Awesome CTO

— Hello, my name is Dima and I'm CTO

— (chorus) Welcome, Dima

A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers and VP R&D, with the emphasis on startups and hyper-growth companies

Contents

• General


• Hiring


• Management


• Handbooks


• Development process


• Architecture


• Technologies


• Startups


• Related stuff


• Product


• Marketing


• Finance


• Books


• More links

General

• The Different CTO Roles - Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO)


• Is it required to be a developer to become a CTO? (Quora)


• Three Golden Rules to Finding a CTO


• Becoming a CTO


• VP Engineering vs CTO - Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures)


• What makes for a successful CEO and CTO relationship in a startup? (Quora)


• #define CTO - Greg Brockman (Stripe CTO)


• How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown to 100 engineers


• Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering


• The difference between a CTO and a VP Engineering

Hiring

• The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing - Joel Spolsky (StackOverflow co-founder)


• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code - Joel Spolsky


• Why Can't Programmers.. Program? - Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow co-founder)


• We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else - Jeff Atwood


• Getting the Interview Phone Screen Right - Jeff Atwood


• Engineering interview process at Stripe (Quora)


• Improving Our Engineering Interview Process (Foursquare)


• Hitting the High Notes - Joel Spolsky


• Top 10 System Design Interview Questions - (HackerNoon)


• How To Hire World-Class Engineers (angel.co)


• Trouble hiring senior engineers? It's probably you


• The Real 11 Reasons I Don't Hire You - Charity Majors


• How to Interview at Amazon


• Lessons from Keith Rabois: How to Interview an Executive


• Lessons from Keith Rabois: How to Become a Magnet for Talent


• Reverse Interview Questions

Management

• The mythical 10x programmer - Salvatore Sanfilippo (author of Redis)


• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum - Charity Majors


• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule - Paul Graham (Y Combinator)


• Software Engineering at Google


• Google re:Work


• 44 Engineering Management Lessons (correct link to non-violent communication for lesson 34)


• The Secret To Discussing Pay With Employees


• Awesome Leading and Managing (Github)


• Progressing from tech to leadership


• A Review Process - Cap Watkins


• 12 manager readmes from top tech companies


• Predictable Delivery


• How people rise up to EVP level in big organizations (Quora)


• Should I Become a Manager? - Cap Watkins


• How to fail as a new engineering manager


• Design Patterns for Managing Up


• Engineering Management (Github)


• On-boarding Software Engineers


• Hold Your Team Accountable


• The Manager FAQ


• The Power of Performance Reviews


• Principles of Engineering Management


• Compensation Best Practices


• Draw The Owl and Other Company Values You Didn’t Know You Should Have


• A MANAGER’S BILL OF RESPONSIBILITIES (AND RIGHTS)


• After Being A Manager, Can I Be Happy As A Cog?


• The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite


• Increment: Teams


• Career Growth Frameworks in Software Engineering: A Review


• Hacking team communications


• How to build a startup engineering team


• Hug your manager


• Lessons from Keith Rabois: How to be an Effective Executive


• How Context Switching Sabotages Your Productivity


• 10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned


• 7 Ways to Set Up a New Hire for Success

Handbooks

• The Atlassian Team Playbook


• Valve Employee Handbook


• Basecamp Employee Handbook


• GitLab Team Handbook


• How HashiCorp Works

Development process

• Scrum / Agile


• Introduction to Scrum for Managers and Executives


• Writing User Stories, Examples and Templates In Agile Methodologies


• CI / CD


• What are the fundamental principles of continuous integration?


