Copyright 2017-2024 Joe Block jpb@unixorn.net. See LICENSE.md for details.
A reading list for the larval stage sysadmin/SRE. This list is focused on the UNIX family of OSes, but PRs about other OSes are welcome.
- Articles and Books to Read
- Languages
- Tools
- Blogs and Podcasts
- Online Communities
- Windows Administration
- Other Resources
- License
So you've got your first sysadmin/sre job or internship. Congratulations, it's going to be an interesting ride.
- A Few Ops Lessions We All Learn the Hard Way - A collection of lessons that everyone in ops and SRE inevitably learns. You may not personally experience all of them, but they'll ring true after you're in ops for a while.
- Clean Code - Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn't have to be that way. Martin has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best agile practice of cleaning code "on the fly" into a book that will instill within you the values of a software craftsman and make you a better programmer-but only if you work at it.
- Continuous Delivery - A book that has rapidly become the guide to planning and implementing build pipelines.
- DevOps Roadmap - Community driven, articles, resources, guides, interview questions, quizzes for DevOps. Learn to become a modern DevOps engineer by following the steps, skills, resources and guides listed in this roadmap.
- Effective DevOps - A practical guide for creating affinity among teams and promoting efficient tool usage in your company.
- Git Magic (free ebook) -
git
is a version control Swiss army knife. A reliable versatile multipurpose revision control tool whose extraordinary flexibility makes it tricky to learn, let alone master. - GNU Coreutils Package Guide - Robert Elder made a short YouTube video describing every command in the GNU Coreutils package. I guarantee you will discover something new.
- Hello DNS - Every sysadmin/sre needs to know how DNS works. Start with DNS Basics it's a good introduction.
- Lean Startup or Lean Enterprise - This pair describes the process surrounding implementation and use of Lean principles in Startup and Enterprise organizations. There are a number of companion pieces that extend the principles to specific fields of study and implementation, such as Lean Analytics.
- Lessons Learned from Twenty Years of Site Reliability Engineering - Google blog post about lessons learned over their first 20 years running data centers.
- LinkedIn's School of SRE - Linkedin is using this curriculum for onboarding non-traditional hires and new college grads into the SRE role.
- SRE Transformation: our thoughts is a great "What is SRE and why bother?" post.
- Site Reliability Engineering - How Google Runs Production Systems. This can be read online for free at Google's SRE site.
- Systems Performance: Enterprise and Cloud by Brendan Gregg, this book is an award winner and a favorite of many a sysadmin and SRE, it addresses systems performance at scale.
- The Art of Capacity Planning - John Allspaw's book is a hands-on and practical guide to planning for such growth, with many techniques and considerations to help you plan, deploy, and manage web application infrastructure.
- The Art of Monitoring - James Turnbull's book on the art of modern application and infrastructure monitoring and metrics.
- The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations - The results of a multi-user case study on DevOps and the practical-oriented sequel to The Phoenix Project.
- The Goal - A foundational novel on the Theory of Constraints and many other operational concerns.
- The Missing Semester of Your CS Education - There’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered in CS programs, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. This course will teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!
- The Phoenix Project - know why your projects are important to the business.
- The Practice of Cloud System Administration, by Tom Limoncelli. Focuses on “distributed” or “cloud” computing and brings a DevOps/SRE sensibility to the practice of system administration. Includes case studies and examples from Google, Etsy, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, and other industry giants are explained in practical ways that are useful to all enterprises.
- Time Management for System Administrators, by Tom Limoncelli. You're going to be pulled in a dozen different directions, if you can't manage your time you and your job performance are going to suffer.
- UNIX-Linux-System-Administration-Handbook by Evi Nemeth is a great book, this book is targeted to larger system deployments and real world large systems.
- Web Operations: Keeping the Data on Time - A collection of essays and interviews, with web veterans such as Theo Schlossnagle, Baron Schwartz, and Alistair Croll that will teach you strategies for designing your web site to scale up smoothly to web-scale load.
