KRISTJÁN ODDSSON · SOFTWARE ENGINEER · ICELAND RSS↗

READING
LIST.

№ 01 · INTRODUCTION

I have a high standard for books I'll generally recommend to other software engineers. I read a bunch of other books but they might be just OK or more specific so I don't want to recommend them.

I plan on updating this list over time.

Crafting Interpreters

https://craftinginterpreters.com

Free-to-read-online book on writing your own interpreter from tokenizing to evaluating code. The book walks you through writing a interpreter for the "Lox" programming language. My implementation is located at https://github.com/koddsson/lox-interpreter.

Site Reliability Engineering

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27968891-site-reliability-engineering

Probably the origin of the term "Site Reliability Engineering". Useful to most software engineering and not just SREs.

The Grug Brained Developer

https://grugbrain.dev/

A no-nonsense take on modern day software engineering with a focus on simplicity and how to handle communication with different stakeholders.

Software Engineering at Google

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48816586-software-engineering-at-google

A great resource for software engineers based off learned lessons from Google. Pretty down-to-earth suggestions with great rationales behind each one. Has suggestions on how to implement systems and solutions to your codebase.

Building a resilient frontend using progressive enhancement

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressive-enhancement

A great resource for why someone might write a service with progressive enhancements. The rationale is solid and comes from a trusted source.

How GitHub Engineering communicates

https://github.com/github/how-engineering-communicates/blob/main/how-github-engineering-communicates.md

My time as a GitHub engineer really shaped my professional (and personal) life. While mostly focused on the work at GitHub the guide has a ton of good information that you can adapt to your organization. The guide is a especially great resource on asynchronous work which often gets conflated with remote work.