timeless classics.

Must read books

I've found these books incredibly inspiring:

• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master: hands-on the most inspiring and useful book I've read about programming.
• Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction: a nice addition to The Programatic Programmer, gives you the necessary framework to talk about code.
• Release It!: this books goes beyond code and gives you best practices for building production-ready software. It will give you about 3 years worth of real-world experience.
• Scalability Rules: 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites
• The Linux Programming Interface: A Linux and UNIX System Programming Handbook: outside of teaching you almost everything you need to know about Linux, this book will give you insights into how software evolves, and the value of having simple & elegant interfaces.

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.
• Signs that you're a good programmer
• Signs that you're a bad programmer

Things to do

Attitude & habits

• Mastering Programming, Kent Beck.

Coding

• Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend
• Lessons learned writing highly available code
• The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming

Incident response (outages, firefighting)

• Incident Response at Heroku
• Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture

Interviewing

• System design interview for IT company
• Technical Interview Megarepo: study materials for SE/CS technical interviews
• How to Win the Coding Interview

Managing the database

• Safe Operations For High Volume PostgreSQL (this is for PostgreSQL but works great for other db as well).
• Zero downtime database migrations (code examples are using Rails but this works great for any programming language)

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.

Releasing & deploying

• How We Release So Frequently
• How to deploy software, Zach Holman
• BlueGreenDeployment, Martin Fowler
• Move fast and break nothing, Zach Holman
• Flipping out, flickr. One of the first articles about feature flags.

Testing

• Testing Strategies in a Microservices Architecture (Martin Fowler) is an awesome resources explaining how to test a service properly.

Writing for performance

• Numbers Everyone Should Know

Things to know

List of things to know

• What every computer science major should know

Know your algorithm and data structures

• Read the CLRS. You can watch and download the course on OCW - there are newer courses as well.
  • Or The Algorithm Design Manual
• Try out some algorithms on Project Euler

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

• Grokking Algorithms
• Essential Algorithms

Know your concepts

• DDD
• TDD
• BDD
• CAP theorem
• OOP
• YAGNI
• DRY
• KISS
• SOLID
• GRASP
• Make it run, make it right, make it fast

Know your editor

• Sublime Text essential plugins and resources
• vim-awesome

Know your database

• A plain english introduction to CAP Theorem
• NOSQL Patterns

Know your dev environment

• Awesome Dev Env

Tools

• Glances: An eye on your system
• HTTPie: a CLI, cURL-like tool for humans
• jq: command-line JSON processor
• tmux: terminal multiplexer
• htop: an interactive process viewer for Linux

Know your shell

• Awesome Shell

Resources

• Bash Hackers Wiki
• Master the command line, in one page must read

Know your webdesign

• Maintainable CSS

Know your dotfiles

• Awesome dotfiles

Articles

• Setting Up a Mac Dev Machine From Zero to Hero With Dotfiles

Know your git

• Git Cheat Sheet
• git-tips

Know how to debug

• Rubber Duck Problem Solving
• Five Whys
• The Infinite Hows: this provides a strong criticism of the five whys method.
• Linux Performance Analysis in 60,000 Milliseconds

Know how to design

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.

• If you're working on data, Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is considered a classic.
• The Universal Principles of Design will give you enough vocabulary and concepts to describe design challenges into words.

Know how to architect systems

• High Scalability: great blog about system architecture, its weekly review article are packed with numerous insights and interesting technology reviews.
• 6 Rules of thumb to build blazing fast web server applications
• Deep Lessons From Google And EBay On Building Ecosystems Of Microservices
• Service oriented architecture: scaling the Uber engineering codebase as we grow
• The twelve-factor app
• Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems
• Introduction to Architecting Systems for Scale
• A Distributed Systems Reading List
• Services Engineering Reading List
• System Design Cheatsheet

Know your programming language

This is language-specific, for instance, checkout my professional Python education doc.

I'd recommend learning:

• At least one dynamic language (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, etc.). Pretty useful for quick one-off automation scripts, and fastest to write for interviews.
• At least one compiled language (Java, C, C++, etc.)
• At least one more recent language to see where the industry is going (as of writing, Go, Swift, Rust, etc.)
• At least one language that has first-class support for functional programming (Haskell, Scala, etc.)

Know your design patterns and anti-patterns

Here's a list of good books:

• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software: dubbed "the gang of four", this is almost a required reading for any developer. A lot of those are a bit overkill for Python (because everything is an object, and dynamic typing), but the main idea (composition is better than inheritance) definitely is a good philosophy.
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture: learn about how database are used in real world applications. Mike Bayer's SQLAlchemy has been heavily influenced by this book.
• SourceMaking's Design Patterns seems to be a good web resource too.
• O'Reilly's How to make mistakes in Python
• 101 Design Patterns & Tips for Developers

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