Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing
ISBN 978-0262133982
A study of why women leave college computer science programs and what keeps them in.
From The Missing Cipher
Further reading
96 books, podcasts, articles, and websites recommended in the book, organized by chapter. Keep going on whatever caught your interest.
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Chapter 1
Creating the Software Engineering Career You Want
Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
ISBN 978-1591848202
A guide to changing careers by building on the strengths you already have.
Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
ISBN 978-1565843424
An oral history of more than one hundred people describing their jobs and how they feel about their work.
Chapter 3
Negotiating Technical Decisions without Consensus
Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey
An annual survey of developers covering languages, tools, frameworks, compensation, and sentiment.
Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
ISBN 978-1942788812
A model for organizing technology teams around the flow of work.
Chapter 4
A Beginner's Guide to System Design: Backend and Infrastructure
High Performance MySQL: Proven Strategies for Operating at Scale
ISBN 978-1492080510
A guide to running MySQL at scale, covering schema design, indexing, and replication.
SQL Pocket Guide: A Guide to SQL Usage
ISBN 978-1492090403
A pocket reference for SQL syntax across five database systems.
Designing Web APIs: Building APIs That Developers Love
ISBN 978-1492026921
A guide to designing and scaling request-response and event-driven web APIs.
Infrastructure as Code, Patterns and Practices: With Examples in Python and Terraform
ISBN 978-1617298295
A guide to infrastructure as code patterns, with examples in Python and Terraform.
Alice and Bob Learn Application Security
ISBN 978-1119687351
An introduction to application security, covering threat modeling, secure design, and common pitfalls.
The Backend Engineering Show
A podcast on databases, APIs, and backend internals.
Command Line Heroes
A podcast on the history of DevOps, cloud computing, and open source.
Chapter 5
A Beginner's Guide to System Design: Design and Frontend
Design
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design
ISBN 978-0262038881
A book on inclusive design and how mismatches between people and products create exclusion.
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People
ISBN 978-0321767530
A collection of short entries on the psychology research behind design decisions.
Refactoring UI
A practical guide to visual design for engineers.
Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
ISBN 978-0321965516
A guide to web usability and designing pages people can use without thinking.
The Design of Everyday Things
ISBN 978-0465050659
A book on how everyday objects communicate how they should be used.
Helvetica
A documentary about the Helvetica typeface and its influence on graphic design.
Frontend
CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems
ISBN 978-1449372637
A collection of forty-seven CSS techniques for solving everyday web design problems.
SVG Animations: From Common UX Implementations to Complex Responsive Animation
ISBN 978-1491939703
A guide to SVG animation techniques, with the performance cost of each approach.
Sara Soueidan
Articles and courses on accessible UI patterns, semantic markup, and CSS.
TetraLogical blog
A blog on digital accessibility practice.
Syntax
A weekly podcast on web development, covering frameworks, CSS, and tooling.
Past shows
No longer releasing new episodes, but the archives are still worth a listen.
The CSS Podcast
A podcast on CSS, from fundamentals to experimental features.
Front End Happy Hour
A panel podcast on frontend engineering and career growth.
Chapter 6
You'll Never Know Everything and It's OK
Mentoring and feedback
Resilient Management
ISBN 978-1937557829
A guide to managing and mentoring engineers, including feedback and one-on-ones. A Book Apart no longer sells books; now sold by the author at resilient-management.com.
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
ISBN 978-1250235374
A guide to giving direct feedback while caring personally.
Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well
ISBN 978-0670014668
A guide to receiving feedback well.
The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
ISBN 978-1491973899
A guide to engineering leadership at each stage, from mentor and tech lead to executive.
Psychological safety and impostor syndrome
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth
ISBN 978-1119477242
A book on psychological safety and how it helps teams learn and innovate.
The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It
ISBN 978-0307452719
A book on impostor syndrome and how to work past it.
Cross-cultural communication
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business
ISBN 978-1610392501
A guide to how communication styles differ across cultures in global business.
Bias in tech
Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
ISBN 978-0735213531
An account of how Silicon Valley's culture came to exclude women, and what it costs the industry.
Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change
ISBN 978-0399591013
A memoir of Pao's gender discrimination lawsuit against a venture capital firm and her work on inclusion in tech.
Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing
ISBN 978-0262035545
A history of how pushing women out of computing work damaged an entire industry.
Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter
ISBN 978-0190863845
A history of Black technologists and the barriers they faced in computing.
Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
ISBN 978-0393634631
A look at how teams' blind spots end up built into the products they ship.
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
ISBN 978-1509526406
A study of how racial bias gets encoded in software that looks neutral.
Chapter 7
MVP: How to Say No and Write a Hypothesis
Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Cost or Schedule
ISBN 978-1943487004
A guide to estimating cost and schedule under uncertainty.
When Will It Be Done? Lean-Agile Forecasting to Answer Your Customers' Most Important Question
ISBN 978-0986436376
A guide to forecasting delivery dates from cycle time and throughput data.
Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products That Create Customer Value and Business Value
ISBN 978-1736633304
A guide to talking with customers continuously while building a product.
Just Enough Research
ISBN 978-1937557881
A guide to doing just enough user research, quickly. Still sold in ebook and paperback at books.alistapart.com.
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
ISBN 978-1491973790
A book on why organizations ship features instead of value, and how to focus on outcomes.
Chapter 8
Laying the Foundation for the Senior Role
Get Your Work Recognized: Write a Brag Document
A blog post on keeping a brag document, a running record of your accomplishments.
Recognition & Appreciation Playbook
A guide to recognition and appreciation at work from Women Who Ship.
Chapter 9
Schmoozing for Success: Networking and Branding
Conversation skills
We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter
ISBN 978-0062669001
A guide to having better conversations, from a public radio host.
Internal brand and visibility
Expect to Win: Proven Strategies for Success from a Wall Street Vet
ISBN 978-1594630514
A career guide to navigating corporate culture, from a Wall Street executive.
External brand
Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It
ISBN 978-1591847403
A guide to developing a point of view and building an audience for it.
Speaking
Demystifying Public Speaking
A guide to public speaking, from choosing a topic to delivering the talk.
Open source
Outreachy
A program offering paid, remote open-source internships for people underrepresented in tech.
Open Source Guides
Community-maintained guides to contributing to and running open-source projects.
First Timers Only
A starting point for making a first open-source contribution.
Up For Grabs
A list of open-source projects with issues curated for new contributors.
The hiring market
State of the Software Engineering Job Market in 2026
A data-driven report on software engineering job openings and hiring in 2026.
Chapter 10
Building the Shelter: Productionizing for Real Users
Productionizing
Production-Ready Microservices: Building Standardized Systems Across an Engineering Organization
ISBN 978-1491965979
A guide to production-readiness standards for microservices, covering stability, reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, monitoring, and documentation.
Scaling Access Control
Solving Identity Management in Modern Applications: Demystifying OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML 2.0
ISBN 978-1484282601
A guide to identity and access management in applications, covering OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML 2.0.
API Dependability and Operational Ownership
Enabling Microservice Success: Managing Technical, Organizational, and Cultural Challenges
ISBN 978-1098130794
A guide to running microservices across an organization, covering the technical, organizational, and cultural sides.
Scaling and Disaster Recovery
Infrastructure as Code: Designing and Delivering Dynamic Systems for the Cloud Age
ISBN 978-1098150358
A guide to defining, testing, and delivering cloud infrastructure as code.
Change Management
The Change Masters
ISBN 978-0671428020
A study of how organizations innovate and manage change.
Chapter 11
Forecast and Fortify: Observability and Resilience
Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence
ISBN 978-1098179922
A guide to observability, covering structured events and how observability differs from monitoring.
Netflix Tech Blog
Netflix's engineering blog, including the posts that introduced chaos engineering.
Implementing Service Level Objectives: A Practical Guide to SLIs, SLOs, and Error Budgets
ISBN 978-1492076810
A practical guide to implementing SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.
Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software
ISBN 978-1680502398
A guide to designing software that survives production, including circuit breakers and bulkheads.
Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice
ISBN 978-1492043867
A guide to practicing chaos engineering.
Time Is Money: The Business Value of Web Performance
ISBN 978-1491928745
A book on the business cost of slow web performance, with case studies.