- Wizard Zines - Julia Evans has a great set of zines she's published about many topics useful to a starting (or even an experienced) sysadmin/SRE.
The Dev part of DevOps means you're going to inevitably end up writing some code. Here's a list of free programming books for many languages.
Here are some of the scripting languages you're most likely to see in your infrastructure, with links to some good references and tutorials.
The awk
family (awk
, gawk
, nawk
and I'm sure I've missed other implementations) of scripting languages is one of the oldest - the first version of awk
was written in 1977, but it's on pretty much any unix (even minimal variants that might not have perl
, python
or ruby
) and is still very useful.
I still use it frequently for pulling columns out of tabular output because by default (and unlike cut
where you have to count spaces) it treats consecutive runs of whitespace characters as a delimiter, so for example you can pipe things to awk '{print $3}'
, but it's Turing-complete - people can and have written complex programs in it.
Here are some good references to get you started:
bash
is objectively a terrible programming language. All variables default to being globals, there is no module system built into the language, dealing with hashes is horrible, and there are other horrors resulting from it trying to be backward compatible with sh
.
That said, it is on every system, so every *NIX sysadmin needs to know bash
.
Here are some useful resources to help you step up your shell scripting game:
- The Art of the Command Line - A good set of notes and tips on using the command-line that is useful when working on Linux/Unix.
- Bash Guide For Beginners - A practical guide which, while not always being too serious, tries to give real-life instead of theoretical examples.
- Bash Guide - Gives examples of good practice when writing
bash
scripts. It is targeted at beginning users with no advanced knowledge. - Bash Pitfalls - Greg Wooledge has a great list of unpleasant surprises in
bash
. - Commandlinefu - An extensive list of
bash
oneliners for almost every task you may need to accomplish. - Google's Shell Style Guide lists what Google's developers consider best practices for
bash
scripts. - Learning the Bash Shell - It's hard to go wrong with an O'Reilly reference on anything, really.
- Pure Bash Bible - A collection of pure
bash
alternatives to external processes. - Safe Ways to do Things in Bash - An excellent set of tips from the authors of shellharden.
- shellcheck is a lint for
bash
. It'll help you find unused variables, deprecated syntax and other things that make yourbash
scripts less stable. You can install it withapt-get
,brew
,cabal
, oryum
. - shellharden - is a syntax highlighter and a tool to semi-automate the rewriting of scripts to ShellCheck conformance, mainly focused on quoting.
- zshelldoc - Documentation generator for Bash & ZSH, with call-trees, comment extraction, etc.
Finally, remember that bash
is not sh
. If you're writing a script in bash
, and testing it with bash
, don't use #!/bin/sh
as the shebang. Firstly, because bash
behaves differently when called as sh
, and secondly, not all *NIX systems (and not even all linux distributions) use bash
as their /bin/sh
any more.
Often you'll find yourself in a Windows enviroment, like it or not. These resources might help you in those cases -
- awesome-powershell - Awesome list of PowerShell resources.
- Best Practices and Style guide - Unofficial recommendations for better PowerShell code.
- Powershell Slack - Think of it as a virtual Powershell user's group.
- PowerShell.org eBooks - A collection of PowerShell (and other) eBooks.
Python has much better support for string manipulation and system infrastructure than Bash. In addition, there is a rich library of modules supporting various tasks you can use in your scripts that are just a pip3 install
away.
A couple of places to go into as training are:
- Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, a free book that helps you automate boring and repetitive tasks with Python.
- Programming Python, a well-written O'Reilly book, short and concise.
- 20 Python Libraries You Aren't Using (But Should), a free book by Caleb Hattingh published by O'Reilly (No real Email address needed.)
- Google's Python Course, an introduction to Python, assuming little programming experience.
- Python Koans is an interactive tutorial for learning the Python programming language by making tests pass.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python, a neat place to see usage and examples of Python and not only for systems administration.
- WSGI - Web Server Gateway Interface, a Python implementation of web servers.
