A curated list of articles & books that effected my thinking, updated periodically. They tend to live at the intersection of technology, community, & culture. They are in no particular order beyond their chronological headings. Linking something here doesn’t mean I endorse every thought in it, of course.
Mar 2021
- Things your manager might not know (Julia Evans)
- They can’t even fire us right (Jack Crosbie)
- Programming Sucks (Peter Huntwelch, 2014)
- Why project managers get no respect (Scott Berkun)
- On Context: The Cambridge School and Curt’s jacket (Leda Glyptis)
- Institutional Betrayal and Institutional Courage (Jennifer J Freyd, PhD)
- Charm Your Communities (Victoria Tran)
Feb 2021
- [Book] The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well (Michael Lopp)
- How Deflector became a media success (Margaret Sullivan, NYT)
- Reflecting on a year of Alpine Parrot (Alpine Parrot)
- Founding Growth Lead (Amazingly-composed job posting @ Commandot, via Jennifer Kim)
- 8 Interview Questions About Diversity & Inclusion Every Job Seeker Should Be Able to Answer (Kelli Newman Mason, TheMuse)
- How Avocode Improved Dev Process 10x with Shape Up (Josef Kettner)
- How money dictates design decisions (Jonas Downey, Hey.com)
- [Scrum] Why relative estimation beats planning poker (Joel Bancroft-Connors, Applied Frameworks)
- I’m a Short Afternoon Walk And You’re Putting Way Too Much Pressure On Me (Emily Delaney, McSweeney’s)
Jan 2021
- They left Mozilla to make the internet better. Now they’re spreading its gospel for a new generation (Anna Kramer, Protocol)
- Hotwire: HTML Over The Wire (Josh Graham)
- What Tracy Chou learned about online harassment while building an app to solve it (Anna Kramer, Protocol)
- The 5 Commandments of Naming Variables (Khalal Walker)
- We Are Not Special [Engineers vs Engineers] (Killel Wayne)
- Understanding Incidents: Three Analytics Traps (John Allspaw)
- Singletons and their use in WordPress (Carl Alexander)
- Expensify CEO David Barrett: ‘Most CEOs are not bad people, they’re just cowards’ (Benjamin Pimentel, Protocol)
- 21 Signs You or Your Organization May Be the White Moderate Dr. King Warned About (Vu Le, Non Profit AF)
- PHP 8.0: A Perfect Storm (Juliette Reinders Folmer, 24 Days In December)
- Twitter thread: Foundational work in regulating online speech (Alex Stamos)
- Make Boring Plans (Camille Fournier)
- Resilience engineering: Where do I start? (Lorin Hochstein)
- Conditions For Learning [Everyday, vs During Incidents] (Erik Hollnagel, HindSight)
- Meaningful Questions to Ask People Right Now (Marina Khidekel, Thrive Global)
- When Black Women Go From Office Pet to Office Threat (Erika Stallings)
- Error Budgets and the Legacy of Herbert Heinrich (Lorin Hochstein)
- Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine (Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic)
- [Shot] Video: Commercial Open Source Business Models (Brendan O’Leary)
- [Chaser] GitLab Removes Its Starter Tier: Pay 5x or lose features (Tim Anderson, The Register)
- OSL 3.0 Explained (Lawrence Rosen)
- A Quick Political History Of White Supremacy (Steven Conn, HuffPost, 2017)
- You’re Using Transients Wrong [In WordPress] (Ryan McCue, 2013)
Jun-Dec 2020
- Book: Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (Nadia Eghbal)
- Hotwire: HTML Over The Wire (Basecamp)
- Second-guessing the modern web (Tom MacWright)
- 100 Years of Voting Hasn’t Done What We Thought it Would (Gail Collins, NYT)
- Why Black People Don’t Go Camping (Nikki Brueggeman, Medium)
- Why Redis beats Memcached for caching (Itamar Haber, Infoworld)
- A Sneaky Theory of Where Language Came From (Ben James, The Atlantic)
- The culture of hurry: the value of ‘free’ work time (Erin ‘Folletto’ Casali)
- Measuring Engagement & Culture (Rachael Happe, TheCR)
- Communities Change How We Work (Rachael Happe, TheCR)