Chapter 12
Weathering the Storm: Handling Incidents and Support
Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams
ISBN 978-0321534460
A guide to testing on agile teams and to how testers and engineers work together.
Docs for Developers: An Engineer's Field Guide to Technical Writing
ISBN 978-1484272169
A guide to planning, writing, and maintaining technical documentation.
Site Reliability Engineering
Google's book on running reliable production systems, covering SLOs, error budgets, on-call, and postmortems.
The Site Reliability Workbook
The hands-on companion to the SRE book, with worked examples of its practices.
Learning From Incidents
A community and body of writing on incident analysis.
Intelligence-Driven Incident Response: Outwitting the Adversary
ISBN 978-1098120689
A guide to incident response driven by threat intelligence.
Chapter 13
Growing in the Right Direction
Respect
7 Forms of Respect: A Guide to Transforming Your Communication and Relationships at Work
ISBN 979-8985751727
A framework of seven forms of respect for communicating at work.
Influence
Being Glue
A talk on glue work, the invisible work that keeps teams running.
Autonomy
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
ISBN 978-1594488849
A book on autonomy, mastery, and purpose as drivers of motivation.
Sense of accomplishment
The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work
ISBN 978-1422198575
A study of how small wins on meaningful work drive engagement.
Financial
I Will Teach You to Be Rich
ISBN 978-1523505746
A personal finance guide covering banking, saving, investing, and spending.
Why You Shouldn't Feel Guilty About Hiring a Cleaning Lady (or Any Other Kind of Employee)
A blog post on paying for help at home to buy back time.
Chapter 14
Distributed Systems and Global Scale
Distributed systems fundamentals
Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations, and Advanced Topics
ISBN 978-0471453246
A textbook on the theory of distributed computing.
Cloud Native Patterns: Designing Change-Tolerant Software
ISBN 978-1617294297
A guide to designing cloud-native services that tolerate change and failure.
Data across regions
Database Reliability Engineering: Designing and Operating Resilient Database Systems
ISBN 978-1491925942
A guide to operating databases as resilient infrastructure.
Running services in every region
Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure
ISBN 978-1098110208
A guide to deploying and scaling applications on Kubernetes.
Chapter 15
Storytelling for Interviews
A Senior Engineer's Guide to the System Design Interview
A free guide to how senior system design interviews are run and scored.
Cracking the Coding Interview
ISBN 978-0984782857
A coding interview prep book with 189 practice problems and solutions.
Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview
ISBN 978-1955706001
The updated companion to Cracking the Coding Interview, covering problem-solving technique and the wider job search.
System Design Interview: An Insider's Guide
ISBN 979-8664653403
Walkthroughs of common system design interview questions, with diagrams.
Machine Learning Interviews
ISBN 978-1098146542
A guide to machine learning interviews, from the interview loop to the technical questions.
Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track
ISBN 978-1736417911
A book on the staff engineer role, its archetypes, and how people reached it, drawn from interviews with staff engineers.
The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change
ISBN 978-1098118730
A guide to the staff engineer role: big-picture thinking, executing large projects, and leveling up others.
Mastering Behavioral Interviews: The Guide to Storytelling in Tech
ISBN 979-8993294308
A guide to building and telling behavioral interview stories for tech roles.
Building a StoryBrand 2.0: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
ISBN 978-1400248872
A marketing framework that casts the customer as the hero and the brand as the guide.
Chapter 16
Maintenance Mode: Slow Down and Get Cozy
Legacy systems and wind-downs
Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future-Proof Modern Ones)
ISBN 978-1718501188
A guide to modernizing and maintaining aging computer systems.
Low-promotability work
The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women's Dead-End Work
ISBN 978-1982152338
A guide to recognizing and declining non-promotable work.
Burnout and rest
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle
ISBN 978-1984817068
A book on burnout and how to complete the stress cycle.
Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto
ISBN 978-0316365215
A manifesto on rest as a right rather than a reward.
Laziness Does Not Exist
ISBN 978-1982140106
A social psychologist's book arguing that what looks like laziness is usually overload.
Caregiving and work
Working Daughter: A Guide to Caring for Your Aging Parents While Making a Living
ISBN 978-1538124659
A guide to caring for aging parents while keeping a career.