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200+ Resources to become a great engineering leader

List of books, newsletters, people and more!

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 2026 and beyond!

I’ve been continuously curating them for over 6 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 2026.

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

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

List of newsletters

People to follow on LinkedIn

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
  • Data Leadership for Everyone by Anthony J. Algmin
  • Multipliers by Liz Wiseman
  • Impact Players by Liz Wiseman
  • Leading Snowflakes by Oren Ellenbogen
  • Leading Effective Engineering Teams by Addy Osmani
  • Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager by James Stanier

List of newsletters

People to follow on LinkedIn

Articles

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
  • Software Engineering Guidebook by Gergely Orosz
  • The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly
  • The Product-Minded Engineer by Drew Hoskins
  • Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
  • Clean Code Cookbook: Recipes to Improve the Design and Quality of your Code by Maximiliano Contieri

List of newsletters

People to follow on LinkedIn

Articles

Become product-minded and business-oriented

List of books

  • Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan
  • Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products by Martina Lauchengco
  • Empowered by Marty Cagan
  • Start with Why by Simon Sinek
  • Transformed — Marty Cagan
  • What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You by Melina Palmer
  • The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
  • Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

List of newsletters

People to follow on LinkedIn

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

People to follow on LinkedIn

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

People to follow on LinkedIn

Articles

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

Any resources you liked and believe would be a great addition to this list? Feel free to open a PR! I am always in the lookout for some more great books / newsletters / people to follow.

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