Table of Contents
- About
- Problem solving
- Programming
- Computer fundamentals
- IDEs
- Best practices
- Code Katas
- Code reviews
- System design basics
- Performance and deep dives
- Concurrency
- Distributed systems
- SQL
- Cloud
- Testing
- Documentation and information management
- Engineering excellence
- Operational excellence
- Project maintenance and contributions
- Learning and leadership
- “Awesome” lists
Created by gh-md-toc
About
This is an opinionated collection of reading material that I’ve collected over the years to help me become a better Engineer. It is not an exhaustive list. I share some more on a somewhat regular basis on my Tech Blog. I also do a lot of general reading on leadership, culture, org building etc but I haven’t found the time to share those.
Problem solving
Programming
- How To Write Unmaintainable Code
- Clean Code by Robert Cecil Martin (Cheat sheet)
- Principles of Effective Developers
Computer fundamentals
- Writing an OS in Rust
- Writing a file system from scratch in Rust
- What’s in a Linux executable?
- Wizard zines
IDEs
- Learn to use the IDE/IntelliJ well
- IntelliJ IDEA Tips and Tricks by Anton Arhipov
- IntelliJ Super Productivity in 45 Minutes
- IntelliJ IDEA. Debugger Essentials
Best practices
- General
- SOLID design patterns
- Summary of OCP, SRP etc
- Venkat Subramaniam Design Patterns talks
- GRASP design patterns
- Domain-driven design by Eric J. Evans
- Applying UML and patterns by Craig Larman
- Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe
- Refactoring, patterns, anti-patterns
- Package by Feature
- Microservice architecture
- Laws of UX
- Hexagonal Architecture and Payments Monolith decomposition - Johnny Willer
- Mateusz Chrzonstowski - My understanding of DDD & Clean Architecture on the example
- I Made Everything Loosely Coupled. Does My App Fall Apart? - Gregor Hohpe
- Java
- Best Practices for Designing and Implementing a Library in Java
- Effective Java, Third Edition Keepin’ it Effective by Joshua Bloch
- Josh Bloch on API design
- Google Best Practices for Java Libraries
- Secure coding
- Java Design Patterns
- Gang of Four Patterns in a Functional Light
- Revisiting Design Patterns after 20 by Edson Yanaga
- Data-Oriented Programming in Java
- Programming Principles - slightly different from the ones above
- 10 Reasons Why we Love Some APIs and Why we Hate Some Others by Lukas Eder
- Let’s make a contract: the art of designing a Java API by Mario Fusco
- Evolving Java-based APIs / Achieving API Binary Compatibility
- Trustin Lee: Writing a Java library with better experience
- Date-Time Design Principles
- The art of building Java APIs: Do’s and Don’ts - Jonathan Giles
- JooQ API design
- Java API design checklist
- 12 recipes for using the Optional class as it’s meant to be used
- Avoid checked exceptions
- A corner case cheat sheet for Java and JVM languages
- Principles of Fluent API Design by David Beaumont
- Style
- Google style guide
- A list of awesome style guides
- Use tools to enforce a consistent, standard coding style (Checkstyle/PMD/FindBugs/SpotBugs/ErrorProne/Infer to do the first level checks)
- Use IDEs and tools to format and fix compiler/IDE warnings
- APIs and CLIs
- Microsoft API guidelines
- Google API design
- Kubernetes REST API conventions
- RESTful APIs and Events, created by Zalando
- REST API tutorial
- Avoid Data Corruption in Your REST API with ETags
- Boost Your REST API with HTTP Caching
- REST API Checklist - Kenneth Lange
- 7 Tips for Designing a Better REST API
- A guide to help you write better command-line programs
Code Katas
- c-guntur/paneer-tikka-masala: A Code Kata using a cooking recipe
- c-guntur/java-katas: One repo to rule them all. All Java Katas in one repo
- eclipse/eclipse-collections-kata: Collections Kata
- vmzakharov/mutate-test-kata: Code kata: using mutation testing to improve quality of unit tests
- forax/design-pattern-reloaded: Implementation of GoF design patterns in Java 8
- forax/java-guide: A guide of modern Java (Java 17)
- BNYMellon/CodeKatas: BNY Mellon Code Katas
Code reviews
- Code review matters and manners with video
- Building a code review culture
- Google Code Review Developer Guide
- Chromium Project - Respectful Code Reviews
- Chromium Project - Respectful Changes
- A Software Engineer’s Guide to Giving Feedback that Actually Matters
- The Code Review Pyramid
System design basics
(Also see 12 Factor, FURPS / Functional Usability Reliability Performance Supportability)
- Requirements
- Goals
- Non goals
- Scale
- Constraints
- Success measures
- Design - Basics
- Customer journeys (Visit -> Search -> Add -> Sign in/up -> Checkout -> Order -> Invoice -> Payment -> Fulfillment -> Shipment -> Confirmation/Return/Cancel/Refund/Status/Notify)
- APIs and Entities - CRUD
- Services - Foreground and background
- Stores
- Reliable (consistent, available), scalable (latency, goodput), observable, maintainable, secure
- Design - Principles
- Customer first
- MVP
- Necessary (support), sufficient (resistance), nice to have
- Critical thinking
- ROI
- COGS
- KPIs
- Data and experiment driven
- Tradeoffs
- Simple, easy to reason and scale
