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mtdvio/every-programmer-should-know

A collection of (mostly) technical things every software developer should know about

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Created Aug 24, 2017Updated Dec 29, 2025

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Created by this repo author

Every Programmer Should Know 🤔

A collection of (mostly) technical things every software developer should know.

These are resources I can recommend to every programmer regardless of their skill level or tech stack

Highly opinionated 💣. Not backed by science. Comes in no particular order ♻️


⭐ it and share with a friendly developer!



P.S. You don't need to know all of that by heart to be a programmer. But knowing the stuff will help you become better! 💪

P.P.S. Contributions are welcome!


Introduction

  • 🎥 Map of Computer Science
  • 🎥 40 Key Computer Science Concepts Explained In Layman’s Terms
  • 📄 Computer Science Roadmap
  • 📄 Community-driven Roadmaps for Developers

Falsehoods

  • Awesome Falsehoods 💊 Curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in. Check for things you do not know about Strings, Addresses, Names, Numbers, Emails, Timezones and Dates and more.

Algorithms

  • Big O Cheatsheet
  • 📖 Computer Science Distilled
  • 📖 Grokking Algorithms
  • 📖 Introduction to Algorithms
  • Algorithms Visualization
  • Algorithms for Competitive Programming

Data Structures

  • 📖 Hello Algo
  • 🎥 UC Berkeley, Data Structures Course
  • Foundations of Data Structures - EDX
  • Data Structures - Coursera
  • Mathematics for Computer Science - Eric Lehman

Numbers

  • 📖 How to Count
  • 📄 Floating Point Guide
  • 📄 What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic
  • 📄 Basic Number Theory Every Programmer Should Know...

Strings

  • 📄 Unicode and Character Sets
  • Homoglyphs
  • Unicode Common Locale Data Repository
  • 🎥 ASCII
  • 🎥 UTF-8

Latency

  • Interactive Latency Infographics
  • 📄 Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know

Time

  • 📄 Some notes about time
  • 🎥 The Problem with Timezones

Memory

  • 📄 What every Programmer should know about memory

Distributed Systems

  • 📖 Understanding Distributed Systems
  • 📖 Designing Data-Intensive Applications
  • 📜 Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems
  • 📜 Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
  • 📄 There is No Now
  • 📄 Jepsen: how different databases behave under partition
  • 📜 Fallacies of Distributed Computing Explained

Machine Learning

  • 🏫 Andrew NG Machine Learning Specification Class

RegExp

  • 🔗 RegexHQ
  • 🔗 Learn regex the easy way
  • 🔗 Regex Crossword

Security

  • 📖 Security Programming
  • 📄 Rolling Your Own Crypto
  • 📄 Cryptographic Right Answers
  • 📄 An Open Letter to Developers Everywhere (About Cryptography)
  • 📖 Foundations of Security: What Every Programmer Needs to Know
  • 📄 OWASP Top 10 - The "gold standard" for web application vulnerabilities.
  • 📄 Portswigger Academy - Practical Labs for learning about web application security.
  • 📄 Web Application Exploits and Defenses
  • 📄 Hashing, Encryption and Encoding

UX/Usability

  • 📖 Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
  • 🎥 Inventing on Principle

SEO

  • 📄 What Every Programmer Should Know About SEO

Architecture

  • 📜 A Field Guide to Boxology
  • 📜 Out of the Tar Pit
  • 📜 No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering
  • 🎥 Growing a Language
  • 🎥 CQRS and Event Sourcing
  • 📖 Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby
  • 🎥 Evolutionary Software Architectures
  • System Design: A Primer
  • 📄 How JavaScript works: part-1, 2, 3, 4
  • 🎥 Entity-Component-System Architecture with Unity by example

Code Design

  • 📄 Programming Principles Wiki

Engineering Philosophy

  • 🎥 Category Theory in Life
  • 🎥 Simple Made Easy
  • 📄 Speed In Software Development
  • 🎥 #NoEstimates
  • 🎥 The Myth of the Genius Programmer
  • 🎥 Making Badass Developers
  • 📄 The Ten Rules of a Zen Programmer
  • 📄 The mythical 10x programmer
  • 📄 The Debugging Mindset
  • 🎥 The Future of Programming
  • 📄 The Good Software Development Manifesto
  • 🎥 All the Little Things
  • 📄 Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Practices

  • 📖 Working Effectively with Legacy Code
  • 📖 The Art of Readable Code: Simple and Practical Techniques for Writing Better Code
  • 📖 Code Complete
  • 📖 Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
  • 📖 Test Driven Development: By Example
  • ✅ Going To Production Checklist
  • 📖 Release It!
  • 📖 Professor Frisby's Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming
  • 📖 SICP: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
  • 📄 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Turtle
  • 📜 Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know
  • Learn X in Y Minutes Learn the basics of a language in a highly condensed way.
  • Hyperpolyglot Compare commonly used features of more or less similar languages side-by-side. Helps you to jump Python<->Ruby, Ocaml<->Haskell, etc.
  • 📄 Pomodoro for Programmers
  • 📖 Site Reliability Engineering