• The Product Managers’ Guide to Continuous Delivery and DevOps


• Git


• Comparing Git workflows


• A successful Git branching model


• Alternative: Trunk Based Development (focused on DevOps and CI/CD)


• Planning


• Evidence Based Scheduling - Joel Spolsky (StackOverflow co-founder)


• Why You Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Technical Debt


• Crisis


• How to Write a Postmortem


• List of Post-mortems (GitHub)


• Startup Lessons Learned - Five Whys - Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup)


• On Call Rotations: How Best to Wake Devs Up in the Middle of the Night


• Testing in Production, the safe way

Architecture

• Twelve-Factor App


• Reactive Manifesto


• An introduction to distributed systems - Kyle Kingsbury (aphyr, author of Jepsen)


• Microservices – Please, don’t (also: HackerNews discussion)


• The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018


• Shrinking microservices to functions


• Design patterns for microservices


• Serverless architecture (Quora)


• NoSQL Databases: a Survey and Decision Guidance


• Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API


• 10 Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes


• How I Write Tests


• Lambda Architecture


• Evolutionary Database Design (Martin Fowler)


• Database Migrations Done Right


• Awesome Scalability


• The Single Most Important Internal Email in the History of Amazon


• Build Your Own X


• A reference guide for fintech & small-data engineering

Technologies

• General


• Big-O explained in plain English


• Coding Interview University


• Javascript


• SuperheroJS collection


• JS: The Right Way


• Frontend developer handbook 2017


• Machine Learning


• Awesome Machine Learning (GitHub)


• Best resources of everyday ML learning (Quora)


• Machine Learning Crash Course: with TensorFlow APIs (Google)


• Deep Learning For Coders


• Big scale


• What is CAP Theorem? (Quora)


• CAP Theorem: Revisited


• Security


• SaaS CTO Security Checklist


• Cloud


• Open Guide to Amazon Web Services


• Amazon AWS in Plain English


• Microsoft Azure in Plain English


• Google Cloud Services for the AWS expert

Startups

• What are the things startups have to get right? (Quora)


• 85 Things I learned being a CEO


• What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO?


• Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs


• What do VCs really look for when making investments? (Quora)


• What would a CTO equity be for a small startup? (Quora)


• As an employee of a startup, how do you know when to quit? (Quora)


• Pitch deck collection from VC funded startups


• YC’s Series A Diligence Checklist


• Options vs Cash


• How To Invest In Startups - Sam Altman


• A Guide to Seed Fundraising


• Startup Playbook - Sam Altman


• Y Combinator Startup Class


• Lean Canvas + Miro template


• Open Source Pitch Deck Templates for Figma

Related stuff

• Knowledge-Sharing Architects As An Alternative to Coding Architects


• Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (also: HackerNews discussion)


• Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued


• What are best practices of experienced programmers? (Quora)


• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names


• 2016 European Software Development Salary Survey (O'Reilly)


• DevOps: Bringing development and operations together (Atlassian)


• DataOps


• How to Prepare a Talk


• Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well


• The Pyramid Principle


• Senior Engineer’s Checklist


• Technology Due Diligence Checklist

Product

• What Makes a Great Product Manager


• If You Don’t Think You Need a VP of Product...


• Red Oceans: How to Find Profitable Startup Ideas


• Product North Star Metric


• What distinguishes the Top 1% of product managers from the Top 10%? - (Quora)


• How to Hire a Product Manager


• The Secrets Of Creative Thinking


• StellarPeers - Product Management Interviews


• Product vs. Feature Teams


• Most Startups Should Be Deer Hunters


• Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters


• How to Write Your First Strategic Roadmap


• Execution at Facebook

Marketing

• Developer Marketing Guide


• Top Resources for Startup Marketing and PR


• SaaS Email Marketing Handbook

Finance

• Financial Planning & Analysis @ GitLab


• Framework for balancing and budgeting engineering resourcing


• Negotiate the right deal with suppliers


• Strategic Procurements 10 Commandments for Managing the Buying Process

Books

• Epic CTO Reading List


• The Mythical Man-Month

More links

• Awesome Falsehood (GitHub)


• Engineering blogs (GitHub)


• Awesome Awesomeness (GitHub)


• Awesome.re (GitHub)


• Chief Technology Officer vs Coder Thinker Organizer (GitHub)


• Senior Software Engineer


• Socal CTO


• Curated list of CTO resources (GitHub)


• Awesome CTO Resources (GitHub)


• Free Tools for Developers

Other

• Awesome TPM

License