This is roughly ordered as

1. learn to do
2. do it well
3. it lives in production
4. big concepts and big picture
5. protect
6. learn from others

(if you are in a hurry, ask your favorite/best AI to summarize any of these ;)

Programming Craft

Books take more investment, yet when they have stood the test of time it is because they have incredible value and information density

Podcasts tip: listen at 1.5x or 2x speed

• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

• Foundations of Programming - Building Better Software by Karl Seguin

• Clean Code by Robert C. "Uncle Bob" Martin

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
• https://www.se-radio.net/2017/06/se-radio-episode-295-michael-feathers-on-legacy-code

• https://fragmentedpodcast.com/episodes/219/ (the legacy code change algorithm)

• https://changelog.com/gotime/6 (Mechanical Sympathy with Bill Kennedy)

• https://fragmentedpodcast.com/episodes/214/ (3 Things Every Developer Needs To Know How To Do)
• https://fragmentedpodcast.com/episodes/41/ (YAGNI you aren't going to need it)
• https://mbuffett.com/posts/programming-advice-younger-self
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MksJTtt7jS4&t=93s Presentation on Code Smells by Sandi Metz at Laracon 2016
• https://robertheaton.com/2015/10/26/why-and-how-to-make-smaller-pull-requests/
• https://robertheaton.com/2014/06/20/code-review-without-your-eyes/ (Heuristics for quickly reviewing code)
• https://two-wrongs.com/code-reviews-do-find-bugs
• https://www.alexandra-hill.com/2018/06/25/the-art-of-giving-and-receiving-code-reviews/

Languages

Even if you do not code in these languages these books can provide invaluable understanding of decisions made in "how stuff works"

• The C Programming Language (2nd Edition) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
• Effective Java Programming Language Guide by Joshua Bloch
• The Go Programming Language by Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan

Key Ideas

• https://www.se-radio.net/2015/05/the-cap-theorem-then-and-now
• https://www.se-radio.net/2015/04/episode-224-sven-johann-and-eberhard-wolff-on-technical-debt
• https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying Logging
• https://increment.com/documentation/
• https://www.wired.com/2013/01/code-bugs-programming-why-we-need-specs/
• https://se-radio.net/2024/02/se-radio-604-karl-wiegers-and-candase-hokanson-on-software-requirements-essentials/

Doing it well

Quality and Testing

Why what we do is important...

• https://medium.com/dataseries/the-rise-and-fall-of-knight-capital-buy-high-sell-low-rinse-and-repeat-ae17fae780f6
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz4dn (13 minutes to the moon episode 5: the 4th astronaut - the first mission critical software)
• https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-3-lala-land-galileos-warning/ (quality "theater")

How to do it well...

• Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, Hung Q. Nguyen
• https://programmingisterrible.com/post/173883533613/code-to-debug

• https://www.se-radio.net/2017/01/se-radio-episode-280-gerald-weinberg-on-bugs-errors-and-software-quality

• https://rbcs-us.com/documents/Why-Most-Unit-Testing-is-Waste.pdf

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15565875 (Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration)

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18466787 List of strings to use in QA testing

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416746 Crowd sourcing how to review code

• https://www.bluematador.com/blog/delight-customers-this-black-friday-7-surefire-strategies-to-prevent-downtime
• https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520 (Always be automating, Thomas Limoncelli)
• https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2945077 (Small batches principle, Thomas Limoncelli)
• https://fragmentedpodcast.com/episodes/183/ (The Testing Paradox)
• https://martinfowler.com/articles/developer-effectiveness.html
• https://www.se-radio.net/2010/09/episode-167-the-history-of-junit-and-the-future-of-testing-with-kent-beck

Infrastructure

• Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael Nygard
• https://www.se-radio.net/2009/05/episode-134-release-it-with-michael-nygard/
• https://www.se-radio.net/2015/02/episode-221-jez-humble-on-continuous-delivery
• https://changelog.com/gotime/142 (All about that infrastructure and DevOps)
• https://www.se-radio.net/2016/01/se-radio-show-246-john-wilkes-on-borg-and-kubernetes
• https://www.se-radio.net/2020/04/episode-405-yevgeniy-brikman-on-infrastructure-as-code-best-practices/
• https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/12/30/cloud-native-applications-with-cornelia-davis-repeat/

Algorithms and Architecture

Algorithms

• The Algorithm Design Manual, 2nd Edition by Steven Skiena
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, Richard Helm

• https://www.se-radio.net/2014/11/episode-215-gang-of-four-20-years-later Gang of Four Architecture Patterns

• https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/queueing_theory (summary and links to resources)

• https://www.se-radio.net/2019/02/se-radio-episode-358-probabilistic-data-structure-for-big-data-problems/
• https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3104030 (Data Sketching summary)

Software Architecture

• https://web.archive.org/web/20210414115314/http://www.laputan.org/mud/ Foundational Essay on architectures and the infamous "Ball of Mud"
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2009/february/best-practice-an-introduction-to-domain-driven-design
• https://www.se-radio.net/2015/05/se-radio-episode-226-eric-evans-on-domain-driven-design-at-10-years
• https://www.codingblocks.net/podcast/clean-code-programming-around-boundaries

• https://virtualddd.com/sessions/ddddd-20-bounded-contexts-microservices-and-everything-in-between/

• https://www.se-radio.net/2017/04/se-radio-episode-287-success-skills-for-architects-with-neil-ford

• https://se-radio.net/2024/05/se-radio-616-ori-saporta-on-the-role-of-the-software-architect/

• https://www.theartifact.io/videos/ep-4-on-becoming-a-software-architect-with-lee-atchison/

