charlax/professional-programming

Professional Programming is a curated reading list for software engineers who want to grow beyond just writing code. It collects books, articles, and talks that the repository maintainer has personally found valuable, organized into dozens of topic categories covering nearly every aspect of software engineering work, from low-level algorithms and databases to career growth, team communication, incident response, system architecture, and engineering management. The list is deliberately selective rather than exhaustive, meaning it only includes resources the author considers genuinely useful rather than trying to catalog everything that exists. Topics range from very technical subjects like compilers, garbage collection, and distributed systems, to softer skills like public speaking, writing clearly, managing technical debt, and maintaining work-life balance. There are also sections on newer topics like large language models and agentic coding. Each entry is a link with a brief label, and icons indicate whether it is a book, video, presentation, or research paper, with star markers for must-reads. You would use this repository as a long-term reference to direct your professional development. When you want to level up on a specific area, such as code review practices, designing reliable systems, or understanding how databases work internally, you can browse the relevant section and find starting points that experienced engineers have already vetted as worth your time. It requires no installation or tooling, it is a plain list of external links. The repository is labeled as Python in the language field, though that appears to reflect minor utility scripts; the content itself is language-agnostic career development material for any software engineer.