References.
This is the works cited page for the website. Individual notes link to these references where they were sourced from an author’s writing.
2025.
January.
- Ed Zitron, The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses’ Brains.
- Technology Connections, Old-Fashioned Rice Cookers Are Extremely Clever.
- Woodruff William, Be Aware of the Makefile Effect.
- David Wheeler, Review of Debugging.
- Ethan Siegel, Protons: Made of Quarks, but Ruled by Gluons.
- Fred Hebert, Queues Don’t Fix Overload.
- Sebastian Gebski, The Failed Promise of Domain-Driven Design.
- Jason Wong, Building a First Team Mindset.
- Sanjana Gajbhiye, Male and Female Brains.
- Sigal Samuel, You Can’t Optimize Your Way to Being a Good Person.
- Catherine Pearson, 6 Ways to Strengthen Your Relationships in 2023.
- Anita Hossain Choudhry and Mindy Zhang, The Best Managers Don’t Fix, They Coach.
- Jennifer Chu, Physicists Magnetize a Material with Light.
- Alex Russell, Frontend’s Lost Decade.
- Sergey Tselovalnikov, Six Sins of Platform Teams.
- Doc Norton, Tuckman Was Wrong!
- Peter Naur, Programming as Theory Building.
- Joshua Kaplan, A Mole Infiltrated the Highest Ranks of American Militias.
- Giacomo Bartolucci et al., Phase Behavior of Cacio and Pepe Sauce.
- Nicole Forsgren et al., The SPACE of Developer Productivity.
- Marilyn Haigh, Silent Meetings.
- Julius Seporaitis, What Can 75,000 Pull Requests Tell?
- Ethan Siegel, The One-Page Calendar That Changes How You View the Year.
2024.
December.
- Noah Davis, Cycle Time.
- Marianne Bellotti, Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts.
- George Guimarães, 5 Metrics Engineering Managers Can Extract from Pull Requests.
- Stiltsoft, How to Visualize Cycle Time / Lead Time.
- Noah Davis, What Analyzing 180,000 Pull Requests Taught Us About Shipping Faster.
- Adrian Colyer, The Evolution of Continuous Experimentation in Software Product Development.
- Jaime Bocanumenth, Five Organizational Models.
- Sandi Metz, The Wrong Abstraction.
- Sinan Ata, Rockstars vs Superstars.
- Patrick M. Lencioni, Make Your Values Mean Something.
- Douglas A. Ready and Emily Truelove, The Power of Collective Ambition.
- Julia Rozovsky, The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team.
- Derek Comartin, STOP Doing Dogmatic Domain Driven Design.
- Maarten Dalmijn, Shape Up vs Scrum.
- Richard Cook, How Complex Systems Fail.
- Brandur Leach, Implementing Stripe-like Idempotency Keys in Postgres.
October.
- RAPID®: Bain’s Tool to Clarify Decision Accountability.
- Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
- Charity Majors, Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder.
- Benjamin Artz, Amanda Goodall, and Andrew J. Oswald, If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You’re More Likely to Be Happy at Work.
- Ron Carucci, How Corporate Values Get Hijacked and Misused.
- Jade Rubick, Why and How to Do Skip Level 1-1s.
- Will Larson, Engineering Strategy Every Org Should Write.
- Will Larson, Good Engineering Strategy Is Boring.
- Richard Rumelt, The Perils of Bad Strategy.
September.
- David Graeber, Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!.
- Byron Katie, 4 Questions to Get out of a Negative Headspace, Stop Suffering, & Start Healing Now.
- Katie Mather, How You Perceive Time Reveals a Lot about You.
- Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, The New New Product Development Game.
- Abi Noda, Predicting Developer Attrition.
- Csaba Okrona, Demystifying Burnout.
- Benjamin Harris and Aliz Hammond, We Spent $20 To Achieve RCE And Accidentally Became The Admins Of .MOBI.
- Ron Jeffries, Dark Scrum.
August.
- Lynn Root, The Design of Everyday APIs.
- Alexandra Hoffer, Creating Processes for API Clarity and Consistency.
- Stay SaaSy, Standardizing.
- API Best Practices.
- Proto Best Practices.
- Kevin Dickinson, 3 Rules to Express Your Thoughts so That Everyone Will Understand You.
July.
- A Practical Guide to Executive Presence.
- Jakob Nielson, 10 Usability Heuristics for UI Design.
- Jade Rubick, Executive Presence Coaching.
June.
- Kevin Gary, To the Bored All Things Are Boring.
- Irina Stanescu, Growing Beyond Senior Levels in Engineer.
- Aria Beingessner, Mozilla’s Engineering Ladder.
May.
April.
- Ben Kuhn, Staring into the Abyss as a Core Life Skill.
- Louis Chew, The Steel Man Technique.
- Rach Smith, Reassessing the Morning Routine in 2023.
- Itamar Shatz, The Shirky Principle.
- Cate Hall, How to Be More Agentic.
- Shreyas Doshi, High Agency.
