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.
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.
How to Build Trust
What are the major management behaviors that can help build trust? Management books often cover the importance of trust, but abstractly. There’s precious little writing about the nuts and bolts, the…
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.
Open doors, management styles, and the life of a CTO 💡
Monday Ideas — Edition #75
Psychology of Speed: A Guide to Perceived Performance
Is it possible to define human perception with a handful of metrics? Learn how people comprehend time, and use this knowledge to make even longer waits feel less frustrating.
It's all just leadership after all
Managers and senior individual contributors: it's all the same.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Software Engineering—all under 10 minutes.
Manage Your Capacity, Not Your Time
We obsess over managing our time. However, we should focus on managing our capacity instead: it's our ability to do our best work.
4 Engineering Slides CEOs Love (That You Can Have For Free)
Never stress out before meeting your boss again.
The Worst Programmer I Know
The great thing about measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers. I want to tell you about the worst programmer I know, and why I fought to keep him in the…
Bottlenecks vs Bandpass
Bottlenecks are famous for slowing things down but did you know they are also terrible at ensuring attention is put in the areas it is most needed?
Three Dimensions of Developer Productivity
A simple way to conceptualize developer productivity.
«response to McKinsey’s article, I think this paper offers a simpler (and complementary) path for understanding and measuring productivity. »
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Software Engineering.
Performance & Compensation (for Eng Execs).
Uber’s original performance process was called “T3B3” and was remarkably simple: write the individuals top 3 strengths, and top 3 weaknesses, and share the feedback with them directly in person. There…
Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications
A reference architecture for the LLM app stack. It shows the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and tech companies.
Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey
Shared by 337
A developer's guide to prompt engineering and LLMs
Prompt engineering is the art of communicating with a generative AI model. Learn how to build with LLMs and how we built GitHub Copilot.
Prompt Engineering vs. Blind Prompting
Shared by 718, including Alexander Seifert, Chris Heilmann codepo8@toot.cafe, Simon Fossom, Matt Schlicht, Nico Müller 🇺🇦
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.
Tim O'Reilly
Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media. Watching the alpha geeks, sharing their stories, helping the future unfold. Didn't pay for a blue check, cannot make it go away
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
Martin Fowler
Author on Software Development. Works for Thoughtworks. Also hikes, watches theater, and plays modern board games. He/him. @mfowler@toot.thoughtworks.com
steve blank
Customer Development & Secret History, Teaching at Stanford and Columbia
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.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Who are the thought leaders in Software Engineering?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Software Engineering, including Jason Fried, Tim O'Reilly, DHH, Martin Fowler, steve blank.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
Can I submit a link?
Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).
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When you’re logged-in, you can flag any link via the «More» (...) menu. You can also report problems via email to hello@refind.com
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