charlax/professional-programming

Releasing & deploying

• How to deploy software, Zach Holman
• BlueGreenDeployment, Martin Fowler
• Move fast and break nothing, Zach Holman
• 🏙 Move fast and don't break things, Google
• Shipping to Production, The Pragmatic Programmer
• SemVer - Semantic Versioning
• CalVer - Calendar Versioning
• Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You
• Version numbers: how to use them?
• Production Readiness Checklist, Gruntwork
• Checklist: what had to be done before deploying microservices to production
• Things end users care about but programmers don't: includes colors, formatting, themes, integrations, UX, compatibility, operations.
• Flipping out, Flickr. One of the first articles about feature flags.
• Feature Flags, Toggles, Controls, a website documenting feature flags, from Launch Darkly.

Principles

• This page is not meant to be comprehensive. I am trying to keep it light and not too overwhelming.
• The selection of articles is opinionated.
• I don't necessarily agree with or endorse every single line that is written in every single one of those resources. The same applies to their authors: I don't endorse everything each of those authors
• 🧰 : list of resources
• 🎞 : video/movie extract/movie/talk
• 🏙 : slides/presentation
• ⭐️ : must-read

Design (OO modeling, architecture, patterns, anti-patterns, etc.)

One of the absolute references on architecture is Martin Fowler: checkout his Software Architecture Guide.

• 📖 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
• And their nefarious nemesis Resign Patterns
• 📖 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 cle
• 📖 Game Programming Patterns: a book about design, sequencing, behavioral patterns and much more by Robert Nystrom explained through the medium of game programming. The book is also free to read online
• 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 componenti
• Domain-driven design, Wikipedia.
• On the Spectrum of Abstraction 🎞, Cheng Lou
• The “Bug-O” Notation, Dan Abramov
• Antipatterns
• Inheritance vs. composition: a concrete example in Python. Another slightly longer one here. One last one, in Python 3.
• Composition Instead Of Inheritance

System architecture

• 🧰 ⭐️ donnemartin/system-design-primer: learn how to design large scale systems. Prep for the system design interview.
• 🧰 A Distributed Systems Reading List
• 🧰 Foundational distributed systems papers
• 🧰 Services Engineering Reading List
• 🧰 System Design Cheatsheet
• ⭐️ karanpratapsingh/system-design: learn how to design systems at scale and prepare for system design interviews
• A Distributed Systems Reading List
• Distributed Systems Classics
• 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.
• 📖 Building Microservices, Sam Newman (quite complete discussion of microservices)
• 📖 Designing Data-Intensive Applications
• 📖 Building Secure and Reliable Systems, Google, (free online). Very complete book.
• Design for security & reliability
• Design tradeoffs

Configuration

• The downsides of JSON for config files, Martin Tournoij.
• Can't add comments
• Excessive quotation and syntax noise
• Using DC (declarative configuration) to control logic is often not a good idea.
• Your configs suck? Try a real programming language
• Most modern config formats suck
• Use a real programming language
• Code rant: The Configuration Complexity Clock
• I’m not saying that it’s never appropriate to implement complex configuration, a rules-engine or a DSL, Indeed I would jump at the chance of building a DSL given the right requirements, but I am sayin
• Initially there was hope that non-technical business users would be able to use the GUI to configure the application, but that turned out to be a false hope; the mapping of business rules into the eng

Table of Contents

• Professional Programming - about this list
• Principles
• Contributing to this list
• Must-read books
• Must-read articles
• Other general material and list of resources
• Other lists
• Accounting
• Agentic coding
• Algorithm and data structures
• API design & development
• Attitude, habits, mindset
• Procrastination
• Authentication/authorization

Must-read books

• 📖 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 Pragmatic 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 softw
• 📖 Structure and interpretation of Computer Programs (free): One of the most influential textbooks in Computer Science (written and used at MIT), SICP has been influential in CS education. Byte recomme
• 📖 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. - an
• 🧰 vhf/free-programming-books
• 🧰 EbookFoundation/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.
• Things I Learnt The Hard Way
• Spec first, then code
• Tests make better APIs
• Future thinking is future trashing
• Documentation is a love letter to your future self
• Sometimes, it's better to let the application crash than do nothing
• Understand and stay away of cargo cult
• "Right tool for the job" is just to push an agenda
• Learn the basics functional programming
• ALWAYS use timezones with your dates
• ALWAYS use UTF-8