The Best Articles in Software Engineering
The most useful articles in Software Engineering from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
Top 5 Software Engineering Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Software Engineering by Refind users.
What is ...?
New to Software Engineering? These articles make an excellent introduction.
A Beginner's Guide to Scaling to 11 Million+ Users on Amazon's AWS
How do you scale a system from one user to more than 11 million users? Joel Williams , Amazon W...
How to ...?
How to Tool for Developer Productivity
Find out how to develop effective tooling in an efficient manner including build vs buy and success metrics for developer satisfaction & productivity
How to think about task estimation
Task estimation is hard because you don't actually know what task estimation is. Let me fix that for you.
How to maintain engineering velocity as you scale
Faire’s engineering team grew from five to over 100 engineers in three years. Throughout this growth, we were able to sustain our pace of engineering execution by adhering to four guiding principles.
How to plan?
How to plan? How hard could it be? 4k words scribbled down on a sunny October afternoon for people in tech observing the Season’s Traditional Annual Planning Process, inspired by a recent interview…
How to Build Software like an SRE
I’ve been doing this “reliability” stuff for a little while now (~5 years), at companies ranging from about 20 developers to over 2,000. I’ve always cared primarily about the software elements I…
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Software Engineering on Refind.
Agile Coaching (AC) at Spotify
At Spotify, change is a constant, and our agile coaches are here to help teams and leaders thrive as we evolve. With agile principles famously part of our DNA, Spotify doesn’t need “transformation…
Evaluating Managers: 5 heuristics to measure managerial impact
Measuring a manager’s impact is hard since outcomes take time. The manager takes full responsibility for the team – be it stagnation, execution woes, poor collaboration, churn, or a lac…
«five measures: execution, strategic vision, people management, team growth, and organizational influence»
How Good Documentation Can Improve Productivity
Good documentation has many benefits, but first and foremost it boosts engineers’ productivity. Here are a few tips to encourage a strong writing culture.
We invested 10% to pay back tech debt; Here's what happened
Why and how we continuously invested the team bandwidth to pay back tech debt and what were the results?
12 resolutions for programmers
It’s important for programmers to continuously challenge themselves in order to avoid creative and technical stagnation. In the spirit of the new year, back in 2012, I compiled twelve month-sized…
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Software Engineering—all under 10 minutes.
Microservices Explained for Product Managers
One of the first introductions product manager might get into the world of architectural design is the concept of microservices. But what exactly are they?
The GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin
There are so many brilliant posts on GPT-3, demonstrating what it can do, pondering its consequences, vizualizing how it works. With all these out there, it still took a crawl through several papers…
Being an Introverted Leader
Shared by 3185, including Stephanie A Kowalski
«Consistency in helping other people in small acts build up to be more powerful than punctual spotlights on specific occasions.»
On the team as a system
How humans work together to build software
«everything we’re working on in tech now like lean, kanban, kaizen, agile, etc, are things that car companies have already been working on and proving out for decades.»
Resources for navigating complex leadership work
For a decade now, I’ve been writing and sharing free tools, templates, and how-tos for managers. My hope is, of course, that these have all been useful for y...
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Software Engineering.
Investing in Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide for Startups
David Nunez, an early hire at Stripe and Uber, shares his step-by-step playbook for establishing good internal documentation habits at your startup. He unpacks his tested tactics for creating a…
The Web’s Next Transition
Web is made up of technologies that got started over 25 years ago. Now, we are transitioning to a new and improved architecture for building web applications.
Hard things in Computer Science
If you’ve more than a couple of years of experience in IT, you probably have stumbled upon the following quote: There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. — Phil Karlton Then, because it’s such a great quote, it evolved: There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) August 31, 2014 However, I think that the initial quote is
Software Engineering
Today I will share some of the software engineering soft skills I have learned from my first 10 years on Google Chrome, where I am a Senior Staff Engineering...
«As engineers, we can sometimes rush to solve a problem right away so it feels like we're making progress or looks like we're being responsive to stakeholders»
Devpod: Improving Developer Productivity at Uber with Remote Development
In this blog, we share how we improved the daily edit-build-run developer experience using DevPods, our remote development environment. We will start with some of the initial challenges, the pain…
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Software Engineering, including:
Jason Fried
Founder & CEO at 37signals (makers of Basecamp and HEY). Non-serial entrepreneur, serial author. No DMs, email me at jason@hey.com.

timoreilly
Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media. Watching the alpha geeks, sharing their stories, helping the future unfold.

DHH
Creator of Ruby on Rails, Co-owner & CTO of 37signals (Basecamp & HEY), NYT best-selling author, and Le Mans 24h class-winner. No DMs, email: dhh@hey.com
steve blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford and Columbia
Martin Fowler
Author on Software Development. Works for Thoughtworks. Also hikes, watches theater, and plays modern board games. He/him. @mfowler@toot.thoughtworks.com
Publications
We monitor hundreds of publications, blogs, newsletters, and news sources in Software Engineering, including:
freeCodeCamp.org
We're a community of millions of people who are building new skills and getting new jobs together. A 501(c)(3) public charity. Tweets by @abbeyrenn.
Uber
Go with ease ➡️ Go with friends ➡️ Go with confidence ➡️ Go anywhere 🚗 For customer support contact @Uber_Support
Martin Fowler
Author on Software Development. Works for Thoughtworks. Also hikes, watches theater, and plays modern board games. He/him. @mfowler@toot.thoughtworks.com
Quanta Magazine
Big ideas in science and math. Because you want to know more. Launched by @SimonsFdn. 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. http://quantamagazine.org
Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow empowers the world to develop technology through collective knowledge.
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Every day Refind picks 5 links from around the web for every user, tailored to the user’s interests. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful. We favor timeless pieces—links with long shelf-lives, articles that are still relevant one month, one year, or even ten years from now. These lists of the best resources on any topic are the result of years of careful curation.
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How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Which sources does Refind monitor in Software Engineering?
We monitor hundreds of sources in Software Engineering, including freeCodeCamp.org, Uber, Martin Fowler, Quanta Magazine, Stack Overflow, and many more.
Who are the thought leaders in Software Engineering?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Software Engineering, including Jason Fried, timoreilly, DHH, steve blank, Martin Fowler.
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