laithshadeed / professional-programming

A collection of full-stack resources for programmers.

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.)
      • Design: simplicity
    • Dev environment & tools
    • Diversity & inclusion
    • Documentation
    • Dotfiles
    • Editors & IDE
    • Engineering management
    • Incident response (alerting, outages, firefighting)
    • Internet
    • Interviewing
    • Learning
    • Project management
    • Programming languages
      • Python
      • JavaScript
      • 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).

Quotes:

• "You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.", Frank Lloyd Wright

Design: simplicity

• Simple Made Easy 🎞, Rich Hickey. This is an incredibly inspiring talk redefining simplicity, ease and complexity, and showing that solutions that look easy may actually harm your design.

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:)

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 languages

I would recommend learning:

• JavaScript and may be one other interpreted language (Python, Ruby, etc.). Interpreted languages are useful for quick one-off automation scripts, and fastest to write for interviews.
• A compiled language (Java, C, C++...).
• A more recent language to see where the industry is going (as of writing, Go, Swift, Rust, Elixir...).
• A language that has first-class support for functional programming (Haskell, Scala, Clojure...).

A bit more reading:

• A brief, incomplete, mostly wrong history of programming languages
• Types
• Resources To Help You To Create Programming Languages
• Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure 🎞, Rich Hickey. The author of Clojure reflects on his programming experience and explains the rationale behind some of Clojure's key design decisions.

Python

For Python feel free to checkout my professional Python education repository.

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.

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