// the find
charlax/professional-programming
A collection of learning resources for curious software engineers
A hand-maintained, massively long list of articles, books, and talks about software engineering as a craft — architecture, career growth, incident response, API design, and dozens of other topics, each with the author's own one-line opinion on why it's worth reading. It's for developers who want curated reading rather than hands-on code, especially folks past the early-career stage who want to round out judgment, not syntax.
The author actually adds a take on most entries instead of just dumping links — you get a sentence of why something matters, which is rare in awesome-lists. Topic coverage is genuinely broad (accounting for engineers, fintech ledgers, auth, billing systems, over-engineering) rather than the usual CS-101 rehash. It's still getting pushed to as of September 2026, so it's not an abandoned list rotting with dead links. The doctoc-generated TOC and topic/antipattern subfolders make a 50k+ star list actually navigable instead of one giant scroll.
There's no code here — it's a reading list, so the value is entirely contingent on external sites staying up; no link-checking or archive.org fallback mentioned anywhere. At this size (hundreds of entries across 80+ topics) the stated principle of 'keeping it light, not overwhelming' doesn't hold up — it's a lot to wade through to find the handful of entries relevant to you. Quality is uneven because inclusion is one person's judgment call via PR review, so some sections (e.g. 'Attitude, habits, mindset') read like a personal bookmarks dump more than a tight edit. No way to sort by recency or filter by topic on GitHub itself — you're stuck ctrl-F'ing a single massive README.