TOP PICKbook
Clean Architecture
Robert C. Martin
The definitive guide on separating concerns, dependency inversion, and building systems that are easy to change. Transformed how I structure every service I write.
ArchitectureDesign PatternsBackend
Curated
Books, courses, articles, and tools that shaped how I build software. Everything here I've personally used and recommend.
Top Picks
Robert C. Martin
The definitive guide on separating concerns, dependency inversion, and building systems that are easy to change. Transformed how I structure every service I write.
Martin Kleppmann
The bible for understanding distributed systems, databases, replication, and consistency models. Essential reading before designing any microservice that handles real data.
Mario Casciaro & Luciano Mammino
Covers streams, event emitters, async patterns, and modular architecture in depth. Goes far beyond the basics you find in tutorials.
Matt Pocock
The most practical TypeScript course I have found. Goes deep on generics, conditional types, and patterns that actually show up in production codebases.
Frontend Masters
Covers load balancers, caching strategies, database sharding, and CDN design using real-world examples. Helped me think at a higher altitude in architecture discussions.
Adrian Colyer
Summaries of computer science research papers, explained accessibly. Great for understanding the ideas behind the tools we use every day.
Martin Fowler
Deep dives on microservices, event sourcing, CQRS, and software design. His writing on strangler fig patterns heavily influenced our Ensolite refactor.
Prisma
The best ORM I have used. Schema-first, fully type-safe migrations, and an intuitive query API. Replaced raw SQL and Sequelize on every project I touched.
All Resources
Andrew Hunt & David Thomas
Timeless principles on being a better engineer — from DRY and orthogonality to tracer bullets and debugging mindset. Read it every couple of years.
Redis
Free official course covering Redis data structures, pub/sub, streams, and real-world patterns. Completed this before implementing BullMQ in production.
Bret Fisher
Hands-on Docker and Docker Compose course covering networking, volumes, multi-stage builds, and Swarm. Made containerizing services intuitive.
Lee Robinson
Practical Next.js patterns from someone who built the framework's docs. I reference his posts constantly when working on Next.js projects like Templora.
Hoppscotch
Open-source Postman alternative that runs in the browser. Faster and lighter for quick API testing, with a cleaner UI. I reach for it over Postman for ad-hoc requests.