An Engineering Leader's 'Required Reading' List for Better Software

Carl Kolon, an engineering leader, has published the curated list of technical essays he sends his team as “required reading.” The collection spans coding practices, platform design, frontend architecture, databases, async programming, and character encoding, with standout picks flagged by a star. His through-line is a preference for simplicity over cleverness: favorites include The Grug Brained Developer (“complexity bad”), Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant, HATEOAS, and The Vietnam of Computer Science. Each entry carries a short note explaining why it earned a spot.

The list doubles as a statement of opinionated engineering philosophy. Kolon argues against ORMs (citing an OpenAI post on scaling Postgres to show how ORM-generated SQL causes performance trouble), pushes for declarative and “pure” React over imperative state-heavy code, and champions locality of behavior over aggressive helper-function extraction. Other recurring themes include avoiding speculative features (YAGNI), encoding invariants in types (“Parse, Don’t Validate”), and knowing your tools deeply, from EXPLAIN ANALYZE to Unicode handling.

Notably, several recommendations are framed as defenses against AI coding assistants. Kolon points to essays like The Wrong Abstraction and Locality of Behavior as ammunition for pushing back on agents that reflexively chase a “single source of truth,” over-apply useMemo and useCallback, or eliminate all duplication. The list reflects a broader tension teams now face: reconciling classic software-design wisdom with the habits and biases of code-generating tools.