A curated reading list and personal knowledge base for building better software: Ruby on Rails, refactoring, performance, security, system design, AI engineering, and engineering leadership. Notes distilled from books, courses, and practice — with battle-tested book recommendations.
- Foundational Reading
- Design Patterns & Refactoring
- Performance
- System Design
- Security
- AI Engineering
- Leadership & Management
- Soft Skills
- Ruby
- Ruby on Rails
- YouTube Channels
- The Passionate Programmer - Chad Fowler
- Clean Code - Robert C. Martin
- The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - Martin Fowler
- Head First Design Patterns - Elisabeth Freeman & Kathy Sierra
- Design Patterns in Ruby - Russ Olsen
- Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (POODR) - Sandi Metz
- Performance Checklist - front-end, back-end, database, server, and monitoring tools
- High Performance Web Sites - Steve Souders
- The Complete Guide to Rails Performance
- Ruby Performance Optimization - Alexander Dymo
- System Design 101 - ByteByteGo
- Full-Stack Software Design & Architecture - Khalil Stemmler
- System Design Academy
- Awesome Scalability - Binh Nguyen
- Harvard CS50 Introduction to Cybersecurity
- Web Security - Stanford CS 253
- Security Architecture - YouTube playlist
- Rails Security Checklist - Eliot Sykes
- Awesome AWS Security
- The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws
- Hands-On Cybersecurity for Architects
- Computer Networking
LLM Fundamentals
Model Providers
Prompt Engineering
Embeddings
Vector Databases
- Vector Databases: from Embeddings to Applications - DeepLearning.AI
- Building Applications with Vector Databases - DeepLearning.AI
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Skills
Agents
LLM Evaluation & Observability
Books & Courses
- AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models - Chip Huyen
- Hands-On Large Language Models - Jay Alammar & Maarten Grootendorst
- OpenAI Cookbook
- DeepLearning.AI
- Claude Academy
- The Manager's Path - Camille Fournier
- HBR Leader's Handbook - Harvard Business Review
- The HBR Manager's Handbook - Harvard Business Review
- The Startup CTO's Handbook
- Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations - Nicole Forsgren et al.
- Bulletproof Problem Solving - McKinsey
- Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual - John Sonmez
- The Laws of Simplicity - John Maeda
- On Writing Well - William Zinsser
- The Ruby Programming Language - David Flanagan & Yukihiro Matsumoto
- The Ruby Way - Hal Fulton
- Eloquent Ruby - Russ Olsen
- Metaprogramming Ruby - Paolo Perrotta
- Ruby Best Practices - Gregory Brown