Startup CTO's Handbook
A long-form startup CTO reference that can be read by topic rather than only from cover to cover.
github.comOur notes
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Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
A freely readable book on shaping work, choosing bounded bets, and giving teams room to solve the details.
basecamp.comOur notes
Software Engineering at Google
A free book about keeping a codebase healthy over time: engineering culture, processes, tools, and the tradeoffs that come with scale.
Free online bookOur notes
Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track
Interviews and guides about staff-plus engineering, useful for developing technical leadership without making management the only path forward.
Free stories & guidesOur notes
Site Reliability Engineering
Google’s free book on error budgets, toil, monitoring, on-call, and operating services. Start with the principles before the large-scale machinery.
Free online bookOur notes
Rands Leadership Slack
A leadership discussion community for experienced, new, and aspiring managers. Useful when you need peers to test a difficult management question with.
Invitation requiredOur notes
#define CTO
A first-person account of finding a VP Engineering partner and reshaping the CTO role as Stripe grew.
blog.gregbrockman.comOur notes
A Manager’s Bill of Responsibilities (and Rights)
A clear statement of what managers owe their teams and the support managers should receive in return.
charity.wtfOur notes
The Real 11 Reasons I Don't Hire You
Why a capable candidate can still be wrong for a particular opening, team, or moment.
charity.wtfOur notes
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
A classic book about the human side of software projects: working conditions, team formation, leadership, and the organizational obstacles to useful work.
Commercial book · samples availableOur notes
Practical Deep Learning for Coders
A free, code-first deep-learning course covering vision, language, tabular models, and deployment. A useful hands-on route for an engineering leader returning to ML.
Free courseOur notes
Thinking Like an Architect
A recorded talk about architecture as a way of thinking: connecting levels, sketching, preserving options, using models, and recognizing tradeoffs.
Video & transcriptOur notes
Software Engineering Ladders
An explicit career model spanning developers, tech leads, program managers, and engineering managers.
github.comOur notes
OWASP Cheat Sheet Series
Concise application-security implementation references, organized by topic and maintained by security practitioners.
Free referenceOur notes
DACI Decision-Making Framework
A facilitated decision exercise that separates the driver, approver, contributors, and people who need to be informed.
Public instructionsOur notes
The Site Reliability Workbook
The practical companion to the SRE book, with implementation examples for SLOs, alerting, toil, and organizational change.
Free online bookOur notes
Machine Learning Crash Course
Modular ML lessons on regression, classification, data preparation, overfitting, neural networks, embeddings, and production systems.
Free lessonsOur notes
Engineering Managers Slack
A peer space for engineering managers, team leads, and others managing people in technology, with explicit confidentiality and conduct rules.
Member communityOur notes
Retrospective
A runnable retrospective play for reflecting on recent work and choosing improvements, with preparation and facilitation instructions.
Public instructionsOur notes
Roles and Responsibilities
A team exercise for making responsibilities, overlaps, and unowned work visible before those gaps cause delivery problems.
Public instructionsOur notes
Atlassian Team Playbook
A library of facilitated team exercises covering goals, decisions, planning, and knowledge sharing. Best used by picking a specific play for a specific problem.
Public play libraryOur notes
Application Security Verification Standard
A structured application-security requirements reference for discussing verification scope with engineers, security reviewers, and suppliers.
Open standardOur notes
Dropbox Engineering Career Framework
A public company career framework to compare expectations and discuss engineering growth in concrete terms.
Public frameworkOur notes
Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
A concrete account of blameless postmortems, when to write them, and how an organization turns incident reviews into learning.
Free chapterOur notes
Implementing SLOs
A hands-on chapter for selecting service-level indicators, defining objectives, and using an error-budget policy to guide reliability work.
Free chapterOur notes
Staff Engineer Archetypes
Four patterns of senior technical leadership—tech lead, architect, solver, and right hand—that make a vague staff title easier to discuss.
Free guideOur notes
Continuous Delivery
A capability guide to keeping software deployable and making releases low risk, with a clear distinction between delivery and automatic deployment.
Free capability guideOur notes
Database Change Management
How versioned database changes, shared visibility, and communication make schema work part of software delivery rather than a separate release bottleneck.
Free capability guideOur notes
Strangler Fig
A gradual approach to modernizing legacy systems by replacing behavior in increments, with attention to why large replacement projects go wrong.
Free articleOur notes
The Practical Test Pyramid
A detailed testing tutorial connecting fast unit tests, integration boundaries, contract tests, and end-to-end coverage to practical code examples.
