books
/ Reading now
-
An Elegant Puzzle -
Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structure
/ My ranking
- 01
The Selfish Gene ★★★★★ - 02
Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders ★★★★★ My take
a platform is a product everyone loves and wants (engineers, managers, leadership). platform engineers are the unhappy people whom all those same people push around as much as they can
✅ what feels nicer than reading a book where you seem to already know all the facts and have seen all the situations, but the text structures it all and puts everything on its shelf
🅱️ none
- 03
Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time ★★★★★ My take
This book is a great inspiration for my blog. It lies perfectly at the intersection of programming, process organization, and tooling. If you want to explore the problem space outside of coding, it is the guide for you. Obviously, you don't need to copy Google's solution to every problem explained in the book, but it is worth thinking about how they apply to your team as some of them are still novices for most organizations.
- 04
Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley ★★★★★ My take
If you have seen a Silicon Valley HBO show, this is the same vibe in the form of a book with (allegedly) a real story inside.
- 05
Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition ★★★★★ - 06
Staff Engineer's Path ★★★★★ - 07
How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking ★★★★★ My take
Read alongside Thinking, Fast and Slow — these two books will help you to be more mindful about your thinking process. Isn't it thinking what we do most of the time?
- 08
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters ★★★★★ My take
Also a short but very packed book on preparing good strategies.
- 09
Thinking, Fast and Slow ★★★★★ My take
Read alongside How Not to Be Wrong — these two books will help you to be more mindful about your thinking process. Isn't it thinking what we do most of the time?
- 10
Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software ★★★★ ★ My take
If I have to choose one book on production-ready software, I must say I enjoyed Release It! a bit more than the SRE book. They both are good and have a different angle on the problem, but I recommend starting with this one.
- 11
Team Topologies ★★★★ ★ - 12
Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management ★★★★ ★ My take
A comprehensive guide on all tools to deliver results (making it happen) in case you work on something longer than a task (a several-month project) and not alone (within a team and organization).
- 13
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber ★★★★ ★ My take
Uber's and Travis Kalanick's story that you first enjoy and then start questioning more and more.
- 14
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram ★★★★ ★ My take
Story of Instagram including clashes of cultures after Facebook bought it. It also contains very interesting thoughts on how this one company transformed the world around us.
- 15
Перші 90 днів. Перевірені стратегії, як підкорити нову посаду ★★★★ ★
- 16
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup ★★★★ ★ My take
Story of the fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.
- 17
Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems ★★★★ ★ My take
In some sense, this is the sister book to Software Engineering at Google. It dives deep into programming, process organization, and tooling specifically for reliably running a production system at the internet scale.
- 18
Thinking In Systems: A Primer ★★★★ ★ My take
Very often, when making decisions, people ignore second-order consequences. Systems thinking is exactly about being able to anticipate them ahead of time and shape your actions accordingly. Why do more meticulous code reviews lead both to better code and to bigger changesets? Why does standardizing internal frameworks lead both to faster development and to an outflow of top engineers?
✅ as an intro to the topic — just what you need
🅱️ you immediately want more, and deeper
- 19
That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea ★★★★ ★ My take
With a much more positive attitude than the previous three, the story of Netflix as its co-founder Marc Randolph remembers it. It is the most interesting for his thoughts about personal life and happiness, how founding the company had a goal for him to fund his personal goals, and how he left the business once the goals were achieved.
- 20
Секрети мозку ★★★★ ★ - 21
The Mythical Man-Month ★★★★ ★ My take
An extraordinary historical artifact. So many project-management ideas we now take for granted were first described in this book more than 50 years ago.
It is worth reading if only because some of these ideas have become so obvious and overused that they are easy to forget or ignore.
✅ Some essays, such as “The Joys of the Craft,” are also a pure delight to read.
🅱️ Still, at least a third of the book is no longer relevant. In some places it is an artifact of its time (consider the project documentation that is periodically printed and mailed to every team member by ordinary post); in others, Brooks simply turned out to be wrong in his predictions.
- 22
xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code ★★★★ ★ My take
The assumption that writing production code has rules and writing test code hasn't because it is too easy is plain wrong. This is the most comprehensive guide on how to write good tests and it is worth time spent on reading 100%.
- 23
Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results ★★★★ ★ My take
Very short and light yet very helpful book on setting goals using the OKR framework.
- 24
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon ★★★★ ★ My take
Jeff Bezos and Amazon's story that's the most interesting for the fact that the internet was still quite young, so the early Amazon team had to invent or experience a lot of things that we consider common knowledge best practices today.
- 25
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders ★★★★ ★ My take
Story from a US Navy officer that will inspire you to build autonomous teams that don't rely on the managers, tech leads, and directors.
- 26
Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track ★★★ ★★ My take
A very pragmatic take on the Staff Engineer role — to the point of claiming you should agree with your manager on everything (you shouldn't!)
✅ the book is compiled from interviews with real staff engineers telling their day-to-day stories — no fiction, no padding
🅱️ the first part summarizes the interviewed engineers' experiences, and the second part is the interviews themselves, so there's a lot of repetition if you read both (one of the interviews has a bit about how great russky universities are — skip it carefully so you don't get burned)
- 27
Strategy ★★★ ★★ - 28
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration ★★★ ★★ My take
The story of Pixar with the focus on how to organize creative teams.
- 29
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction ★★★ ★★ My take
First you write code. You're handed a task and, using the languages of machines, you try to convey to the machines what they need to do.
Then you realize you're conveying your thoughts through machine language not only to machines but to people too: your colleagues, and your own future self.
But the most interesting part starts when you have to convey your thoughts in human language to other people. Ideas, proposals, design docs, tasks for the team, strategies, promo packets, discussions on Slack or in person — the success of your projects depends less and less on how well you communicate with machines, and more and more on how well you communicate with people.
A separate joke, of course, is that writing code now also takes being able to communicate with the machine in human language — it doesn't matter which programming languages you know if you can explain to Claude Code in English what you need.
✅ 45 minutes — is this an audiobook or already a podcast?
🅱️ The overall concept is interesting, but I'd have liked more concrete tips and tricks.
- 30
Leading Effective Engineering Teams ★★ ★★★ - 31
Mentoring 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know ★★ ★★★ My take
any recommendations on a practical intro to mentoring?
✅ very short and promises to be very practical
🅱️ actually a classic feel-good nonfiction — everything written is obvious anyway, and it's hard to take anything useful from it
- 32
The Software Engineer's Guidebook ★ ★★★★ My take
In 2026, translating books into Russian in partnership with a Russian publisher is beyond the pale. And $800 of donations to the Ukrainian army does not make up for it.
wait so money from your book will fund both russian and Ukrainian army?
you are the only one responsible for your own career✅ it really is an exhaustive manual for playing the game called "a career in IT"; if I'd read this book 10 years ago I'd have understood faster what was going on and what to do🅱️ well, at this stage I basically got confirmation that my experience isn't made up, without a whole lot of new insights