Resources

A bunch of resources that I refer to from time to time on various topics. This list was created in May 2022, and will grow as time goes.

• Blogs
• Podcasts & Videos
• Books
• Curated List & Handbooks
• Culture
• Leadership
• Management
• Time Management
• Problem Solving
• Agile
• Startups
• Tech / Engineering management
• Product Management
• Reliability
• Software Architecture
• Software Engineering
• Testing
• DevSecOps
• Sales & GTM
• SEO
• Incident / Crisis Management

Blogs

• General management
• First Round Review
• Jason Yip → Agile
• Tech
• Addy Osmani → Software Engineering
• Thiago Ghisi → Engineering Management
• Aadil Maan → Technical Program Management
• Serverless Land → On Event Driven Architectures

Podcasts & Videos

• Lex Fridman
• EO → Entrepreneurship
• Tech
• GOTO Conferences
• Domain-Driven Design Europe

Books

• On startups, innovation, and Product Management
• High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People
• Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
• Management & company building
• Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building
• High Output Management
• Summary: Top Takeaways from Andy Grove’s High Output Management
• Radical Candor
• Summary: Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss
• Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy
• Engineering Management & Digital Transformation
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
• Summary: Learnings from “An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management” by Will Larson
• The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
• For first time managers
• The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
• Leadership
• CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest
• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
• Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
• Problem solving
• Problem solving 101
• Personal growth
• Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
• Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day
• Tech
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
• Clean Code
• Summary: wojteklu/clean_code.md
• Persuasion & negotiation
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
• Marketing
• Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing

Curated List & Handbooks

• A curated list for software developers to transition to an engineering management role.
• Code reviews
• Awesome List of resources on leading people and being a manager
• The Documentation Compendium
• Curated List of Go-To-Market GTM Resources
• Curated Sales Resources For Startup Founders
• Sales, Marketing, and Recruiting Resources for Founders
• The Atlassian Team Playbook
• Basecamp Employee Handbook
• Gitlab Team Handbook
• How HashiCorp Works

Culture

• The Importance of Story-Telling in Software Engineering: Amazon’s Cult of the 6-pager: why narrative matters

Leadership

• 37 Signals
• Lazy Leadership
• Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires — This Chief of Staff Shares His Playbook
• Why Success Is Often Elusive at the Highest Echelons
• Lara Hogan - Etsy Lessons

Management

• The Power of Performance Reviews: Use This System to Become a Better Manager
• The forgotten cousin of OKR that could make it 10x better
• The Operating System Canvas
• Growing a Feature Team Using Lanes
• The Hiring Test
• How to Hire World Class Engineers
• We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

Time Management

• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
• Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations
• Delegate outcomes, not activities
• Renovating Teams
• Identify Leaders by Giving People Assignments

Problem Solving

• The problem-solver’s playbook: 17 questions to sharpen your thinking

Agile

• Agile Manifesto
• 12 Principles of Agile
• Scrum
• It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings

Startups

• Creandum Data Room Template

Tech / Engineering management

• The Engineering Manager
• The Three Hats of a Technology Leader
• #define CTO by Stripe CTO
• CTO Checklist
• Defect/Bug Management
• Managing Difficult Software Engineers
• Engineering Manager Guide
• John Lewis - Partnership Engineering Principles

Product Management

• Writing User Stories, Examples and Templates In Agile Methodologies
• Why Product Managers Should Be Story Mapping
• Estimation
• My preferred approaches to estimation on Agile projects

→ Talks about user story points, swimlane sizing, and blink estimation

• Swimlane Sizing – Complete & Fast Backlog Estimation
• When life gives you lemons, write better error messages

→ How to write good error messages

Reliability

• ZEN and the art of Reliability
• Engineering Reliable Mobile Applications: Strategies for Developing Resilient Native Mobile Applications

Software Architecture

• 12 Factor
• Reactive Manifesto
• System Design Primer
• Awesome Scalability
• Build Your Own X

Software Engineering

• General
• Additional resources on Staff-plus engineering
• Software Engineering - The Soft Parts

→ Soft skills for engineering leaders

• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
• On Being A Senior Engineer
• Building & scaling Engineering team
• A Practical Guide to Writing Technical Specs
• Process
• Version Control for Multiple Agile Teams
• Software Engineering at Google
• Technical
• Optimistic vs. Pessimistic Locking Vlad Mihalcea
• Optimistic vs. Pessimistic locking Stack Overflow
• REST API Design
• Design Patterns
• ULID

“ULIDs contain a 48-bit timestamp followed by 80 bits of random data. The timestamp allows ULIDs to be sorted, which works much better with the b-tree data structure databases use for indexing. In one high-throughput system at Shopify we’ve seen a 50 percent decrease in INSERT statement duration by switching from UUIDv4 to ULID for idempotency keys.” Source

• Surviving Flashes of High-Write Traffic Using Scriptable Load Balancers

Testing

• Pummelling the Platform–Performance Testing Shopify

→ Talks about scientific approach to performance testing

• A zen manifesto for effective code reviews
• How I Write Tests
• Testing in Production, the safe way
• Testing in Production: the hard parts
• The 10 Minute Test Plan
• Software Testing Huristics
• Heuristics of Software Testability

DevSecOps

• The SaaS CTO Security Checklist Redux
• Ultimate DevSecOps library
• Monitoring Distributed Systems

→ The Four Golden Signals (Latency, Traffic, Errors, Saturation)

• Real-World Engineering Challenges #6: Migrations
• Production Readiness Checklist at Mercari
• Microservice Production Readiness Checklist
• bregman-arie/sre-checklist

Everything about SRE role

Sales & GTM

• Unit of Value™: A Framework for Scaling
• Building a Sales Engine: Nailing Growth at the Series A
• From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy

SEO

• SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time
• How to Learn SEO In 2022 (In Record Time)
• Ahrefs: The Beginner’sGuide to SEO
• Moz: The Beginner's Guide to SEO
• Winning at SEO
• Content Driven Growth

Incident / Crisis Management

• Shopify - Implementing ChatOps into our Incident Management Procedure
• A List of Post-mortems
• Startup Lessons Learned - Five Whys by Eric Ries
• On Call Rotations: How Best to Wake Devs Up in the Middle of the Night