Reading List

Personal references, recurring influences, and things I still recommend

This is not meant to be a definitive syllabus or a fashionable list of whatever is currently circulating online. It is a small, personal shelf of things I have read, returned to, or still find useful.

Some links are old. That is partly the point. A good reading list should preserve durable influences, not pretend that everything worthwhile was published last week.

Engineering Judgement

  1. Things You Should Never Do, Part I, Joel Spolsky
  2. How to Write a Git Commit Message, Chris Beams
  3. The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
  4. Accelerate, Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim

ML, Search, And Data Systems

  1. The 5 Tribes of the ML World, Michaël Trazzi
  2. How Is Search Different Than Other Machine Learning Problems?, Doug Turnbull
  3. Stream Processing with Apache Flink, Fabian Hueske and Vasiliki Kalavri

Writers And Blogs I Still Check

  1. The Beautiful Mess, John Cutler
    I keep coming back to Cutler because his product writing is practical without being simplistic: advice grounded in experience, shaped by real teams, incentives, and messy systems.
  2. Renaissance Developer, Joe Schmetzer
    Joe was my mentor during my UBS years and is still an Extreme Programmer in the practical sense: he taught me the habits behind agile software development, TDD, pairing, small feedback loops, and engineering as a disciplined way of learning.
  3. OpenSource Connections, Doug Turnbull
    Doug is one of the clearest voices I have found on search relevance: he turns Solr, Elasticsearch, Lucene, learning to rank, and messy stakeholder judgement into practical engineering advice.
  4. The Morning Paper, Adrian Colyer
    Adrian’s archive is useful because he makes serious computer science papers digestible without stripping away the important ideas, which is exactly the bridge from research to practice I value.

General Favourites

  1. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
  2. Albert Camus, The Plague
  3. Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls
  4. Irvin D. Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure
  5. Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence
  6. Ernest Cline, Ready Player One