The Best Articles in Software Engineering
The most useful articles and videos in Software Engineering from around the web, curated by thought leaders and our community.
Refind focuses on timeless pieces and updates the list whenever new, must-read articles or videos are discovered.
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 2024 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...
"Lessons from building GitHub code search" by Luke Francl (Strange Loop 2023)
In this talk, I'll share some lessons we learned building a high-performance code search engine, designed to meet GitHub's large scale. GitHub code search is...
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 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 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 "missing" graph datatype already exists. It was invented in the '70s
This post is a response to/inspired by The Hunt for the Missing Data Type (HN) by Hillel Wayne. I suggest reading his article first. Why do programming languages lack built-in support for graphs and…
Increase Test Fidelity By Avoiding Mocks
This article was adapted from a Google Testing on the Toilet (TotT) episode. You can download a printer-friendly version of this TotT e...
Meta's new LLM-based test generator is a sneak peek to the future of development
Meta's TestGen-LLM is a sneak peek to the future of developer productivity: specialized, orchestrated, and rigorously filtered.
Design Patterns that Encourage Junk Data
A post from Remy on Mastodon recently got me thinking: Been picking up some of the jsbin archive work. Today, there's currently 62 millions bins stored. The last full copy archive I ran (which…
How to use Server Timing to get backend transparency from your CDN
Backend time can have a big impact on Largest Contentful Paint and other metrics. Here's how to use server-timing headers to find out what's happening inside the black box of Time to First Byte.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Software Engineering—all under 10 minutes.
How To Fix Broken Teams
Most teams break in very similar ways. And, even more luckily, most teams can be fixed in similar ways. So, let’s talk about diagnosing and fixing the most broken of teams.
«One of the first things a new manager should look to do is fix broken processes. Broken teams have lots of broken processes with lots of symptoms that would be fixed by better process,»
How we work asynchronously
Our secret to shipping lots while working remotely
Navigating ambiguity.
Perceiving the layers of context in problems will unlock another stage of career progression as a Staff-plus engineer, but there’s at least one essential skill to develop afterwards: navigating…
Biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry
My top 3 biggest productivity killers and my solutions to them + 🎁 BONUS: one additional: multi-tasking
4 simple software engineering habits that transformed my productivity
A breakdown of 4 simple software engineering and coding habits that improved my productivity. These include keyboard shortcuts, learning to say no, reaching flow state faster, and keeping a big book…
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Software Engineering.
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…
«Do summarize and distill important context for your team; don’t just be a firehose.Do answer questions and go into more detail if team members ask»
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.
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.
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Software Engineering, including:
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.
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).
How can I report a problem?
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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Keep Learning
Learn something new, guided by experts. Deep Dives are carefully hand-curated series of time-tested articles and videos from around the web.
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