The philosophy
Why these books exist
For more than 15 years, I worked across mobile engineering, architecture and technical leadership, including at Cisco and Mastercard, with experience across Apple, Adobe and Visa.
Across every one of them, I saw the same pattern.
Talented engineers were getting stuck. They had the technical skill; nobody had taught them how the systems around engineering work.
The systems nobody teaches
Hiring
How interviews really happen, and what signals move a decision.
Promotion
How careers progress in practice, and why strong work alone rarely gets you promoted.
Architecture
How real decisions get made, the tradeoffs, the constraints and the judgement behind them.
Leadership
How influence works without authority, and how staff and architect engineers operate.
The missing curriculum
None of this is taught in computer science programs or bootcamps. It is learned slowly, unevenly, and usually too late, by watching, guessing and getting passed over.
These six books are an attempt to write that curriculum down. A deliberate path, from getting found, to becoming a stronger engineer, to interviewing well, to designing systems, to leading teams, to operating as an architect.