Free tutorialOur notes
Architecture Decision Record
A compact explanation of recording one consequential architectural decision, its context, consequences, and later superseding decisions.
Free referenceOur notes
Timeouts, Retries, and Backoff with Jitter
Why retries can amplify an outage, how timeout boundaries matter, and how backoff and jitter help keep transient failures from becoming overload.
Free articleOur notes
The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
A short historical checklist about the working conditions and engineering practices behind a team. Useful prompts for interviewing an employer.
Free articleOur notes
We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else
A challenge to vague “best people” hiring and zero-doubt interview decisions, including the risk of rejecting capable candidates on thin evidence.
Free articleOur notes
How to Interview an Executive
Executive-hiring notes about ownership, strategic reasoning, team gaps, and the difference between creating value and protecting an established business.
Free essayOur notes
How to Become a Magnet for Talent and Assess Talent
Early-startup recruiting notes on making the mission visible, building a candidate pipeline, and actively helping people understand why they should join.
Free essayOur notes
The Power of Performance Reviews
A performance-review system with preparation, delivery, follow-up, and a reusable template, grounded in the author’s management experience at Airbnb.
Free article & templateOur notes
After Being a Manager, Can I Be Happy as a Cog?
An advice-column discussion of returning to technical work after management, including status, influence, motivation, and the cost of staying away from practice.
Free articleOur notes
Context Switching Is Destroying Your Workday
An accessible explanation of attention residue and task switching, with practical ways to reduce interruptions in a connected workplace.
Free articleOur notes
How to Be an Effective Executive
Notes on executive attention: gathering information, choosing high-impact activities, managing a calendar, and making meetings serve a clear purpose.
Free essayOur notes
Engineering Management Resources
A broad topic index for engineering management, from one-to-ones and delegation to technical strategy, developer experience, and organizational design.
Public collectionOur notes
Awesome Engineering Ladders
An index of public engineering ladders, articles, frameworks, and presentations, including examples from Dropbox, Etsy, and other organizations.
Public collectionOur notes
An Introduction to Distributed Systems
Public teaching notes on time, networks, faults, safety, liveness, algorithms, and practical production concerns, with links to optional lab work.
Free course notesOur notes
The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018
A detailed discussion of why microservices appeal, where their operational costs appear, and what to ask before splitting a system.
Free articleOur notes
The Reactive Manifesto
A concise statement of responsive, resilient, elastic, message-driven systems, with a glossary for discussing these architectural qualities.
Free manifestoOur notes
Awesome Scalability
A large reading index of performance, scalability, reliability, and real-world architecture case studies, useful for researching a specific bottleneck.
Public collectionOur notes
A List of Post-mortems
Public incident reports grouped by failure themes such as configuration, time, hardware, and databases. Useful for testing assumptions before an outage.
Public incident indexOur notes
A Successful Git Branching Model
The original Gitflow explanation, including the author’s later advice to prefer a simpler workflow for continuously delivered applications.
Free articleOur notes
Developer Roadmaps
Interactive learning maps for engineering disciplines and technologies, useful for structuring self-study or identifying unfamiliar areas.
Public learning mapsOur notes
Managing Data Science Teams
A field guide covering data-science hiring, management habits, knowledge sharing, collaboration, and scaling a specialist team.
Free field guideOur notes
How to Structure a Data Science Team
An overview of data-science roles and organizational models, useful when deciding where specialists should sit and how they connect to product teams.
Free articleOur notes
Awesome Billing
An engineering-oriented index of pricing, billing, accounting, invoices, payments, tax, fraud, and the systems that connect them.
Public collectionOur notes
PriceOps Awesome List
A focused reading index on software pricing and its implementation, including usage-based models, packaging, and pricing courses.
Public collectionOur notes
Rewarding Talent: The Founder’s Guide to Stock Options
A founder-focused stock-options handbook covering allocation policies, employee ownership, geographic differences, and company examples.
Public handbookOur notes
Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer
A candidate-side explanation of job-offer negotiation, including leverage, communication, and why advice depends on power and personal circumstances.
Free articleOur notes
Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued
A substantial essay on how technical workers approach compensation discussions, with examples of preparation, framing, and avoidable assumptions.
Free articleOur notes
How to Prepare a Talk
A practical preparation process built around speaking and rehearsing the talk, rather than mistaking silent slide-writing for performance practice.
Free tutorialOur notes
The North Star Metric
A product-metrics framework centered on a measure of customer value, useful for testing whether a team’s activity measures connect to product outcomes.
