Reading List
This is a curated library of the books that have been most influential in shaping my career - not just for coding, but for understanding strategy, scaling teams, and achieving high level technical influence.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters - Allowed me to understand the difference between goals, vision, and strategy, what bad strategy looks like, and how I can align my work with the company strategy.
Thinking In Systems - Essential for debugging complex, distributed systems and organizational processes. It teaches you to look beyond symptoms and find the points of highest leverage.
Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track - Before this book, I didn’t really understand what Staff Engineers get up to. This gave me an invaluable insight into their roles and has motivated me to aim for this career track.
The Staff Engineers Path - The most practical guide for leveling up. It clearly outlines the distinct responsibilities of Staff Engineers and gives you a playbook for proving your impact at that level. I will most likely reread this once I am staff.
Design Patterns - Platform agnostic and an important read for any highly technical engineer imo. It gives you a common vocabulary and a toolkit for building scalable, maintainable architectures.
Team Topologies - Crucial for modern engineering organizations. It shows how team structure directly impacts architecture and how to design teams for optimal flow and reduced cognitive load
Product Management’s Sacred Seven - While written for PMs, some sections on Data and UX design are super insightful for collaborating better and having consistent, high-impact input from a product perspective. I’ve read a lot of product books and this is certainly the most practical I’ve come across. Highly recommended for strengthening the Eng-PM relationship.