links

A long-term collection of texts I revisit.

Five layers: Programming (implementation), Tests (quality) , Engineering Process (structure), Culture (foundation), and Others (misc high-quality references).

Programming

How we implement ideas

• Knuth – Programming as an Art
• Peter Naur – Programming as Theory Building
• OSTEP — the definitive OS textbook.
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
• Simple Made Easy
• Joe Armstrong Thesis — concurrency and fault tolerance.
• Peter Norvig – Good Style
• Peter Norvig – Design Patterns
• Armstrong – Why OOP Sucks
• PACELC Theorem — latency vs consistency.
• Tiger Style — system design philosophy.
• 5 Rules Programming (Rob Pike)
• Napkin Math — intuitive performance math.

Tests

Quality: Design, strategy, and verification

• How to Test
• Dirty Database
• Bad Tests
• Unit and Integration Tests
• Don’t Write Bugs
• TODOS Aren’t for Doing
• SMURF – Beyond the Test Pyramid
• Toilet Tests (Risk Driven Testing)
• Test Sizes (Google)
• Testing With Expectations (Janestreet)
• Testing With Expectations 2
• Testing on error handling code

Engineering Process

How we work together to build.

• Effective design docs
• Modern CI
• The Evolution of SRE at Google
• Cognitive Load is What Matters
• How to Communicate in a Remote Startup
• Google Platform Rant
• Performing for the Job Title
• Clean Code, Horrible Performance
• The Only Unbreakable Law
• The Configuration Complexity Clock
• Cognitive Load (GitHub)
• Agile Was Never Your Problem
• You Are Not Refactoring
• Fast (Catherine Jue) — speed as process philosophy.
• Refactoring English – Essays That Shaped Me
• Six Programmers and Type System

Culture

The base that supports everything else.

• Le Guin Precepts
• Feynman - What Problems to Solve
• Basic Things
• Cold-Blooded Software
• Grug Brain Developer — complexity bad.
• Programming Sucks
• The Importance of Off Topic
• Feynman – Cargo Cult Science
• Feynman Blackboard
• Are You OK
• Most Tech Content is Bullshit
• Imaginary Problems Are the Root of Bad Software
• Chinese Tech Terms
• Oil Shell Blog (Spolsky) — language and clarity.
• Debugging Leadership — people before process.
• Process Debt
• Rocket Science of Meetings — meetings that matter.
• Agile Manifesto
• Engineering Ladders
• Negotiate Anything
• How to Ship
• Antirez – We Are Destroying Software
• Kitchen Sink

Others

High-quality references that don’t fit perfectly elsewhere

• A Distributed Systems Reading List
• Brendan Gregg - Linux Performance
• Mitchell Hashimoto – As Code
• Eaton Phil – DB I/O
• Memory Allocation — visualizing allocators.
• Linux is Not an Operating System
• C Isn’t a Programming Language Anymore
• Beej Guides — C, networking, Git.
• Jepsen – TigerBeetle
• How Go Memory Works
• Building S3
• Be Simple (Rust Example)
• Programming Languages (Pierce)
• Oxide’s Rust Cancel Safety
• The Copenhagen Book — fundamentals of auth design.
• Renting Is for Suckers
• Algorithms for Modern Hardware
• MLOps (Huyen Chip)
• SRE Google - Example Postmortem
• How to Scale Your Model (JAX Book)
• CPU (Gamozo)
• How Memory Works
• Programming Feedback for Advanced Beginners
• Notes and Impact — discussions on impact.
• Scalability! But at what COST?