Intro

Investing in yourself is a great investment anytime! I am sharing with you my personally curated resources to level up and grow to become a great engineering leader in 2025!

I’ve been continuously curating them for over 5 years now.

Topics span from software engineering, system design, data engineering, leadership, management, and all the way to AI and product and business.

How to start?

There are a LOT of resources here, and your time is very important. I don’t suggest trying to learn all of the resources at once; I suggest picking a few resources at a time from specific categories that you need the most. That’s what I do as well.

When I need to go into more detail in a specific category, I choose the resources and do a deep dive into the specific topics. I also connect with certain individuals, check their posts, and/or ask them questions.

Important: Before you choose which resources you wish to go into more detail, I suggest doing a retrospective of your current skill set and defining where you need to improve.

To help you with finding out what skills you need, this is a great article: Become a Great Engineering Leader in 2025.

And for a full roadmap to break into Engineering Leadership, check this article: Full Roadmap to Break Into Engineering Leadership in 2025

This will ensure you are spending your time on the most impactful things first!

Get better in System Design

List of books

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

• System Design Interview by Alex Xu

• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler

• Understanding Distirbuted Systems by Roberto Vitillo

• Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin

• Systems Analysis and Design, multiple editions and multiple authors

• Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems by Sam Newman

• Fundamentals of Software Architecture by Neal Ford and Mark Richards

• Software Architecture: The Hard Parts by Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Pramod Sadalage and Zhamak Dehghani

• Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Niall Richard Murphy, Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones and Jennifer Petoff

• Learn System Design in a Hurry, (Helping FAANG+ Software Engineering candidates land their dream job) by Evan King

List of blogs

• Meta Engineering

• AWS Architecture

• The Netflix Tech

• Apple Security Tech

• Google AI/Research

• LinkedIn Engineering

• Uber Engineering

• Engineering at Quora

• Pinterest Engineering

• Lyft Engineering

• Twitter Engineering

• Dropbox Engineering

• Spotify Engineering

• Github Engineering

• Instagram Engineering

• Canva Engineering

• Booking.com Tech

• The Airbnb Tech

• Stripe Engineering

• Discord Engineering and Design

• Engineering at Microsoft

• Reddit Engineering

• Slack Engineering

• Asana

• DigitalOcean

• CloudFlare

• HelloInterview

List of newsletters

• The System Design Newsletter by Neo Kim

• ByteByteGo by Alex Xu

• AlgoMaster Newsletter by Ashish Pratap Singh

• Byte-Sized Design by Byte-Sized Design

• System Design Codex by Saurabh Dashora

• System Design Classroom by Raul Junco

• Big Tech Careers by Prasad Rao

• Simple AWS by Guille Ojeda

People to follow on LinkedIn

• Neo Kim

• Alex Xu

• Raul Junco

• Saurabh Dashora

• Shalini Goyal

• Nikki Siapno

• Mayank Ahuja

• Prasad Rao

• Guille Ojeda

Become a Better Leader / Manager

List of books

• The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo

• The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins

• The Lean Manager by Andrew and Muhammad Wilkerson

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni (my personal favorite)

• The Manager's Path by Camille Fournieri

• Leadership in 60 seconds by Omar Halabieh

• Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader by Herminia Ibarra

• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell

• Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson

• How to Lead When You're Not in Charge by Clay Scroggins

• Think Again by Adam Grant

• The Mind of the Leader by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter

• The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

• Engineering Management for the rest of us by Sarah Drasner

List of newsletters

• Engineering Leadership by Gregor Ojstersek (this newsletter)