Ruby also has a rich ecosystem of gems you can use in your programs, and like Python, much better string and data structure manipulation than Bash.
If you're in a Ruby shop, you'll want these books:
Perl has a long history of being the system administrator's friend, bringing the best of bash
, sed
and awk
together. It is also suitable for building tools for the system administrator to utilise in their work.
- carton - A dependency management tool.
- cpanm - An alternative and very friendly tool for installing modules from CPAN. This pairs well with perlbrew.
- perlbrew - A tool for managing one or more Perl installations, without needing to modify the system-level Perl.
- pinto - A tool for managing a private CPAN repository.
- Mojolicious - A rich framework for doing all things web, from building web services and sites to building HTTP client applications.
- Plack/PSGI - The Perl implementation of WSGI, with many Plack servers available for use.
- Task::Kensho - A list of recommended modules for many purposes, including reading configuration files, connecting to databases, logging, sending email, web crawling and development, and handling XML.
- Pulumi is similar to Terraform, in that you can configure infrastructure with code. Unlike Terraform, you can do this with conventional languages such as TypeScript, Python, and Go.
- Terraform is a tool that allows you to configure your infrastructure as code, just like Chef/Puppet/etc allow you to manage the configuration of individual machines as code, with all the benefits of being able to diff, code review, etc. Terraform works with (as of this edit) AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, vSphere and many other systems.
- AWSCli provides a unified command line interface to Amazon Web Services. Wean yourself off of the webui if you want to be truly productive.
- og-aws is an excellent resource to AWS written by and for engineers who use AWS extensively.
- S3cmd is a free command line tool and client for uploading, retrieving and managing data in Amazon S3 and other cloud storage service providers that use the S3 protocol, such as Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2 or DreamHost DreamObjects.
- Az PowerShell Module The cross-platform (i.e. PS Core) Azure PowerShell module. Replaces the
AzureRm
module and provides a migration path from it. - Azure CLI 2.0 new preview CLI interface for Azure (written in python).
- Azure Code Samples samples of code showing how to interact with Azure.
- Azure Friday "Just two engineers, a laptop and the cloud, solving problems".
- Azure Quickstart Templates community contributed Azure Resource Manager templates for tons of things.
- Official Azure Documentation official documentation for all Azure services.
- Introduction is Google's official introduction and an overview.
- GCP for AWS professionals lists equivalents for AWS products in GCP.
- GCP for Azure professionals lists equivalents for Azure products in GCP.
- Introduction The OpenStack project's official introductory overview.
- Installing The list of tools you should consider if you want to install and operate OpenStack yourself.
- Community Where to go and who to ask for help.
- Planet OpenStack An aggregated feed from across the Internet of OpenStack-related content, including contributions from individuals.
- Public Clouds Similar to AWS, GCP or Azure, this is a list of providers who offer cloud services running on OpenStack.
- Stackalytics Code contribution statistics to OpenStack and related projects.
- SuperUser SuperUser is an online 'publication' aggregating and editorialising content related to OpenStack and Open Infrastructure.
Quite simply, if you aren't using configuration management, you're doing it wrong.
You don't want to manually configure any servers - no matter how hard you try, they won't end up truly identical and having meat typing in commands takes far too long per server, doesn't scale, and the manual labor will discourage you from standing up new VMs for testing.
Treating your configuration as something described in text files allows you to treat it like code. You can do pull-requests, get your changes reviewed by your team, view the differences between your configuration at different times, and almost most-importantly, find out who changed the configuration, when, and if they wrote good commit messages, why.
There are several good options:
- Ansible is designed to be minimal in nature, consistent, secure, and highly reliable. Owned & supported by Red Hat.
- CFEngine has been in continuous development since 1993. Unlike some of its peers on this list, it is written in C and is built with speed and scalability in mind. It should be considered for very, very large systems and for very small (think embedded) systems.
- Chef is written in Ruby and Erlang and uses a Ruby DSL to describe system configuration.