- So Much Community Data, So Little Insight (Rachael Happe, TheCR)
- How Open Source Communities Work (Stormy Peters)
- Many Games Are Held Together By Duct Tape (Patricia Hernandez, Polygon)
- The Anti-Capitalist Software License (Ramsey Nasser & Everest Pipkin)
- Future of Cygnus Solutions (Michael Tiemann, 1999)
- The Cost of Workaholic Leaders (Suzan Bond)
- Sticking To It (Zeldman, Automattic)
- Building The Woke Web (Olu Niyiawosusi, ALA)
- Implementing Shape Up (John Stokvis)
- An Incomplete Guide to Inclusive Language for Startups and Tech (Courtney Seiter, Buffer)
Jan-May 2020
- Responsive Design Turns Ten (Ethan Marcotte)
- Open Source Beyond The Market (DHH, SvN)
- Is Your Work Truly Essential? (James Kaelan, Medium)
- On Mid-Career and Thinking About Your Path Forward (Ryn Daniels)
- Laziness Does Not Exist (Devon Price)
- Feedback Ladders (Leslie Cohn-Wein, Kristen Lavavej & swyx, Netlify)
- The Old Internet Died And We Watched And Did Nothing (Katie Notopoulos, BuzzFeed)
- Why Developers Hate PHP (Mehdi Zed)
- Book: It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH & Jason Fried)
2018 – 2019
I didn’t regularly update this list for a couple years, so this is a retroactive list.
- Book: Crucial Conversations
- Book: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry (Jack Kornfield)
- Book: Generation Decks: The Unofficial History of Magic the Gathering (Titus Chalk)
- Book: The Manager’s Path (Camille Fournier)
- The Imbalance of Culture Fit (Matt Griffin, ALA)
- Mental Illness in the Web Industry (Brandon Gregory, ALA)
- Video: How to Keep Your Systems Running Day After Day (John Allspaw, Devops Ent. Summit)
- Video: Explaining Kanban Using Kanban (Eric Brechner, Talks@Google)
Jul 2017-Feb 2018
- The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals
- Want readers to start trusting you again? Stop stalking them across the internet
- Improving Our Engineering Interview Process
- Backyard Pond
- Advanced query optimization techniques on large queries
- Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices
- Hacking, Refactoring, Rewriting, and Technical Debt
- You are the product
- I significantly underestimated the power of Jeff Bezos
- Join our startup, we’ll cut your pay by 40%!
- Sleeping barber problem – Wikipedia
- Face ID, Touch ID, No ID, PINs and Pragmatic Security
- Just 22, this digital news publisher is ready to go old-school with print
- Reddit’s campaign against hate speech worked
- Refresh Is Sacred
- Software is a Long Con
- On Improving Diversity in Hiring
- Why open source software isn’t as ethical as you think it is
- Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics
- The Week My Husband Left And My House Was Burgled I Secured A Grant To Begin The Project That Became BRCA1
- The privilege of risk
- We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made.
- The Web began dying in 2014, here’s how
- AMPersand
- When we only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest
- We’re making Slate’s advertising as smart as its content.
- Do Facebook and Google have control of their algorithms anymore? A sobering assessment and a warning
- May the next Etsy learn its lessons
- How to prepare for a one-on-one meeting as an employee
- The Mortality and Joy of Productivity
- Oh, shit, git!
- Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful
- How To Create A Useful Value Proposition w/ Examples
- “username or password incorrect” is bullshit
- The presence prison
- Why Good Managers Are So Rare
- So Now You’re A Manager
- How good code dies
- How to crush remote team retreats
- DOES17 (conf talk video) – How Your Systems Keep Running Day After Day
- Stimulus 1.0: A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have
- Better Onboarding, Better Retention, Happier Humans
- Is PHP relevant?