- Eliyahu Goldratt, Theory of Constraints.
- AoM, Towards a Philosophy of Household Management.
- Derek Sivers, Writing One Sentence per Line.
- Redowan Delowar, ETag and HTTP Caching.
March.
- Paul Asjes, Designing APIs for Humans: Object IDs.
- Derek Sivers, Cut out Everything That’s Not Surprising.
- Eric Raymond, Basics of the Unix Philosophy.
- AoM, 5BX.
- Jefferey Cave, The Evils of Sequential IDs.
- Jack Lindamood, Bipartite Composition.
- Vicki Boykis, Both Pyramids Are White.
- Fred Wynyk, Conway’s Law in Team Topolgies.
- Yuval Yeret, 4 Metrics To Visualize and Accelerate Flow.
- Derek Comartin, Event-Driven Architecture Lost Its Way.
February.
- Sam Thomas Davies, Failing Forward.
- Matthew Rocklin, Write Dumb Code.
- Tom Critchlow, Narrative Strategy.
- Charlotte Hu, Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning.
- Ninad Pathak, Your GitHub Pull Request Workflow Is Slowing Everyone Down.
- James Samuel, How to Get Good at Giving Feedback.
- Selena Simmons-Duffin, Your Appendix Is Not Useless.
- Greg Foster, The Ideal PR Is 50 Lines Long.
- Jason Cohen, Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias.
January.
- Maxwell Zeff, There’s More Proof That Return to Office Is Pointless.
- Adam Fishman, Debate Everything vs. Just Tell Me What To Build.
- Eirini Kalliamvakou, Good DevEx Increases Productivity.
- Crystal Lewis, Hire a Data Manager.
- Tom Critchlow, Don’t Give Advice, Be Useful.
- Crystal Lewis, Let’s Talk about Joins.
- Fernando Villalba, Don’t Destroy Silos, Transform Them.
- Johnathan & Melissa Nightingale, Director Means Something.
- Pier-Jean Malandrino, C4 Model Perspective.
- Bob Violino, 10 Ways to Destroy Developer Happiness.
- Tom Mahood, The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans.
- Derek Sivers, Benefits of a Daily Diary and Topic Journals.
- Julia Evans, Write a Brag Document.
- Jeff Haden, The Best Employees Focus on Content, Not Process.
2023.
December.
- Will Larson, Why Limiting Work-in-Progress Works.
- Sara Tortoli, Jobs-To-Be-Done.
- Sergey Faldin, All You Need Is To Make 1,000 Pots.
- Oskar Dudycz, From Relational Data To Events.
- Sam Davies, The Six Principles of Effective Writing.
- Leonardo Creed, The Most Valuable Trait of Top Software Engineers.
November.
- Remy Porter, The Therac-25 Incident.
- Chris Taylor, Every Self-Help Book Ever.
- Derek Sivers, First Follower Leadership Lessons.
- Veritasium, Testing the US Military’s Worst Idea.
- Arjun Narayan and George Fraser, Don’t Use Kafka as Your Primary Data Store.
- Jimmy Breck-McKye, Microfrontends Should Be Your Last Resort.
- Stay SaaSy, Stop Making People Make Up Their Mind.
- Henrique Vicente, You Don’t Need UUID.
- Neil Madden, Moving Away from UUIDs.
- Connect2id, Human-Friendly Identifiers.
- Rob Conery, A Better ID Generator For PostgreSQL.
- AoM, You Should Have 12 Favorite Problems.
September.
May.
April.
- Addy Osmani, Managing Complex Change.
- David Jenkins, Guillermo Del Toro on Noir and Horror.
- Henrik Kniberg, The Resource Utilization Trap.
- Kurzgesagt, The Star That Shouldn’t Exist.
- Sam Thomas Davies, The Four Commitments.
- Lara Hogan, Be a Thermostat, Not a Thermometer.
- Jade Rubick, Can This Ownership Exercise Improve How You Work with Others?
- Cedric Chin, Goodhart’s Law Isn’t as Useful as You Might Think.
- Jade Rubick, Engineering Manager vs. Tech Lead.
- Ryan Peterman, Why Engineers Need To Write.
March.
- Angela Giuffrida, Carbonara Is a US Dish.
- Jade Rubick, Completed Staff Work.
- Jade Rubick, Advice for New Directors.
- Jade Rubick, A History of Mini-Ms.
- Jade Rubick, Variations for Mini-M Management Support Groups.
- Jade Rubick, How to Implement Mini-M Support Groups.
- Jade Rubick, Uplevel Your Managers with Mini-M Support Groups.
- Jason Sachs, Why Amdahl’s Law is Misleading.
- Eric Schwitzgebel, If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious.
- KK Ottsen, They Are Preparing for War.
- Jade Rubick, Everyone Lies to Leaders.
- Vadim Kravcenko, Contracts You Should Never Sign.
- Don Wentworth, Bashō by Hass.
- Amos Wenger, Lies We Tell Ourselves to Keep Using Golang.