- Puppet makes it easy to automate the provisioning, configuration and ongoing management of your machines and the software running on them. Make rapid, repeatable changes and automatically enforce the consistency of systems and devices – across physical and virtual machines, on premise or in the cloud.
- Salt orchestrates the build and ongoing management of your infrastructure.
Containers package software and all its dependencies in a single package that can be run in isolation from other containers or applications running on the server, without the overhead of a full virtual machine.
Containerd is an industry-standard container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness and portability. It is available as a daemon for Linux and Windows, which can manage the complete container lifecycle of its host system: image transfer and storage, container execution and supervision, low-level storage and network attachments, etc.
Follow the installation instructions for your preferred platform (Currently, only Linux and Windows are directly supported) and start learning how to use Containerd:
On macOS, you can use Lima or Colima which both launch Linux virtual machines with automatic file sharing, port forwarding, and containerd installed. You can use the lima xbar plugin for a simple menubar application to control your Lima or Colima VMs.
Docker is a tool for running and managing containers. Containers are rapidly growing in popularity for local development (as an alternative to virtual machines), and can also run software in production with tools like Kubernetes or Amazon ECS.
Follow the installation instructions for your preferred platform:
- Docker CE for Linux
- Docker CE for Mac
- Linux usually requires a separate installation of docker-compose
- Docker CE for Windows
- The Docker Book - An excellent resource for getting started with Docker. This book is quick & easy to read.
Kubernetes is a portable open-source container orchestration system used to automate deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
There are many good tutorials at kubernetes.io. I recommend you start with either the minikube walkthrough since it will get you a running test cluster quickly, or enable the kubernetes cluster option in Docker Desktop.
VMWare sponsors a free set of online Kubernetes courses at https://kube.academy/courses.
If you want to understand everything that is involved in getting a Kubernetes cluster up and running, Kubernetes the Hard Way by Kelsey Hightower is a must-read.
Have you ever wondered exactly what happens when you type something like kubectl run nginx --image=nginx --replicas=3
to make everything happen? What happens when K8s... is an in-depth guide that leads you through the full lifecycle of a request from the client to the kubelet
, linking off to the source code where necessary to illustrate what's going on.
- k3s - k3s is a kubernetes distribution optimized for IOT and edge computing. It is packaged as single binaries for ARM64, ARMv7 and X86 and is ideal for a learning environment - you can set up a k3s instance in less than five minutes, and if you break it, tear it down and re-install it just as quickly.
- krew - Makes it easy to use kubectl plugins.
krew
helps you discover plugins, install and manage them on your machine. It is similar to tools likeapt
,dnf
orbrew
. Today, over 70kubectl
plugins are available onkrew
. - kubectx - Provides the
kubectx
command, which makes it easy to switch between clusters specified in your.kube/config
, andkubens
, which helps you switch between Kubernetes namespaces smoothly.
There are several good projects for monitoring.
- Grafana - Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Create, explore, and share dashboards with your team and foster a data driven culture.
- OSquery for Windows, linux, macOS, and FreeBSD - Use SQL queries to look into items such as installed programs, running processes, and other events for inventory and monitoring.
- Prometheus - Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. Since its inception in 2012, many companies and organizations have adopted Prometheus, and the project has a very active developer and user community. It is now a standalone open source project and maintained independently of any company.
Help wanted.
Many of the tools you're going to use have JSON output options. Trying to parse JSON with grep
or awk
is a world of pain, fortunately there is jq, a lightweight JSON processor you can use to slice out useful bits of the output for use in scripts similarly to how you can use awk
or sed
on text files.
- Adam Gordon Bell wrote a good Introduction to JQ.
- There's an online playground at https://jqplay.org/ you can use to experiment.
Inevitably you're going to find yourself in a situation where you have to look at logs to see what's going wrong with a service. When it's a multi-gigabyte logfile, that can be extremely painful.
Enter regexes and the grep
family of tools.
When you have a multi-gigabyte logfile, it's a lot less painful to look at just the entries generated by the service that you got alerted about. Even better to only look at the error messages from the service, and something as basic as grep -i yourservice < log | grep -i errorcode
can convert a potentially multi-hour ordeal into a quick minute or two task.
