What is professional-programming?

Professional Programming is a curated reading list for software engineers who want to get better at their craft. Think of it as a personal bookshelf of "best of the web" content, books, articles, talks, and papers, handpicked to help you grow from someone who writes code into a well-rounded, effective developer. The list is organized by topic, covering everything you'd expect (databases, security, testing, API design) and plenty you might not (procrastination, biases, public speaking, work-life balance). The author leans on a principle from Abraham Lincoln about sharpening the axe before chopping the tree, meaning the time you invest in learning fundamentals pays off enormously when you actually build things. Each item is tagged so you can tell at a glance whether it's a book, a video, a slide deck, or a must-read article. This is built for working developers at any stage, but it's especially valuable for people early in their careers or those transitioning into engineering. A junior developer wondering what they don't know yet could browse topics like career growth, code reviews, or debugging. A founder learning to manage a technical team might dip into engineering management or incident response. Someone preparing for interviews has a dedicated section for that too. The must-read articles section alone distills years of hard-won lessons into a handful of short pieces, things like "unlearning absolute truths as a junior developer" and practical advice for navigating your first engineering role. What makes this collection stand out is its deliberately opinionated, keep-it-tight philosophy. The author explicitly avoids being comprehensive, choosing quality over quantity. Rather than dumping every possible link, they curate only resources they've found genuinely inspiring or that have become timeless classics. It's the difference between a library card catalog and a trusted colleague saying "read this first, then this, and save this one for when you hit that wall."