A curated reading list and personal knowledge base for building better software: Ruby on Rails, refactoring, performance, security, system design, AI engineering, and engineering leadership. Notes distilled from books, courses, and practice — with battle-tested book recommendations.

• Foundational Reading
• Design Patterns & Refactoring
• Performance
• System Design
• Security
• AI Engineering
• Leadership & Management
• Soft Skills
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• YouTube Channels

• The Passionate Programmer - Chad Fowler
• Clean Code - Robert C. Martin
• The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas

• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - Martin Fowler
• Head First Design Patterns - Elisabeth Freeman & Kathy Sierra
• Design Patterns in Ruby - Russ Olsen
• Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (POODR) - Sandi Metz

• Performance Checklist - front-end, back-end, database, server, and monitoring tools
• High Performance Web Sites - Steve Souders
• The Complete Guide to Rails Performance
• Ruby Performance Optimization - Alexander Dymo

• System Design 101 - ByteByteGo
• Full-Stack Software Design & Architecture - Khalil Stemmler
• System Design Academy
• Awesome Scalability - Binh Nguyen

• Harvard CS50 Introduction to Cybersecurity
• Web Security - Stanford CS 253
• Security Architecture - YouTube playlist
• Rails Security Checklist - Eliot Sykes
• Awesome AWS Security
• The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws
• Hands-On Cybersecurity for Architects
• Computer Networking

LLM Fundamentals

• Introduction to LLMs
• How LLMs Work?
• How I Use LLMs Effectively

Model Providers

• OpenAI
• Anthropic
• Gemini

Prompt Engineering

• OpenAI Prompt Engineering Guide
• Anthropic Prompt Engineering Overview
• Prompting Guide

Embeddings

• Vector Embedding - IBM
• What is Vector Embedding? - Elastic
• Vector Embeddings Explained - Weaviate

Vector Databases

• Vector Databases: from Embeddings to Applications - DeepLearning.AI
• Building Applications with Vector Databases - DeepLearning.AI

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

• RAG From Scratch - LangChain
• Building and Evaluating Advanced RAG Applications - DeepLearning.AI

Skills

• Agent Skills
• Claude Agent Skills Overview

Agents

• AI Agents - IBM
• AI Agents in LangGraph - DeepLearning.AI

LLM Evaluation & Observability

• DeepEval
• OpenAI Evals

Books & Courses

• AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models - Chip Huyen
• Hands-On Large Language Models - Jay Alammar & Maarten Grootendorst
• OpenAI Cookbook
• DeepLearning.AI
• Claude Academy

• The Manager's Path - Camille Fournier
• HBR Leader's Handbook - Harvard Business Review
• The HBR Manager's Handbook - Harvard Business Review
• The Startup CTO's Handbook
• Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations - Nicole Forsgren et al.

• Bulletproof Problem Solving - McKinsey
• Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual - John Sonmez
• The Laws of Simplicity - John Maeda
• On Writing Well - William Zinsser

• The Ruby Programming Language - David Flanagan & Yukihiro Matsumoto
• The Ruby Way - Hal Fulton
• Eloquent Ruby - Russ Olsen
• Metaprogramming Ruby - Paolo Perrotta
• Ruby Best Practices - Gregory Brown

• Agile Web Development with Rails - Sam Ruby et al.
• The Rails Way - Obie Fernandez
• Rails AntiPatterns - Chad Pytel & Tammer Saleh
• Advanced Rails - Brad Ediger
• Ruby Science - thoughtbot
• Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails - Paul Dix
• The RSpec Book - David Chelimsky et al.

• Stanford Online
• Y Combinator
• AI Engineer
• ByteByteGo
• Lenny's Podcast
• IBM Technology
• Big Think
• Harvard Business Review