Free articleOur notes
Awesome Product Management
A product-management resource index spanning discovery, strategy, delivery, metrics, and practical tools. Useful for finding the product perspective on an engineering decision.
Public collectionOur notes
Awesome Falsehood
An index of mistaken software assumptions about names, time, addresses, identity, geography, and other messy parts of the real world.
Public collectionOur notes
Software Engineering Blogs
A directory of company and individual engineering blogs for finding first-hand technical accounts beyond the same handful of frequently shared articles.
Public publisher indexOur notes
Valve Handbook for New Employees
The illustrated 2012 employee handbook describing Valve’s flat organization, self-directed projects, peer feedback, and approach to hiring.
Free PDF · 2012 editionOur notes
The Mythical Man-Month
Essays on large software projects, coordination costs, conceptual integrity, and why adding people is not a simple cure for a late project.
Commercial book · samples availableOur notes
Continuous Delivery
The book-length treatment of deployment pipelines, build and test automation, configuration, data changes, and collaboration across delivery roles.
Commercial book · samples availableOur notes
Building Secure & Reliable Systems
Google practitioners connect security and reliability across system design, implementation, operation, incident response, and organizational culture.
Free online bookOur notes
Humans in the Loop: Engineering Leadership in a Chaotic Industry
A recorded engineering-leadership talk about AI and automation, the complexity left for people to handle, and the skills leaders should keep developing.
Video & transcriptOur notes
Generous, High Fidelity Communication
A recorded talk connecting generous communication, disagreement, and just culture to the conditions that help a team raise concerns and work safely.
Video & transcriptOur notes
Startup Playbook
A free founder-oriented playbook covering the idea, team, product, execution, growth, hiring, and fundraising, with text and audio on the author’s site.
Free online playbookOur notes
Hacking team communications
A practical account of using existing work channels to reduce repeated status requests and expose work earlier.
noamelf.comOur notes
How to build a startup engineering team
How an engineering leader can adapt large-company experience to a startup without losing the ability to grow.
increment.comOur notes
The One Key to Dealing with Senior Executives: Answer the Question!
A concrete reminder to answer the question an executive actually asked before adding background and qualifications.
kellblog.comOur notes
Cycle times
An organizational view of cycle time: decision layers, meeting size, ownership, and repeated loops.
boz.comOur notes
Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API
A concrete API design checklist covering the developer experience, resource design, documentation, versioning, and operational details.
vinaysahni.comOur notes
A Tactical Guide to Managing Up
A collection of concrete approaches to aligning expectations and improving the working relationship with a manager.
review.firstround.comOur notes
Hold Your Team Accountable
A coaching approach to accountability that emphasizes inquiry and clear expectations instead of taking the work back.
dave-bailey.comOur notes
Individuals matter
A critique of roadmaps and staffing systems that assume people with the same title are interchangeable capacity.
danluu.comOur notes
Draw The Owl and Other Company Values You Didn’t Know You Should Have
An account of the gap between declaring company values and making them visible in decisions and behavior.
firstround.comOur notes
Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well
Why clear writing becomes a practical engineering skill as teams and responsibilities extend beyond immediate peers.
blog.pragmaticengineer.comOur notes
The Top 10 Deliverables of Product Managers
A concrete view of product work through the artifacts behind vision, strategy, design, and execution.
sachinrekhi.comOur notes
Execution at Facebook
A first-person explanation of product execution responsibilities and how engineers and product managers divide the inputs.
productlife.toOur notes
GitLab Engineering Management
A live public chapter on engineering management, including onboarding, backup coverage, and technical credibility.
handbook.gitlab.comOur notes
GitLab Financial Planning & Analysis
A current public view of financial planning and analysis, including forecasting, business drivers, and cross-functional planning.
handbook.gitlab.comOur notes
Software Engineers Growth framework
A historical explanation of replacing a career framework as a company’s size and team structure changed.
prontopro.engineeringOur notes
The Different CTO Roles
Four different mandates can hide behind the same CTO title. Use them to make your own responsibilities explicit.
allthingsdistributed.comOur notes
Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering
A structured approach to entering an engineering executive role, starting with the business and the organization you inherit.
lethain.comOur notes
How to spend your first 30 days in a new senior-level role
A listening tour for new senior leaders, with concrete prompts for learning what people want changed and preserved.
larahogan.meOur notes
Evolution of my role as a founder CTO
A founder’s account of how architecture, operations, hiring, and management changed as RevenueCat grew.