- Everything Easy is Hard Again
- Why supporters pay for journalism (hint: it’s not about exclusive access)
- A beginning consultant brings skills, an experienced consultant brings value
- Be a Pal, My Dudes
- Who I want to work for
Mar-Aug 2017
- Product Roadmap Prioritization: Weighted or Kano?
- 20 Product Prioritization Techniques
- JWT (JSON Web Tokens) is a Bad Standard
- Index cards are pretty cool
- Why Employees At Apple And Google Are More Productive
- Anthony Bourdain Does Not Want to Owe Anybody Even a Single Dollar
- Front-end Developer Handbook 2017
- 6 Rules To Live By When You Work In An Office But Have Remote Team Members
- Fog Creek Professional Ladder
- What is the best way to evaluate a software engineer?
- JSON Feed
- Why I Never Let Employees Negotiate a Raise
- Fog Creek Compensation
- What Really Happened with Vista
- Short Story – Superiority – by Arthur C. Clarke
- The Myth of Developer Productivity
- The Old Guard
- Cannot Measure Productivity
- Hitting the High Notes
- What if companies interviewed translators the way they interview coders?
- The Unacceptable Persistence of the Digital Divide
- Let’s Talk About Your Plan to Run A Consequence-Free Company
- How Fucked Up is Your Management?
- How to Recruit
- How we pay people at Basecamp
- Basecamp: Our Rituals
- GitHub: Balanced Employee IP Agreement
- So, about this Googler’s manifesto
- So you’re surrounded by idiots. Guess who the real jerk is
- Apache vs Nginx: Practical Considerations
Jan / Feb 2017
- Bring in the Goddamn Adults Already
- The Reality of Developer Burnout
- Effective Product Roadmaps
- Abraham Lincoln’s “Blind Memorandum”
- What I Wish I’d Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn
- The Problem With AMP
- Hacking the Army
- Setting Expectations as a Manager
- How to Improve After a Sprint
- Let’s stop calling them ‘soft skills’
- These Are the Most Productive Countries in the World
- Does Unlimited Vacation Time Really Work?
Dec 2016
- A Favor for Your Future Self
- We Need to Talk About Technical Debt
- Accessibility Whack-A-Mole
- How to have an honest one-on-one with an employee
Nov 2016
- The Dirty Dozen Roadmap Roadblocks
- Pay the Price for Open Source
- Video: No one expects the woman code troll – Jenn Schiffer, Engineer/Artist at XOXO Festival
- Redesigning Waxy, 2016 edition
- Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It
- Social Media Is Killing Discourse Because It’s Too Much Like TV
- A look at the impact of inclusive design
Oct 2016
- Contempt Culture
- Field experiment on posting rules in discussions
- Task Performance Indicator: A Management Metric for Customer Experience
- The inaccessible web: how we got into this mess
- Taking PHP seriously
- And it’s gone —The true cost of interruptions
- Your Team In Four Dimensions
- Agile Manifesto
- Writing good code: how to reduce the cognitive load of your code
- Be Careful What You Code For
- My condolences, you’re now the maintainer of a popular open source project
- The way we evaluate developer performance is broken
- Product strategy means saying no
Etcetera
Books I read before I started this list that were particularly formative and that I recommend to any web developer (or manager of them). I’ve resisted linking them to Amazon in the naive hope you might buy them elsewhere.
- Being Geek (Lopp)
- Managing Humans (Lopp)
- Rework (DHH & Fried)
- Remote (DHH & Fried)
- Getting Real (DHH & Fried)
- Designing with Web Standards (Zeldman)
- Don’t Make Me Think (Krugman)
- The Design of Everyday Things (Norman)
- A Book Apart series (several)
- Buzzing Communities (Millington)
- The Indispensable Community (Millington)