Career

  • 💰 Levels FYI
    Salary stats for various tech companies. Better than Glassdoor.
  • 📄 10 Things Every Programmer Should Know For Their First Job
  • 📄 How Much Do Software Engineers Really Make in Each City?
  • 📄 Software Engineers Tenure in San Francisco
  • Software Engineering 101
  • 📖 The Passionate Programmer
  • 📖 Soft Skills: The software developer's life manual
  • 📖 The Complete Software Developer's Career Guide
  • 📖 Programming Beyond Practices: Be More Than Just a Code Monkey
  • A list of European Investors
  • 📄 Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer
  • 📄 How To Interview As a Developer Candidate
  • 📄 How To Get a Tech Job Abroad Faster
  • 📖 How To Be A STAR Engineer
  • 📈 TL;DR; Stock Options
    • Discussion on HN #1
    • Discussion on HN #2
  • 📄 The Open Guide to Equity Compensation
  • 📄 Equity 101 for Startup Employees
  • 📖 Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions
  • 🔥 Everything you need to know to get the job
  • 📖 Tech Interview Handbook
  • 📄 Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
  • 📄 What you should know as a founder of a software company
  • 🎥 Code Interview Prep & Programming Questions | Pramp
  • 📖 97 things every programmer should know
  • 🎥 A Philosophy of Software Design | John Ousterhout | Talks at Google

Fine-tune Your Resume

  • 🔨 CV Compiler

Open Source

  • 🌐 Learn how to use Git and GitHub

Remote Work

  • 🌐 Remotive.io: Startups hiring remotely
  • 🌐 Remote Work List for Developers
  • ⚡ NomadList
  • 📖 The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work
  • 🏠 Awesome Remote Job

Problem Solving

  • 📖 The Art and Craft of Problem Solving
  • 📖 How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method

Soft Skills

  • 📖 Difficult Conversations
  • 📖 Crucial Conversations
  • 📖 How to Win Friends and Influence People

Mental Health

  • Awesome Mental Health
    A curated list of awesome articles, websites and resources about mental health in the software industry.

Papers on Programming

  • ❤️ Papers We Love
  • 📰 The Morning Paper
  • 📜 What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
  • 📜 Go To Statement Considered Harmful
  • 📰 Arxiv
  • 📰 Sci-hub

Free Books on Programming

  • 📚 Free Programming Books

Services ⚡

  • 🤖 Abstract API's
  • Free For Dev
  • Public APIs
  • The Noun Project
  • Without Coding
  • Simpleicons
  • Learn Anything
  • repl.it

Licenses

  • Choose An Open Source License
  • Well-explained Software licenses in TLDR version
  • How open source licenses work and how to add them to your projects

Where To Look For Further Info

  • freeCodeCamp Guide
  • GeeksForGeeks
  • Dev.To
  • Stack Overflow
  • Dzone

Coding Practice Sites ⚡

  • 🔗 CodeForces
  • 🔗 CodeChef
  • 🔗 Coderbyte
  • 🔗 CodinGame
  • 🔗 Cs Academy
  • 🔗 HackerRank
  • 🔗 Spoj
  • 🔗 HackerEarth
  • 🔗 TopCoder
  • 🔗 Codewars
  • 🔗 Exercism
  • 🔗 CodeSignal
  • 🔗 Project Euler
  • 🔗 LeetCode
  • 🔗 Firecode.io
  • 🔗 InterviewBit
  • 🔗 uCoder
  • 🔗 LintCode
  • 🔗 CodeCombat
  • 🔗 InterviewCake
  • 🔗 At Coder
  • 🔗 Codility
  • 🔗 ICPC Problem Archive
  • 🔗 Codemia
  • 🔗 LabEx
  • 🔗 Codebattle

Learning through entertainment:

  • Robocode
  • Elevatorsaga
  • Untrusted
  • CSS Diner
  • CodingGame

Platform Engineering

A modern discipline that evolved from DevOps and SRE principles, focused on improving developer experience and productivity by building and managing self-service tools and workflows, often through an Internal Developer Platform (IDP). The goal is to reduce cognitive load on developers and streamline the path to production.

  • What is Platform Engineering?

    • Microsoft Learn: What is platform engineering?
      A comprehensive overview of the practice, its goals, and core capabilities.
    • Atlassian: What is Platform Engineering?
      A great explanation of the roles and responsibilities of a platform team.
  • Internal Developer Platform (IDP)

    • internaldeveloperplatform.org: What is an IDP?
      A foundational resource explaining the concept of an IDP as the core product of a platform team.
    • Atlassian: Internal Developer Platform Guide
      A deep dive into the benefits and best practices for building an IDP.
  • Golden Paths (Paved Roads)

    • Spotify Engineering: How we use Golden Paths to solve fragmentation
      The original concept from Spotify, explaining how they use "opinionated and supported paths" to guide developers.
    • Red Hat: What is a Golden Path for software development?
    • A clear article on how Golden Paths provide templates and standardized workflows to increase efficiency.