miguelcarranza.esOur notes
Trouble hiring senior engineers? It's probably you
An employer-side critique of job descriptions and recruiting practices that fail to answer experienced candidates’ questions.
hiringengineersbook.comOur notes
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing
A classic argument for evaluating practical programming ability through a deliberate interview process.
joelonsoftware.comOur notes
Getting the Interview Phone Screen Right
A concrete look at what an early technical screen can establish before a longer interview.
blog.codinghorror.comOur notes
GitLab Talent Acquisition Framework
The current public hiring handbook, connecting candidate experience, interviewer preparation, and recruiting responsibilities.
handbook.gitlab.comOur notes
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
Why moving between engineering and management can build a stronger career than treating management as a one-way promotion.
charity.wtfOur notes
A Review Process
A detailed account of redesigning reviews around shared principles and concrete examples of collaboration.
capwatkins.comOur notes
Meetings for an effective eng organization
A working model for team meetings, technical reviews, development forums, and engineering-wide questions.
lethain.comOur notes
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
Why a meeting that looks small on one calendar can break the working day of someone who needs uninterrupted concentration.
paulgraham.comOur notes
Should I Become a Manager?
A practical reflection on choosing management and understanding what changes when the team’s work becomes your responsibility.
capwatkins.comOur notes
Reverse Interview Questions
Questions candidates can ask about work, culture, delivery, and the company they might join.
github.comOur notes
The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite
A planning sequence that moves between leadership context and team proposals before committing the organization.
review.firstround.comOur notes
Measuring an engineering organization
A decision-based approach to engineering measurement, separating operating needs from different stakeholders’ questions.
lethain.comOur notes
Evidence Based Scheduling
A historical approach to forecasting delivery using recorded estimates and actual outcomes.
joelonsoftware.comOur notes
Accentuate the negative: making the non-perfect decision. Technical decision making
How to build agreement around a technical proposal by explaining its disadvantages and assumptions early.
leaddev.comOur notes
Microservices – Please, don’t
A cautionary account of the costs hidden behind promises of cleaner code and easier scaling through microservices.
riak.comOur notes
Twelve-Factor App
Twelve operational principles for applications, with useful starting points for configuration, releases, and process lifecycle.
12factor.netOur notes
How I Write Tests
A practical testing approach built around separable modules, reusable fakes, and making verification easier to perform.
blog.nelhage.comOur notes
Startup Lessons Learned - Five Whys
A concrete account of linking failures to improvements in onboarding, tests, deployment, and operational feedback.
startuplessonslearned.comOur notes
On Call Rotations: How Best to Wake Devs Up in the Middle of the Night
A discussion of on-call as shared ownership, including the managerial work required to make it sustainable.
thenewstack.ioOur notes
Trunk Based Development
A practical introduction to integrating small changes frequently and reducing long-lived branch divergence.
atlassian.comOur notes
SaaS CTO Security Checklist
A recovered live source for the Goldfig security checklist, covering people, accounts, applications, and operations.
goldfiglabs.comOur notes
Awesome Security
A broad security reference collection for finding deeper material once you have identified a specific control or threat.
github.comOur notes
Evolutionary Database Design
How database change can evolve with application development through collaboration, versioning, and small migrations.
martinfowler.comOur notes
Database Migrations Done Right
A concise explanation of why schema transitions become easier when application and database releases can move independently.
brunton-spall.co.ukOur notes
Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story
An explicitly fictional company story about a data team whose impressive models compete with basic unanswered business questions.
erikbern.comOur notes
Product vs. Feature Teams
An opinionated distinction between delivering a prescribed feature list and owning a customer problem with a cross-functional team.
svpg.comOur notes
How to Hire a Product Manager
An updated classic on evaluating product judgment, technical collaboration, and the ability to work across disciplines.
kennorton.comOur notes
Mandate Levels
A language for discussing whether a team controls a task, solution, problem, or broader business goal.
cutlefish.substack.comOur notes
Technology Due Diligence Checklist
A broad diligence question set spanning product, organization, scalability, and AI/ML operating responsibilities.
akfpartners.comOur notes
Technical Due Diligence Questions
Questions that connect technical due diligence to the business, product, team, and ability to operate the system.
github.comOur notes
A Guide to Seed Fundraising
A founder-oriented explanation of seed fundraising and the preparation behind telling a company’s story.
blog.ycombinator.comOur notes
Basecamp Employee Handbook
A public employee handbook to study for how an organization writes down its own working expectations.
github.comOur notes
Titles open the original destination. Our selection notes explain the use and context; historical material and archive-only notes are labeled.
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