A personally curated roadmap for career growth as a software engineer.
I originally created this list as a personal reference to answer questions about career growth and improving technical skills.
I’ve read all these books and articles, and strongly recommend them for anyone looking to grow their career as a software engineer.
This list is organized into topics.
Must-reads for all levels
These books are must-reads for software engineers at any level. I’ve read each of them multiple times and continue to reference them regularly.
📘 Release It! - Best practices for building production-ready products. ~3 years’ worth of real-world experience in one book. (Also Design It! )
📘 The Little Prover - How can you know your software is correct and not just passing tests?
📝 refactoring.guru - Quick reference guides for common design patterns and code smells.
🎙️ Lenny’s Podcast - Focuses on product management in tech. Invaluable podcast for anyone working with a PM.
📘 Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track
📘 Building Microservices (O’Reilly) - Concepts for building distributed systems at scale.
📘 Building Event-Driven Microservices (O’Reilly) - Patterns for working with asyncronous data at scale.
📘 Distributed Systems - Building systems that scale (especially good for enterprise or big tech/FAANG).
📘 Designing Data-Intensive Applications (O’Reilly) - Practical design patterns for working with data-intensive, large-scale products.
Resources specific to engineering managers.
📘 The Manager’s Path - A guide to growing your career as a manager.