Books & Downloads
Reference material and longer-form writing. The free downloads are genuinely useful on their own. The book is for engineers who are ready to move up and want to know what that actually means.
Free downloads
Three reference docs I keep coming back to. Sign up once, download any of them.
- Code Review Checklist — A practical reference for what to actually look for, not a style guide.
- PostgreSQL Tuning Cheat Sheet — Index selection, query planning, and the settings that matter for real workloads.
- Interview Prep Starter — A structured approach to preparing for software engineering interviews.
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Land the Job
Full-length guideA field guide for engineers who are ready to lead, and need to prove it in a room full of strangers.
I wanted the lead engineer title before I was ready for the job. That's not a confession. It's the default. The money is better, the decisions feel like they should be yours anyway, and there's a specific kind of frustration that comes from having someone else's architectural opinions imposed on a codebase you live in.
Those aren't shameful reasons. They're just incomplete. And if they're the only reasons, you find out the hard way, somewhere around month three, when you realize you traded the part of the job you liked for the part you thought would be easier.
Five chapters on what the transition actually looks like: what you're giving up, what interviewers are really evaluating, and how to prepare for a role that is structurally different from every IC job you've held. Interview flashcards included.
What's inside
- →Becoming a lead for the right reasons, and recognizing when you're not ready yet
- →The actual scope difference between senior and lead, across the titles that don't standardize
- →How to prepare for a technical interview that's really an evaluation of judgment
- →What the first 90 days actually require, before the team trusts you
- →Interview flashcards: the questions that trip up good engineers and how to answer them well