- autoregex - This site will let you paste a regex into it and have it translated to English, or make an English statement like "First character A, second character B, up to three B characters, then a C and end of line" and have that translated to
^A.{0,3}BC$
. - debuggex.com will visualize regular expressions graphically.
- Introducing Regular Expressions - Michael Fitzgerald's O'Reilly Book is a good place to start.
- Regex for Noobs - An illustrated guide to regex that aims to provide a gentle introduction for people who never have fiddled with regex, want to, but are kind of intimidated by the whole thing.
- Regular Expressions Cookbook
- Sed and Awk Pocket Reference presents a concise summary of regular expressions and pattern matching, and summaries of sed and awk and how to use them to edit files and convert data from one format to another.
Serverless doesn't mean no sysadmins, even though there aren't instances to administer. We need to change common processes that we rely on to monitor and manage services that run on serverless platforms. There are not system level metrics to understand how our application is working.
Here are a few resources to help:
- Building Observability Into a Serverless Application (Video) Yan Cui presents some guidelines to implementing observability into serverless on AWS. The patterns in this talk can be applied to other platforms as well.
No matter what source control system you use (git
, hg
, perforce
, whatever), you're going to have to write commit messages. Make them good. It may be obvious today why you made the change, but in six months or a year you won't have that context.
- Explain why you made the change, not just what you changed. And no, the diff is not an explanation.
- Start your commit messages with a single line that explains what you were trying to do in general
- Go into more detail about your changes in the message body. Talk about what you intend the change to do and why more than how you did it. If there's an issue or ticket number, include that in your commit message too, it'll give more context to your coworkers (or you in a year).
Good commit messages help the rest of your team understand what you're trying to do and make it easier for them to find logic errors in your pull requests - the code may be technically correct, but if they understand what you're trying to do, they can see when your code isn't actually doing what you say you want it to do, even when it is syntactically correct.
Here are a few articles that while focused on git
commit messages apply to any source control system:
- 5 Useful Tips for a Better Commit Message is another good article on writing commit messages.
- A Note About Git Commit Messages
- Writing Good Commit Messages is a good article on writing coherent commit messages.
Whether or not your shop uses git
internally, you're going to end up needing to use it for the many useful tools and references hosted on GitHub and GitLab.
- 19 Git Tips for Everyday Use - a good set of starter tips for using
git
. - git-extra-commands - a misleadingly named collection of extra
git
helper scripts, blog posts, tutorials and videos. - git-flight-rules is Kate Hudson's guide to using
git
in specific situations. - git-tips/tips is a collection of
git
tips - Pro Git by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub is a great overall resource for
git
. - Why the Heck is Git so Hard? The Places Model is an article about moving from SVN/CVS to
git
. - Ben Limmer's Git Skills Talk will help you understand using
git
(particularly with GitHub).
- awesome-ssh - A curated list of
ssh
apps, libraries and other resources. - drduh Yubikey-Guide - A comprehensive guide to using Yubikey hardware tokens with SSH and GPG.
- SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition
Testing is incredibly important and you should undertake this for your infrastructure as well as your applications.
- Test Kitchen https://kitchen.ci - Test your configuration management tooling. Test kitchen was originally written to test chef cookbooks, but can be used for other configuration management systems as well.
Don't get involved in the Editor Wars. Just. Don't. Your choice of tool does not need defending. Nor does anyone else's choice.
However, you should care about your tools. You should be able to use them efficiently.
vim
is a reality of life for SysAdmins. It is the one editor you can be sure is installed in even the most minimal *NIX or linux install. You must be able to do at least basic edits with it. You don't need to love it, but eventually you will have to use it.
- Damian Conway, "More Instantly Better Vim" - OSCON 2013
- vi and Vim Editors Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition
Emacs is an extremely extensible editor. In jest, it is frequently referred to as an operating system with a half-decent editor.
