Table of Contents

• Professional Programming
  • Must read books
  • Must-read articles
  • Other general material and list of resources
  • Topics
    • Algorithm and data structures
    • Attitude, habits, mindset
    • Automation
    • Biases
    • Career growth
    • Characters sets
    • Coding & code quality
    • Computer science
    • Databases
    • Data science
    • Debugging
    • Design (visual, UX, UI)
    • Design (OO modeling, architecture, patterns, anti-patterns, etc.)
    • Dev environment & tools
    • Diversity & inclusion
    • Documentation
    • Dotfiles
    • Editors & IDE
    • Engineering management
    • Incident response (alerting, outages, firefighting)
    • Internet
    • Interviewing
    • JavaScript
    • Learning
    • Project management
    • Programming language
      • FP vs. OOP
    • Over-engineering
    • Reading
    • Releasing & deploying
    • Security
    • Shell
    • System architecture
      • Scalability
      • Stability
      • Resiliency
    • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
    • Testing
    • Tools
    • Version control (Git)
    • Work ethics & work/life balance
    • Web development
    • Writing for performance
  • Concepts

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.

There are some free books available, including:

• Professional software development 📖: pretty complete and a good companion to this page. The free chapters are mostly focused on software development processes: design, testing, code writing, etc. - and not so much about tech itself.
• List of free programming books

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

Other general material and list of resources

• The Imposter's Handbook - $30. From the author: "Don't have a CS Degree? Neither do I - That's why I wrote this book."
• mr-mig/every-programmer-should-know: a collection of (mostly) technical things every software developer should know

Topics

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 quora question lists some funnier learning alternative, including:

• Grokking Algorithms
• Essential Algorithms

Attitude, habits, mindset

• Mastering Programming, Kent Beck.
• The traits of a proficient programmer
• The tao of programming: a set of parables about programming.
• Taking Ownership Is The Most Effective Way to Get What You Want
• Finding Time to Become a Better Developer

Automation

• Automation Should Be Like Iron Man, Not Ultron

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.

• Cognitive bias cheat sheet. #hiring

Career growth

• The Conjoined Triangles of Senior-Level Development looks into how to define a senior engineer.
• Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer, Dan Heller.

Characters sets

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Coding & code quality

• Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend
• Lessons learned writing highly available code
• The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship 📖, Robert C. Martin. Describes numerous useful best practices. A bit long. There's also a clean code cheatsheet.

Computer science

• What every computer science major should know
• Teach Yourself Computer Science: an opinionated set of the best CS resources.

Databases

• A plain english introduction to CAP Theorem
• NOSQL Patterns
• NoSQL Databases: a Survey and Decision Guidance
• 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)
• SQL styleguide

Data science

• A dirty dozen: twelve common metric interpretation pitfalls in online controlled experiments

Debugging

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

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.

• 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.
• Microsoft's Rest API guidelines
• Book recommendations from HackerNews

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

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.
• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software 📖, Eric Evans
• Clean Architecture 📖, Robert C. Martin. Uncle Bob proposes an architecture that leverages the Single Responsibility Principle to its fullest. A great way to start a new codebase. Also checkout the clean architecture cheatsheet.

Articles:

• 101 Design Patterns & Tips for Developers
• Python Design Patterns: For Sleek And Fashionable Code: a pretty simple introduction to common design patterns (Facade, Adapter, Decorator). A more complete list of design patterns implementation in Python on Github. Also a book here.
• SourceMaking's Design Patterns seems to be a good web resource too.
• O'Reilly's How to make mistakes in Python
• Education of a Programmer: a developer's thoughts after 35 years in the industry. There's a particularly good section about design & complexity (see "the end to end argument", "layering and componentization").
• Google's API Design Guide: a general guide to design networked API.
• Domain-driven design, Wikipedia.

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

• Inheritance vs. composition: a concrete example in Python. Another slightly longer one here. One last one, in Python 3.
• Composition Instead Of Inheritance
• Complexity and Strategy: interesting perspective on complexity and flexibility with really good examples (e.g. Google Apps Suite vs. Microsoft Office).