• Elevate by Addy Osmani

• Manager.dev by Anton Zaides

• Scarlet Ink by Dave Anderson

• The Hybrid Hacker by Nicola Ballotta

• The Caring Techie Newsletter by Irina Stanescu

• Tech World With Milan Newsletter by Dr Milan Milanović

• The Conscious Leader by Taha Hussain

• The Engineering Manager by James Stanier

• Techlead Mentor by Raviraj Achar

• Refactoring by Luca Rossi

• Level up as a Tech Lead by Anemari Fiser

• Thinking in Tech by Dariusz Sadowski

• Adrian Builds by Adrian Stanek

• Level Up by Ethan Evans by Ethan Evans

• The Chronicles of a High EQ Leader by Djordje Mladenovic

• 🔮 Crafting Tech Teams by Denis Čahuk

• The Leader’s Playbook by Ali Merchant

• The Software Engineering Times by Ryan Murphy

• Beyond Your Limits by Pramoda Vyasarao

• Product Driven Newsletter by Matt Watson

• Alex Ewerlöf Notes by Alex Ewerlöf

People to follow on LinkedIn

• Gregor Ojstersek

• Omar Halabieh

• Irina Stanescu

• Luca Rossi

• Addy Osmani

• Taha Hussain

• Anton Zaides

• Dr Milan Milanović

• David Anderson

• Anemari Fiser

• Pedro Gil Carvalho

• Dariusz Sadowski

• Adrian Stanek

• Ali Merchant

• Alexander Kliotzkin

• Ethan Evans

• Djordje Mladenovic

• Denis Čahuk

• Matt Watson

• Sarah Gruneisen

• Pramoda Vyasarao

• Steven Claes

• Anna J McDougall

• Ryan Murphy

• James Stanier

• Alex Ewerlöf

• Itzy Sabo

• Daria Rudnik

• Tobias Mende

Articles

• Stuck at Senior Engineer - How to Break Through and Reach the Next Level

• 7 Must-Have Engineering Manager Stories That Will Land You the Offer

• Engineer to Leader: 10 Insights to Get You Started

• Become an Engineering Leader Everyone Wants to Work With

• Your Engineering Team Should be Looking to Solve Customer Problems

• How to Ace Engineering Manager Interviews

• The State of Engineering Leadership in 2025

• First time in a leading position? This is what to do

• 15 Productivity Hacks Every Engineer & Manager Should Know

• Not Communicating Your Impact is Killing Your Career

• How I Grew From Engineer to CTO

• Full Roadmap to Break Into Engineering Leadership in 2025

• What’s Next After Senior Engineer?

• Why you should do a Tech Lead rotation in your engineering team

• 5 mindset shifts needed to grow from engineer to leader

• Help your manager to help you

• 5 lessons learned setting up a global engineering org at Google

• How to build trust as an engineering leader

• Great engineering leaders create leaders

• 3 main soft skills a Tech Lead needs to develop

• Senior Engineer to Lead: Who to promote and how to train them

• How to become a CTO

• 12 ways to become a CTO

• Good managers are hard to find and once you have them, they should be appreciated

• What does a CTO do

• From IC to manager

• How to develop a great tech strategy

• How to recognize the potential in engineers

• How to manage up as an engineer or a manager

• Software Engineering team structure that works

• Engineering org structure that works

• How teaching made me a better engineer and manager

• From Tech Lead to Team Lead

• How I organized my time as a full-time CTO

• How to create a great engineering organization where people can thrive

• How to use engineering metrics for the success of engineers and teams

• From Engineer to Principal Solutions Architect at AWS with Prasad Rao

• How to create a culture of ownership in your engineering team

• Blameless culture should be a standard in the engineering industry

• How to become a Fractional CTO?

• How to handle underperformance

• How to have a top performing, healthy and active day as an engineer or a manager

• The importance of having a career growth plan in the engineering industry

• 8 signs that you have a good manager

• Leading 1 team vs 3 teams vs 5+ teams

Become a Better Software Engineer

List of books

• The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

• Refactoring by Martin Fowler and Kent Beck

• Why Programs Fail by Andreas Zeller

• Clean Code by Robert Cecil Martin

• Grokking Algorithms by Aditya Y. Bhargava

• Staff Engineer by Will Larson

• Modern Software Engineering by David Farley

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

• Engineering Software Products by Ian Sommerville

• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

• Code Complete by Steve McConnell

• The Staff Engineer's Path by Tanya Reilly

• Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell

List of newsletters

• Engineering Leadership by Gregor Ojstersek (this newsletter)