- Tim Carmody, Cistercian Numerals.
- Animation Obsessive, How to Paint Like Hayao Miyazaki.
- Clive Thompson, How I Use RSS To ‘Rewild’ My Attention.
February.
January.
2022.
December.
- Michael McIntyre, Goodhart’s Law.
- Basel Al-Sheikh Hussein, The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today.
- Evan Andrews, Sword of Damocles.
- William Morgan, The Generation Ship Model of Software Development.
- Nancy Friedman, Cunningham’s Law.
November.
- Robert Lucas, Econometric Policy Evaluation.
- Benoit Mandelbrot, How Long is the Cost of Britain?
- Lieberherr and Holland, Assuring Good Style for Object-Oriented Programs.
- Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach.
- Doc Norton, Escape Velocity.
- Aaron Gustafson, Understanding Progressive Enhancement.
- Seth Godin, Three Kinds of Forever.
- Nathaniel Davis, UX Design Practice Verticals.
- Will Larson, Staff Engineer.
- Ben Gremillion, Mobile-First Responsive Design.
October.
- Shin Takahashi, The Manga Guide to Statistics.
- Jasper Polak, McKinsey Presentations.
- Julia Evans, How to Spy on Your Programs with Strace.
- Trey Harris, The Case of the 500-Mile Email.
- George Dvorsky, What Is the Purpose of the Universe? Here Is One Possible Answer..
September.
August.
July.
- Robert Keidel, Seeing Organizational Patterns.
- Caleb Kruse, Seeing Blue.
- “I Have Dubbed It The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon”
- Ricial Dilig, Shokunin.
- Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz, Programming Perl.
June.
- Russell Ackoff, Continuous Improvement.
- Russell Ackoff, From Data to Wisdom.
- Will Larson, To Lead, You Have to Follow.
- Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law.
- Susanne and Andreas Bartel, The Official Guide to the Kanban Method.
- Jay H. Bernstein, The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy and Its Antithesis.
- Lyn Bond, Synthesizing.
- Abigail Bassett, The Art of Kakeibo.
- Arnold Zwicky, Why Are We so Illuded?
May.
April.
- Juvoni Beckford, Using Books to Navigate Life.
- Allen Wilson, Playing the Zettelkasten RPG Through Arbitrary Constraints.
- How, Exactly, Is Structure Supposed to Emerge?
January.
- Jakub Neander, How To Export PostgreSQL Query Output as CSV.
- AoM #756 with Will Storr, How the Desire for Status Explains (Pretty Much) Everything.
- AoM #734 with Brandon Warmke, How Moral Grandstanding Is Ruining Our Public Discourse.
- Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems.
2021.
December.
- Society of GK Chesterton, “Taking a Fence Down”.
- AoM #762 with Michael Hyatt, Prepare Now to Have Your Best New Year Ever.
- David Gray, Liminal Thinking.
- Ron Jeffries, Story Points Revisited.
- Camille Fournier, The Manager’s Path.
- Kurzgesagt, The Origin of Consciousness.
November.
- Sarah Drasner, Mistakes I’ve Made as an Engineering Manager.
- David Allen, Getting Things Done.
- Christopher Sirk, The History of Kaizen.
October.
- Sarah Drasner, The Importance of Career Laddering.
- Mile Oliver, Better Short Term Goals for New Engineering Hires.
- Elizabeth Saunders, 6 Causes of Burnout.
- Martin Fowler, What do you mean by ”event-driven”?
- Hal Elrod, The Miracle Morning.
September.
August.
- Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life.
- Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland, The Scrum Guide.
- Doanh Do, What Is Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)?
- Jeff Sutherland, Scrum.
- Willem-Jan Ageling, 7 Reasons Not to Use Scrum.
- Simon Sinek, Most Leaders Don’t Even Know the Game They’re In.
July.
- Thierry de Pauw, Shades of Conway’s Law.
- Dan Pink, The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.
- Nir Eyal, Hooked.
- Robert Burton, Where Science and Story Meet.
- Jeremiah Lee, Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals.
May.
- Nick deWilde, The Learning Loop of Knowledge Work.
- Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain Podcast.
- David Rock, Your Brain at Work.
- Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage.
- Dustin Gorski, When to Use Scrum?
- Brené Brown, Dare to Lead.
April.
March.
- Gary Neilson et al., 10 Principles of Organization Design.
- Robert Keidel, The Three Reasons to Hold a Meeting.
- Karla Segura Chavarría, Will Betelgeuse Go Hypernova?
- What it’s like inside of a black hole.
- Merve Emre, Secret History Of Myers-Briggs.
- Rouan Wilsenach, DevOpsCulture.
- Martin Fowler, MicroservicePrerequisites.
- Mark Forster, Noguchi Filing System.
January.
- Watts & Hertvik, Technical Debt: The Ultimate Guide.
- Steven Rogelberg, The Surprising Science of Meetings.
- Scaled Agile Framework, WSJF.
- Greg McKeown, Essentialism.