The Best Articles in Software Engineering
The most useful articles and videos 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 in 2023 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (ex-COO of Stripe)
Claire Hughes Johnson is the former COO at Stripe where she helped scale the company from a small startup to the legendary company it is today. She also spen...
The disease of process people
Lenny Rachitsky interviews world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover concrete, actionable, and tactical advice to help you build, launch, and...
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 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 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 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 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.
The complicated parts of leadership: Betting on people
In this series of short stories, I share tricky situations I’ve encountered while leading teams. These experiences have taught me invaluable leadership lessons and greatly influenced my manag…
Measuring Flow and Focus
Focus time is a positive predictor of flow.
Architecture Principles: An approach to effective decision making in software architecture
Are you a software architect and often find it difficult to make architecture decisions in your team? This article shows you how to use architecture principles to make effective decisions in your…
Interviewing engineering executives.
Earlier I wrote about getting hired as an Engineering executive, and it’s perhaps even more important to discuss the opposite question: how should you interview and evaluate Engineering executives? As…
Lehman’s Laws of Software Evolution
In the world of software engineering, the Lehman's Laws of Software Evolution are widely recognized as a fundamental framework for understan...
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Software Engineering—all under 10 minutes.
90% of My Skills Are Now Worth $0
...but the other 10% are worth 1000x
GitHub Copilot X: The AI-powered developer experience
GitHub Copilot is evolving to bring chat and voice interfaces, support pull requests, answer questions, and adopt OpenAI's GPT-4.
Offline Is Just Online With Extreme Latency
I just finished watching “Local-first Software” by Peter Van Hardenberg and loved it! He talks about changing the paradigm we’re currently in where a program runs in the cloud and we look at it when…
TBM 212: A Problem vs. The Problem
Unexpected time to write today… (I wrote a post about Product-Reality Fit yesterday). Have you ever been in a discussion about the definition of a problem and found the whole conversation going in…
The Right Mindset for Fixing Software Bugs
You’re faced with a software bug, there are two routes you can take: Google for a fix -> apply it and verify it’s working -> move on Google for a fix -> apply…
«What really matters is training your mind to question things, to not accept an answer if it doesn’t make sense, to have a mindset that can make you understand the tool you’re using on a deeper level»
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Software Engineering.
Prompt Engineering vs. Blind Prompting
Shared by 589, including Nico Müller 🇺🇦, Matt Schlicht, Alexander Seifert
Why am I not terrified of AI?
Every week now, it seems, events on the ground make a fresh mockery of those who confidently assert what AI will never be able to do, or won’t do for centuries if ever, or is incoherent even …
How to plan as an engineering executive.
Some years back, I interviewed a senior leader for an engineering role, and asked them a question about planning. I enjoyed their response, “Ah yes, the ‘P’ word, planning.” That answer captured an…
"Clean" Code, Horrible Performance
Many programming "best practices" taught today are performance disasters waiting to happen.
Project Management for Software Engineers
At some point in your career you will be asked to manage a project. This can be intimidating, it can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. We can leverage some time-honoured techniques, and adapt them…
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Software Engineering, including:
Jason Fried
Founder & (sometimes) CEO at 37signals (makers of Basecamp and HEY). Non-serial entrepreneur, serial author. No DMs, email me at jason@hey.com.

Tim O'Reilly
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
Joel Spolsky
co-founder of Fog Creek, Trello, Stack Overflow, Glitch, and http://HASH.ai - I have moved to @spolsky@blackrock.city on mastodon
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.
Will Larson
CTO at @cartainc. Author of Staff Engineer and An Elegant Puzzle. Currently writing The Engineer Executive's Primer w/O'Reilly.
Uber
Go with ease ➡️ Go with friends ➡️ Go with confidence ➡️ Go anywhere 🚗 For customer support contact @Uber_Support
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
Martin Fowler
Author on Software Development. Works for Thoughtworks. Also hikes, watches theater, and plays modern board games. He/him. @mfowler@toot.thoughtworks.com
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. 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.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
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The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
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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, Will Larson, Uber, Quanta Magazine, Martin Fowler, and many more.
Who are the thought leaders in Software Engineering?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Software Engineering, including Jason Fried, Tim O'Reilly, DHH, steve blank, Joel Spolsky.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
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