• Coding Challenges by John Crickett

• Developing Skills by John Crickett

• High Growth Engineer by Jordan Cutler

• The Developing Dev by Ryan Peterman

• The T-Shaped Dev by Petar Ivanov

• Hungry Minds by Alexandre Zajac

• The Hustling Engineer by Hemant Pandey

• Level Up Software Engineering 🚀 by Caleb Mellas

• Engineer's Codex by Leonardo Creed

• The Modern Software Developer by Richard Donovan

• Strategize Your Career by Fran Soto

• The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz

• Software Design: Tidy First? by Kent Beck

• Dev Details by Mike

• Front-End Focus by Mads Brodt

• Craft Better Software by Daniel Moka

• Saiyan Growth Letter by Tiger Abrodi

• The Polymathic Engineer by Franco Fernando

• ByteSizedBets by TheAnkurTyagi

People to follow on LinkedIn

• John Crickett

• Jordan Cutler

• Ryan Peterman

• Caleb Mellas

• Richard Donovan

• Daniel Moka

• Tiger Abrodi

• Hemant Pandey

• Alexandre Zajac

• Brian Jenney

• Francisco Manuel (Fran) Soto Ramírez

• Gergely Orosz

• Kent Beck

• Rahul Pandey

• Alex Chiou

• Mike Thornton

• Mads Brodt

• Petar Ivanov

• Fernando Franco

• Ankur Tyagi

• Harley Ferguson

• James Willett

• Milan Jovanović

• Eric Roby

• Alexandre Zajac

• Zubin Pratap

• Sam Williams

Articles

• How to grow from mid-level to senior Software Engineer

• Future Proof Your Career as an Engineer in Gen AI World

• How to Gain Respect From Your Peers and Leadership as an Engineer

• The Importance of Writing in the Engineering Industry

• How to build good relationships inside and outside your engineering team

• Best engineers are focusing on helping others

• Growing from engineer to Staff engineer and thriving

• Perfectionism - one of the biggest productivity killers in the engineering industry

• How to let your manager know about your goals and aspirations

• 5 skills to develop to grow from Senior to Staff Engineer

• How to be a reliable engineer

• How to be a proactive engineer

• Simple code is the best code

• From Shy Engineer to Director at Oracle and a Skilled Communicator

• How to propose an impactful improvement to the codebase and own the implementation

• How to build credibility in the engineering industry

• How to prevent burning out in the engineering industry

• Context-switching - one of the worst productivity killers in the engineering industry

• Going from impostor one day to feeling like a superhuman the next day

• Simplifying as much as possible is the way to go in the engineering industry

• Engineer's Guide to Freelance Work

• How to Develop a Senior Mindset

• Thrive in your first 90 days when starting a new position as an engineer

• Become the go-to engineer in your organization

• How Can Engineers and PMs Collaborate Effectively?

• How I was able to get promoted while constant reorganization

• Keep a brag list of the wins you achieved, thank me later

• Grow in your career by organizing an engineering guild

• Starting my career again as a junior engineer

• A good engineer thinks like a product manager

• The importance of data when making decisions in the engineering industry

• A CS Degree is not needed to be successful as a Software Engineer

• Why your job search is failing as an engineer or a manager (and how to fix it)

• You don’t need to be a manager to have a successful career in the engineering industry

• Engineer’s guide to convincing your Product Manager to prioritize technical debt

• Timeless skills in Software Development

• The importance of forming opinions in the engineering industry

Become product-minded and business-oriented

List of books

• Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

• Empowered by Marty Cagan

• Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products by Martina Lauchengco

• Transformed by Marty Cagan

• Start with Why by Simon Sinek

• What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You by Melina Palmer

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

List of newsletters

• Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky

• The Product Compass by Paweł Huryn

• Product Growth by Aakash Gupta

• Wes Kao's Newsletter by Wes Kao

• Product Management IRL by Amy Mitchell

• Leah’s ProducTea by Leah Tharin

• Elena's Growth Scoop by Elena Verna

• Untrapping Product Teams by David Pereira

• Behind the Craft by Peter Yang by Peter Yang

• The Looking Glass by Julie Zhuo

• The Beautiful Mess by John Cutler

• GTM Strategist by Maja Voje

People to follow on LinkedIn

• Lenny Rachitsky

• Pawel Huryn

• Aakash Gupta

• Wes kao

• Amy Mitchell

• Leah Tharin

• Elena Verna

• David Pereira

• Julie Zhuo

• Peter Yang

• John Cutler

• Maja Voje

Get better at Data Engineering / Data Science

List of books

• Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Matt Housley

• Data Engineering with Python by Paul Crickard

• Spark: The Definitive Guide by Matei Zaharia

• Big Data: Principles and Best Practices of Scalable Realtime Data Systems by James Warren