If you want to get a taste of what emacs
can do, you can defer to Magnars and his excellent video tutorials/demos:
One of the biggest problems with emacs
is that the defaults present a fairly different experience to what people are used to in other editors. Your first stop should be learning the basics using the built-in tutorial, followed by the mini-manual from tuhdo:
- Type
ctrl-h
, followed closely byt
from withinemacs
to see the tutorial http://tuhdo.github.io/index.html.
Emacs can be can be made to look and act relatively modern if that's your desire:
If you're looking for emacs
packages, the following online package index is the most popular, and tracks many of them:
There are several excellent starter kits out there, with varying delineations of whiz-bang. Here are some starter kits, with spacemacs being the most popular:
Here are some emacs
configurations for inspiration:
- Magnar Sveen's very interesting and original
emacs
config! magnars/.emacs.d - Phil Hagelberg's config: https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/dotfiles/tree/master/.emacs.d
- Steve Purcell's excellent config: purcell/emacs.d
Use tools which help you be productive. If you want to use a GUI Text Editor or IDE, don't let anyone give you a hard time about that.
There are GUI versions of vim
and emacs
that have ardent followers.
- Sublime Text is another editor with an extensive plugin ecosystem and arguably one of the inspirations for Atom.
- Visual Studio Code is a cross platform editor that is gaining traction in the community.
- Arrested Devops - hosted by Matt Stratton, Trevor Hess, and Bridget Kromhout. ADO is the podcast that helps you achieve understanding, develop good practices, and operate your team and organization for maximum DevOps awesomeness.
- Code as Craft - Etsy's ops blog and is full of well written examples of dealing with real-world problems at scale.
- Corecursive - Each episode someone shares the fascinating story behind a piece of software being built.
- DevOps'ish - A weekly newsletter assembled by open source contributor, DevOps leader, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador Chris Short.
- Hey, Scripting Guy! Blog is a blog that answers common (and some uncommon) PowerShell queries.
- Julia Evans' Blog - Julia writes a great blog where she dives into interesting ops topics and explains them clearly.
- Kitchen Soap - John Alspaw is the CTO at Etsy and writes a great blog about web operations and operating at scale and other things that are interesting to ops types.
- Last Week in AWS - Corey Quinn's weekly newsletter about the latest goings-on in the world of AWS.
- Last Week in Kubernetes Development - Weekly newsletter summarizing code activity in the Kubernetes project: merges, PRs, deprecations, version updates, release schedules, and the weekly community meeting.
- Monitoring Weekly - Weekly compilation of curated articles, news and tools related to monitoring.
- On the Metal - Bryan Cantrill and Jessie Frazelle host a podcast about all sorts of interesting aspects of computing.
- PowerScripting Podcast - hosted by Jon Walz and Hal Rottenberg.
- SRE Weekly - SRE Weekly is a newsletter devoted to everything related to keeping a site or service available as consistently as possible.
- DevOpsChat Slack is another community of DevOps minded folk with a diverse set of topic specific chat rooms. Home to Arrested DevOps.
- Hangops Slack is a community of DevOps minded folk with many subject focused chat rooms.
- Platform Engineering is a large community focused on platform engineering. Their slack has more than 15,000 users.
- PowerShell Slack is a community of PowerShell enthusiasts and Windows centric DevOps topics.
- Chocolatey - Having existed much longer than WinGet, Chocolatey has a large ecosystem of packages.
- Scoop - A simple, no frills package manager. Compared to Chocolatey, package manifests are easier to write and it munges with the system much less.
- WinGet - The official pakcage manger, useful for installing applications, PowerShell scripts, and more.
- privatezilla - Checks (and optionally fixes) your Windows 10 installation for privacy violations with a GUI interface.
- Win-Debloat-Tools - Another tool for fixing privacy and performance issues on Windows 10 and 11.
- dbatools - A set of PowerShell commands to streamline SQL Server management.
- gsudo - In a pinch, this allows you to run a certain command as Administrator, without running an console session.
