Bookmarks

Orosz wrote this over four years after leaving Uber. Junior to staff, all in one book. I wish someone handed me this in 2020 instead of me figuring it out the hard way.

Before this book, "staff engineer" was just a title to me. Larson made it concrete — what you actually do, how you set direction, why alignment matters. The Stripe and Slack stories helped.

If Larson is the map, Reilly is the field manual. How to run projects across teams, how to think big-picture, how to actually help people grow. Less inspirational, more useful.

Risk-driven architecture. You design proportional to what can go wrong. Stopped me from over-engineering low-stakes features and under-designing the parts that actually mattered.

A novel about an IT disaster. Read it in two sittings. DevOps and Theory of Constraints finally clicked for me through the story, not from slides at a conference.

The book Phoenix Project is based on. Manufacturing, not software — but the bottleneck thinking applies everywhere. Read Phoenix Project first, then this to understand the theory underneath.

Frontend engineer reading a distributed systems book — sounds weird, but after this I stopped writing client code that fights the backend.

I picked this up around 2021, three years into my career. Thought I knew JS. Was wrong. Closures, prototypes, the event loop — Kyle Simpson explains what actually happens at the engine level.

Starts with flashlights and Morse code, ends with you understanding how a CPU works. Pairs well with CS50.

I check this before making career moves. Hiring trends, comp data, big tech culture from someone who was in the room at Uber.

Real stories from staff engineers at Stripe, Slack, Dropbox. Not theory — how they actually spend their days.

Where we settle arguments about Core Web Vitals and accessibility at work. Source of truth for web platform stuff.

Deep JS and TC39 proposals explained clearly. When a new ECMAScript feature drops, Axel has the best writeup before anyone else.

Joel Spolsky co-founded Stack Overflow and Trello. His old posts on hiring, specs, and the Joel Test aged better than most software books. Still relevant 20 years later.

Been reading it since I started coding. Long-form front-end articles that go deeper than the average dev.to post.

Best CSS explanations on the internet. Interactive demos that make flexbox and grid click. I send his stuff to every dev I mentor.

I uninstalled Spotlight, Alfred, and three menu bar apps the day I set this up. Clipboard history alone saves me 20 minutes a day. Pure Love ❤️

Daily planner for standups, idea backlog for side projects, and my brag doc for performance reviews. Markdown + calendar + tasks in one app.

I love WebStorm, but PhpStorm gives me built-in database tools like DataGrip. One IDE for code and DB queries. Worth it for that alone.

VS Code fork with AI baked in. I switch between this and PhpStorm depending on the project. Good for quick edits and AI-assisted prototyping.

Warms the screen color at night. Small thing, but my eyes stopped hurting after late coding sessions.

Built this bookmarks page with it. Refactoring, tests, PR drafts. It reads repo structure first, which is why I trust it with real code.

My fallback when Claude tokens run out. GPT 5.3 on Codex Extra High is solid.

My rubber duck 🦆. Architecture decisions, RFC drafts, thinking through tradeoffs before bringing them to the team.

Replaced Google for technical and daily searches.

How I pick which model to use. Blind Elo rankings from real users, not marketing benchmarks.

Took this years into my career. Filled gaps in algorithms and memory that self-teaching left. Malan is the best lecturer I have seen.

My go-to when I need to go deep on one thing. Their TypeScript and system design workshops are particularly good.

Go, Python, algorithms, distributed systems. I use it to get outside my frontend bubble. Helps me talk to backend engineers without guessing.

Hands-on container, networking, and Linux labs. The kind of infra knowledge that makes you dangerous in a good way during incident calls.

Where I finally understood generics and conditional types. The gap between "using TS" and "designing type-safe APIs" closed here.

Built our testing culture at MacPaw around this. Static analysis through E2E. I still link it when onboarding new people.

Gergely Orosz on big tech culture, comp, and hiring. I read this before making career decisions.

Weekly React news. My react-rerender post got picked up here. Nice to be on both sides — reader and featured author.

Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski. Good energy, real depth. I listen on the way to the gym.

Every Friday. Best JS roundup out there. Subscribed since 2019, still open every issue. Some of my posts ended up here too.

JS newsletter that is actually fun to read. Never boring.

Full Ukrainian translation of the 24.6k-star testing guide. 50+ best practices without Google Translate mangling the code examples.

Official Ukrainian translator for both annual surveys. They shape how the industry tracks adoption — now accessible to Ukrainian devs.