- Author
- Carl Kolon
- Published
- Undated
- Kind
- Annotated reading list of articles and books
- Original
- carlkolon.com/reading/
- Subject
- Software design
What it is
Carl Kolon is an engineering leader who sends articles to the team as required reading. The page groups them under headings such as coding practices, frontend and databases. It ends with books that shaped the author's views.
What it says
- Kolon says the list exists to share lessons from programmers who faced similar challenges.
- Kolon would recommend The Grug Brained Developer above all other entries.
- Kolon says the coding entries argue against speculative features and wrong abstractions.
- Kolon says ORMs seem seductive at first but soon cause performance problems and confusion.
- For the frontend, Kolon favours state derived from served HTML and pure, declarative React components.
- The list says some entries help push back against coding agents that over-consolidate code.
- The book picks include The Mythical Man-Month, Crafting Interpreters and Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
What evidence it gives
The page offers opinion and short annotations. One quote from an OpenAI article about scaling Postgres supports the view on ORMs. It runs no tests and gives no data.
Interests and limits
One engineering leader chose the entries, so the list is not a survey. The author says some points reinforce personal opinions and invites disagreement. The linked articles and books were not read, only this page.