- Free-for-Dev is a list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev.
- awesome-scalability - An organized reading list for illustrating the patterns behind scalable, reliable, and performant large-scale systems.
- awesome-sre - A curated list of awesome Site Reliability and Production Engineering resources.
- awesome-sysadmin - A curated list of awesome open-source sysadmin resources.
- devops-exercises - Questions and exercises on various technical topics, sometimes related to DevOps and SRE.
- devops-resources - Another repository of useful resources and information about DevOps.
- nohello - Why you shouldn't just say 'Hello' when you chat with someone. Make it easier for them to help you.
- oncall-handbook - Alice Goldfuss' excellent oncall handbook, read this before your first oncall shift.
- sre-interview - A collection of questions to practice for interviews.
- stack-on-a-budget - A list of free/cheap tiers of services that you can use to learn the various cloud-based systems.
- sysadvent - Every year the sysadvent team publishes 24 good articles for sysadmins and SREs.
- tools.tldr.run - A curated list of security tools for Hackers and Builders.
- Etsy's Debriefing Facilitation Guide is a great guide to conducting a blame-free debrief after an outage.
- Pēteris Ņikiforovs has a good blog post explaining what everything you see in
top
/htop
output here. - Dan Luu wrote an excellent article about the Normalization of Deviance that is good food for thought about engineering practices.
- Donne Martin maintains a great System Design Primer.
- Julia Evans wrote a couple of great resources on making your 1-on-1's with your manager more effective. 1-on-1s should not just be a status report on what you're working on - you should be using them to focus on more big picture goals (both yours and the organizations) and your career. Read her article on 1-on-1 ideas, and I recommend buying her Help, I have a Manager! zine.
- Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice by Patrick Mackenzie is an article I wish I could have read at the start of my career.
- How to Get Into SRE by Alice Goldfuss is an excelent article about her path to becoming an SRE. Alice also gave a great presentation - Passing the Console: Fostering the Next Generation of Ops Professionals at LISA16.
Writing good documentation and design docs is as important as writing code. The more senior you are, the more writing you're going to have to do - communication skills are a must.
- Email - Like it or not, you're going to write a lot of email in the course of your work. Make them good. Lazarus Lazaridis wrote a good article on Composing Better Emails
- Gergely Orosz wrote an excellent blog post about Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well.
- Patrick McKenzie wrote a great blog post on salary negotiation. Salary negotiation is one of the few times in your life where a five minute conversation can earn you (or cost you!) thousands of dollars - be prepared.
- Patrick also has a good podcast episode on salary negotiation - Kalzumeus Podcast Episode 12: Salary Negotiation with Josh Doody (there's a transcript too). You have to do it, it affects your life, you should do it well.
- The Fearless Salary Negotiation site is a good read overall, especially the article on handling a Salary Expectations Interview Question when the recruiter asks. To quote them, "Your salary expectations are one of the few things you know that the company doesn’t. That makes them extremely valuable and sharing them can make your salary negotiations very difficult and even cost you a lot of money." so read (at least) this article before you start your next job interview cycle.
- An Engineer's Guide to Stock Options - Alex McCaw wrote a good blog post explaining stock options in plain English.
- Equity 101 by Gergely Orosz is a good summary of the most common equity compensation variants.
- How We Can Fix Startup Stock Options is a good post by Pete Cheslock on optimizing the tax implications of your stock options.
- The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation - Stock options, RSUs, job offers, and taxes — a detailed reference, including hundreds of resources, explained from the ground up.
- Understanding Startup Stock Options - Ben Beltzer explains when you should exercise, how to get paid out, how much you'll make, and how much tax you'll probably have to pay (get advice from your own accountant, don't rely on a blog post).
- What I Wish I'd Known About Equity Before Joining A Unicorn - This is an excellent (though USA-centric) summary of how to value stock options and what the tax implications are and how to minimize potential tax. I heartily recommend reading it before you accept any offers involving stock or stock options as part of your compensation.
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