- Mechanical sympathy
- Reduce toil and undifferentited heavy lifting
- Customer first
- Scope
- CDN / Edge network / POP, Region / availability zone / cell
- System - Loadbalancer
- Healthcheck
- Routing
- DNS updates
- TLS and Certs
- System - API Gateway
- Protocols
- Firewall
- Rate limiting
- Bounds check
- Authz and authn
- Routing
- Logging
- Concept - Resilience
- Timeout
- Retry
- Jitter
- Bulkhead
- Circuit break
- Backpressure
- Memoize
- Fault domain
- Concept - Reads, writes and operations
- Space and compute complexity
- Arrival time, wait time, service time
- Read and write ratio
- Consistency, availability, durability
- Atomic, transactional, lease, lock
- Eventually or strongly consistent
- Durable
- Synchronous, asynchronous
- Commands (need to be worked upon, ideally by a single worker)
- Events (already happened)
- Query (deterministic queries that don’t have random numbers etc produce repeatable results)
- Checkpoint, write after/before logs, replay-idempotence, compensation-rollback
- Critical path
- Crosstalk, coordination, contention
- Partition, replication, affinity, anti-affinity
- Schema on read or write, filter and aggregate on read or write
- Deduplication, pre-fetching, pre-aggregating
- Batching, compression, retention, tiering
- Online vs offline - Analytics, notifications, repairs, reconciliation
- Caching, invalidation, summary or probabilistic structures
- Scoring, sorting, constraint satisfaction
- Space and compute complexity
- Concept - Algorithms
- Loadbalancing
- Least used
- Power of two random choices
- Round robin
- …
- Hashing
- Consistent hash
- Modulo hash
- Rendezvous hash
- …
- Loadbalancing
- Concept - Security
- Authenticate and authorize
- Encryption at rest and motion
- Sign and verify
- Governance, risk and compliance
- Audit trail
- Principles
- SSO, RBAC …
- Least privilege
- Short lived tokens
- Key rotation
- …
- Concept - Operations
- Measure, monitor, alert - Detect, escalate, respond, prevent
- Cost
- Performance
- Errors
- Capacity
- Disruption and error budgets
- Test - chaos and synthetic
- SLO
- Deploy safely
- Feature flags and canary/blue green rollouts
- Reduce toil
- Auto repair
- Auto scale up and back to zero
- Measure, monitor, alert - Detect, escalate, respond, prevent
Performance and deep dives
- General
- Java
- JVM bytecode
- JVM internals
- No Free Lunch? Memory Allocation in the JVM
- Java at Speed
- Aleksey Shipilёv’s posts describing some elementary piece of knowledge about JVM
- JVM Anatomy 101
- Time To Really Learn Generics: A Java 8 Perspective
- Mastering the mechanics of Java method invocation
- Understanding Java method invocation with invokedynamic
- Behind the scenes: How do lambda expressions really work in Java?
- Understanding Gradle
- Secrets of Performance Tuning Java on Kubernetes by Bruno Borges
Concurrency
- Brian Goetz on concurrency
- Venkat Subramaniam concurrency talks
- Concurrent programming in Java by Doug Lea
- Roman Leventov’s Code Review Checklist for Java Concurrency
Distributed systems
- General
- Resilience
SQL
- Practical SQL for Data Analysis - Haki Benita
- Awesome SQL Tips and Tricks - Voxxed Days Cluj - 2019
- How Query Engines Work
- How Modern SQL Databases Come up with Algorithms that You Would Have Never Dreamed Of by Lukas Eder - YouTube
Cloud
- Jerry Hargrove - Cloud Diagrams & Notes
- open-guides/og-aws: Amazon Web Services — a practical guide
- Amazon Web Services In Plain English
- Amazon Web Services (also in plain English)
- AWS services explained in one line each
Testing
- Test Desiderata
- Cassandra testing guidelines
- Don’t be mocked by your Mocks: Listening to your Tests
- Testing legacy code when you dislike tests (and legacy code) by Maeve Revels
- Effective Unit Testing by Eliotte Rusty Harold
- Write awesome tests by Jeroen Mols
- An Ultimate Guide To BDD
- The lazy programmer’s guide to writing thousands of tests - Scott Wlaschin
- Property based testing
- Integrating PIT Mutation Testing and GitHub Pages with GitHub Actions
Documentation and information management
- US Government plain language guidelines
- Technical Writing Courses for Engineers
- Effective software design documents & A generic design document template for documenting Micro services
- Google Developer Documentation Style Guide
- The Modular Documentation Project Source Repository
- The Art of Code Comments - Sarah Drasner
- How to Write a Git Commit Message
- Conventional Commits - specification for adding human and machine readable meaning to commit messages
- If Hemingway Wrote JavaDocs
- Keep a Changelog
Engineering excellence
Operational excellence
Project maintenance and contributions
- Tanzu Community Engagement guidelines, community health measurements, and goals
- Cassandra contribution guide has a nice page on code review among other things
- eclipse collections contributor guide
- Strimzi contributor guide
- Contributing to Seldon Core
Learning and leadership
- Barbara Oakley: “Learning How to Learn”
- Reading Research: A Guide for Software Engineers
- Engineering You: Martin Thompson
- Understanding the role of a principal engineer
- How to Ask and Answer Questions Effectively