• 97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know by Tobias Macey

List of newsletters

• DataExpert.io Newsletter by Zach Wilson

• SeattleDataGuy’s Newsletter by SeattleDataGuy

• Daily Dose of Data Science by Avi Chawla

• Data Engineering Central by Daniel Beach

• Data Engineering Weekly by Ananth Packkildurai

• Joe Reis by Joe Reis

• Data Gibberish by Yordan Ivanov

People to follow on LinkedIn

• Zach Wilson

• Benjamin Rogojan

• Avi Chawla

• Daniel Beach

• Ananth P

• Joe Reis

• Yordan Ivanov

Get better at AI & ML

List of books

• Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications by Chip Huyen

• Machine Learning System Design Interview by Ali Aminian and Alex Xu

• AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models by Chip Huyen

• Building Applications with AI Agents by Michael Albada

• AI Systems Performance Engineering by Chris Fregly

• Prompt Engineering for LLMs by John Berryman and Albert Ziegler

• Prompt Engineering for Generative AI by James Phoenix and Mike Taylor

• Building LLMs for Production by Louis-François Bouchard and Louie Peters

• Building Generative AI Services with FastAPI by Alireza Parandeh

• Essential Math for AI by Hala Nelson

• Mathematics of Machine Learning by Tivadar Danka

• LLM Engineer's Handbook by Paul Iusztin and Maxime Labonne

• LLMs in Production by Christopher Brousseau and Matt Sharp

List of newsletters

• MarvelousMLOps by Maria Vechtomova & Başak Tuğçe Eskili

• AI Supremacy by Michael Spencer

• Into AI by Dr. Ashish Bamania

• The Palindrome by Tivadar Danka

• Decoding ML by Paul Iusztin

• The AI Engineer by Owain Lewis

• Nate’s Substack by Nate

• Neural Bits by Alex Razvant

• The AI-Augmented Engineer by Jeff Morhous

• Gradient Ascent by Sairam Sundaresan

People to follow on LinkedIn

• Owain Lewis

• Paul Iusztin

• Dr. Ashish Bamania

• Maria Vechtomova

• Başak Tuğçe Eskili

• Michael Spencer

• Chip Huyen

• Li Yin

• Raphaël Hoogvliets

• Hamel Husain

• Meri Nova

• Timur Bikmukhametov

• Alex Razvant

• Sairam Sundaresan

Articles

• The Impact of AI on Engineering Teams

• How to Use AI to Improve Teamwork in Engineering Teams

• OpenAI's Product Leader Reveals: AI Product Strategy for Engineering Leaders

• LLMs: Common Terms Explained, Simply

• Guide to Rapidly Improving AI Products Part 1

• Guide to Rapidly Improving AI Products Part 2

• Biggest Mistakes Engineering Leaders Make With AI

• AI Evals: How To Systematically Improve and Evaluate AI

• How to Measure AI Impact in Engineering Teams

• Engineering Leader's Guide to Managing Unrealistic AI Expectations

• Guide to Prompt Engineering

• Why 51% of Engineering Leaders Believe AI Is Impacting the Industry Negatively

• Future Proof Your Career as an Engineer in Gen AI World

• How to Use AI to Be a Great Engineering Leader

• Top AI Coding Tools for Engineering Teams in 2025

• 5 AI Tools to Build to Be a Better Engineering Leader in 2025

• How to use Cursor AI to build side projects

• How to use AI to increase Software Development productivity

• Will AI replace mid-level engineers in 2025?

• You have an AI product, how to get users?

• Enforcing the use of AI in engineering teams - good or bad thing?

Get better at Coaching & Mentoring

List of books

• Coaching for Performance Fifth Edition: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership by Sir John Whitmore

• The Prosperous Coach: Increase Income and Impact for You and Your Clients by Steve Chandler and Rich Litvin

• The Coaches' Handbook: The Complete Practitioner Guide for Professional Coaches by Jonathan Passmore

• Coaching Skills: The Definitive Guide to Being a Coach by Jenny Rogers

• Coaching: The Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership by Ruchira Chaudhary

Get better at Communicating and Emotional Intelligence

List of books

• Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman

• The Art of Empathy by Karla Mclaren

• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

Articles

• Empathy is a superpower in the engineering industry

• How to develop EQ as an engineer or a manager

• How to communicate with stakeholders the right way

• How Engineering Leaders Stay Calm and Effective When It Gets Personal

Last words

Any books, newsletters, people or any other resources that you know would be a great addition to this list? Make sure to add them in the comments!

I am always in the lookout for some more great books / newsletters / people to learn from!

We are not over yet!

How to Start With Freelance Work as an Engineer

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You are more than welcome to find whatever interests you here and try it out in your particular case. Let me know how it went! Topics are normally about all things engineering related, leadership, management, developing scalable products, building teams etc.