CTO Reading List
Essential Reading
- The Mythical Man-Month - The Classic. 50 years old, and many still haven’t learnt the core lesson: communication overhead is huge, and piling resources into projects often has the opposite impact to what you want.
- The Agile Manifesto - I still reread this once a quarter, and still get insights from it.
Product
- Don’t Make Me Think - advice on how to present users information clearly, and how to get ‘real’ feedback on existing interfaces.
Architecture
- Working Effectively with Legacy Code - I love the author’s definition of legacy code: “Code without unit tests”. You could be writing legacy code today! Great advice for how to deal with black box applications without tests (or even documentation).
People & Engineering Management
- Peopleware - many modern articles and books reveal insights that were described in Peopleware long ago. Save yourself time and go to the source.
- An Elegant Puzzle - Will Larson is a modern engineering manager who writes beautifully, and always gives practical advice.
Collections
- Essays on programming I think about a lot - great collection of gold articles