• https://www.se-radio.net/2020/05/episode-409-joe-kutner-on-the-twelve-factor-app/

• • https://brandur.org/heroku-values

• https://www.se-radio.net/2018/03/se-radio-episode-320-nate-taggart-on-serverless-paradigm

• https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html#drawbacks Drawbacks of Serverless

• https://www.se-radio.net/2021/02/episode-447-michael-perry-on-immutable-architecture/

• https://virtualddd.com/sessions/orchestration-and-choreography-with-laila-bougria-udi-dahan/
• https://changelog.com/gotime/297 Event Driven Systems and Architecture
• https://event-driven.io/en/whats_the_difference_between_event_and_command/

Microservices

• https://www.se-radio.net/2022/08/episode-525-randy-shoup-on-evolving-architecture-and-organization-at-ebay/
• Building Microservices by Sam Newman
• http://www.elidedbranches.com/2016/08/microservices-real-architectural.html (Camille Fournier)
• https://alibaba-cloud.medium.com/conways-law-a-theoretical-basis-for-the-microservice-architecture-c666f7fcc66a
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13960107 (modules vs microservices)
• https://changelog.com/gotime/126 Go time: monolith vs microservices

Architectural Scalability

• https://netflixtechblog.com/lessons-netflix-learned-from-the-aws-outage-deefe5fd0c04
• https://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture-facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html
• https://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-million-users-11000-cores-an.html
• https://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/16/justintvs-live-video-broadcasting-architecture.html
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18760350 A simple guide to scaling to 10M users (with commentary from HackerNews)

Distributed Systems

• https://www.se-radio.net/2021/07/episode-470-l-peter-deutsch-on-the-fallacies-of-distributed-computing/
• https://www.codingblocks.net/podcast/transactions-in-distributed-systems/
• https://www.se-radio.net/2015/11/se-radio-episode-241-kyle-kingsbury-on-consensus-in-distributed-systems
• https://www.se-radio.net/2017/02/se-radio-episode-282-donny-nadolny-on-debugging-distributed-systems
• https://www.se-radio.net/2017/03/se-radio-episode-285-james-cowling-on-dropboxs-distributed-storage-system
• https://www.se-radio.net/2010/03/episode-157-hadoop-with-philip-zeyliger
• https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/02/18/go-networking-with-sneha-inguva/
• https://blog.golang.org/waza-talk Concurrency is not parallelism by Rob Pike at Waza 2013
• https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Hoare78.pdf (Tony Hoare on Communicating Sequential Processes)

PAXOS

• https://bwlampson.site/Slides/PaxosABCDAbstract.htm
• https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf (Leslie Lamport on Paxos)
• https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf (Leslie Lamport on Paxos Simplified)
• • https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2016/12/paxos-simple-Copy.pdf

Security

• Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier
• The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications by Michal Zalewski
• https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/52/ (Magecart: credit card skimming and websites)
• https://www.wired.com/story/confessions-marcus-hutchins-hacker-who-saved-the-internet/

History

• https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/hans-peter-luhn-and-the-birth-of-the-hashing-algorithm
• https://segment.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-the-uuid/
• Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000ncmw Alan Turing
• https://guykawasaki.com/steve-wozniak/ Apple hardware wizard
• https://urchin.biz (pre-history of google analytics)
• https://www.cake.co/conversations/VXHSjBG/the-untold-origin-story-of-ebay-that-i-lived-and-the-times-that-could-have-killed-it
• https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1142065 (Werner Vogels about AWS 2006)
• https://www.se-radio.net/2015/07/episode-232-mark-nottingham-on-http2/
• https://http2-explained.haxx.se/en/part2

Artificial Intelligence

• https://www.wired.com/story/eight-google-employees-invented-modern-ai-transformers-paper/
• https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-dawn-of-the-ai-era
• https://lexfridman.com/gustav-soderstrom/ (AI in spotify music)

Career

• https://www.se-radio.net/2022/06/episode-515-swizec-teller-on-becoming-a-senior-engineer/
• https://rutar.org/writing/how-to-build-a-personal-webpage-from-scratch/ Create yourself a blog ("web log")
• https://danluu.com
• https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ ("I could build that in a weekend")
• https://charity.wtf
• https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Interesting Ideas

• https://changelog.com/gotime/132 (The trouble with databases)

• https://www.se-radio.net/2010/11/episode-169-memory-grid-architecture-with-nati-shalom

• https://lexfridman.com/david-patterson/ RISC (reduced instruction set computer)

• https://blog.devtrovert.com/p/go-get-go-mod-tidy-commands

• https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/techmeme-ride-home/id1355212895 (daily tech news)

Game Theory

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h75xp In our time: game theory
• https://ncase.me/trust/ (interactive game theory for prisoner's dilemma)
• https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/golden-rule (game theory in practice)

Papers and Articles of Huge Ideas

• http://www.essrl.wustl.edu/~jao/itrg/shannon.pdf (Claude Shannon on Communication)

• https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/time-clocks.pdf (Leslie Lamport on Time)

• https://bwlampson.site/33-Hints/WebPage.html (Butler Lampson on Hints for Computer System Design 1983)

• • https://news.microsoft.com/stories/people/butler-lampson.html

• https://bwlampson.site/10-SPEGuestEditorial/WebPage.html (1972: "Almost everyone who uses a pencil will use a computer")

• https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/10/42360-retrospective-an-axiomatic-basis-for-computer-programming/fulltext (C.A.R. Hoare on formal verification)

• https://www.usenix.org/system/files/nsdi20-paper-agache.pdf AWS Lambdas are powered by Firecracker OS

• • https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/03/02/firecracker/