Dev environment & tools

• 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

Diversity & inclusion

Checkout my list of management resources.

Documentation

• Documentation-Driven Development
• Writing automated tests for your documentation: this should be required, IMO. Testing code samples in your documentation ensures they never get outdated.
• Documentation is king, Kenneth Reitz

Dotfiles

• Awesome dotfiles
• My dotfiles

Articles

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

Editors & IDE

• Sublime Text essential plugins and resources
• vim-awesome
• Bram Moolenaar (Vim author), Seven habits of effective text editing (presentation).

Engineering management

Checkout my list of management resources.

Incident response (alerting, outages, firefighting)

• Incident Response at Heroku
• Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture
• My Philosophy on Alerting
• A great example of notes taken during outage and postmortem from Gitlab (01/31/2017). This one's a tricky one because an engineer's action caused the irremediable loss of 6 hours of data.

Internet

• How Does the Internet Work?
• How the web works

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.

• All the best advice we could find on how to get a job
• System design interview for IT company
• Technical Interview Megarepo: study materials for SE/CS technical interviews
• How to Win the Coding Interview
• The elevator programming game
• I spent 3 months applying to jobs after a coding bootcamp. Here’s what I learned.
• Top 10 algorithms in Interview Questions
• Questions to ask your interviewer
• Interactive Python coding interview challenges
• tech-interview-handbook/cheatsheet.md

JavaScript

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

• mbeaudru/modern-js-cheatsheet: cheatsheet for the JavaScript knowledge you will frequently encounter in modern projects.

Learning

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.

Project management

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

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.)

A bit more reading:

• A brief, incomplete, mostly wrong history of programming languages
• Types
• Resources To Help You To Create Programming Languages

FP vs. OOP

• Jargon from the functional programming world
• Goodbye, Object Oriented Programming

Over-engineering

• 10 modern software over-engineering mistakes
• A good example of over-engineering: the Juicero press (April 2017)

“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")

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

• 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.

Security

• Penetration Testing Tools Cheat Sheet
• My First 10 Minutes On a Server - Primer for Securing Ubuntu
• A practical guide to securing macOS
• Web Developer Security Checklist
• Reckon you've seen some stupid security things?: everything not to do.

Shell

• Awesome Shell

Resources

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

System architecture

• High Scalability: great blog about system architecture, its weekly review article are packed with numerous insights and interesting technology reviews. Checkout the all-times favorites.
• 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
• The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction: one of those classical articles that everyone should read.
• Learn how to design large scale systems. Prep for the system design interview (Github repo)
• Turning the database outside-out with Apache Samza
• Building Microservices 📖, Sam Newman (quite complete discussion of microservices)

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

• The Walking Dead - A Survival Guide to Resilient Applications
• Defensive Programming & Resilient systems in Real World (TM)
• Full Stack Fest: Architectural Patterns of Resilient Distributed Systems

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

• Graduating from Bootcamp and interested in becoming a Site Reliability Engineer?: a great collection of resources to learn about SRE.

Testing

• Testing Strategies in a Microservices Architecture (Martin Fowler) is an awesome resources explaining how to test a service properly.
• A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving... and a great way to learn about confirmation bias and why you're mostly writing positive test cases.
• The test pyramid
• Just Say No to More End-to-End Tests
• End-To-End Testing Considered Harmful
• Move fast and don't break things (presentation)
• Eradicating Non-Determinism in Tests, Martin Fowler
• Kent Beck : “I get paid for code that works, not for tests”

Tools

• DevDocs API Documentation: a repository for multiple API docs (see also Dash for macOS).

Version control (Git)

• Git Cheat Sheet
• git-tips
• Git from the inside out

Work ethics & work/life balance

• Your non-linear problem of 90% utilization, Jason Cohen: why constantly running at 90% utilization is actually counter-productive.
• Evidence-based advice on how to be successful in any jobs: most self-help advices are not research-based. The ones listed in this article are.

Web development

• grab/front-end-guide: a study guide and introduction to the modern front end stack.
• Maintainable CSS

Writing for performance

• Numbers Everyone Should Know
• Latency numbers every programmer should know
• Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming

Concepts

Glossary

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