{ "updated": "2026-09-14", "selection": "Editorial curation for aspiring and practising FDEs; no paid placement or affiliate links.", "resources": [ { "id": "benmore-forward-deployed", "title": "Forward Deployed: Discovery, AI-Driven Development, and the Forward Deployed Engineer", "author": "Richard Buehling", "publisher": "Benmore", "url": "#ref-benmore", "type": "book", "topic": "discovery", "level": "intermediate", "access": "provided", "accessNote": "User-supplied PDF; no public full-text link verified. This entry opens the source note and chapter guide. The original PDF is not hosted.", "summary": "A consulting practitioner’s method for discovery, specification-led development, deployment, handoff, and support.", "why": "Use Chapters 4–8 for engagement judgment and Chapters 10–15 for delivery and ownership.", "practice": "Build an assumption register, track prototype gaps, and ask a receiver to perform a rollback.", "caveat": "Benmore’s February 2026 perspective. Its support pricing and workflow percentages are company examples, not industry benchmarks.", "publication": "2026-02", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": true, "sourceNote": "Supplied PDF inspected: title, contents, discovery, specification, development and handoff chapters. Page references in the source guide use printed page numbers." }, { "id": "agent-factory-book", "title": "The AI Agent Factory", "author": "Panaversity", "publisher": "Panaversity", "url": "https://agentfactory.panaversity.org/docs/about", "type": "book", "topic": "ai", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public web reading; optional tools, model calls, and hosted infrastructure may cost extra.", "summary": "An online curriculum for specifying, building, and supervising AI workers.", "why": "Use its orientation to distinguish session assistance from recurring worker operation.", "practice": "Compare a one-off task with a recurring version; name the owner, trigger, limits, and review.", "caveat": "The 10-80-10 rule is a teaching heuristic. Economic predictions and Digital FTE terminology do not prove labor replacement.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": true, "sourceNote": "Official page read on 14 September 2026. This records the author’s educational method, not independent validation of its market forecasts or ecosystem performance." }, { "id": "agent-factory-spec", "title": "Spec-Driven Development", "author": "Panaversity", "publisher": "Panaversity", "url": "https://agentfactory.panaversity.org/docs/spec-driven-development-crash-course", "type": "course", "topic": "discovery", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public web reading; optional tools, model calls, and hosted infrastructure may cost extra.", "summary": "A course on agreeing intent, defining acceptance, and keeping specifications current.", "why": "Translate a broad customer request into checks that can survive a change of implementation.", "practice": "Write three acceptance examples before building; revise the spec when a constraint changes.", "caveat": "Specifications need evidence and review; writing one does not establish that the customer problem is valid.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official page read on 14 September 2026. This records the author’s educational method, not independent validation of its market forecasts or ecosystem performance." }, { "id": "agent-factory-sor", "title": "The FDE AF Model", "author": "Panaversity", "publisher": "Panaversity", "url": "https://agentfactory.panaversity.org/docs/ecosystem/fde-af-model", "type": "article", "topic": "data", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public web reading; optional tools, model calls, and hosted infrastructure may cost extra.", "summary": "A proposed model separating shared machinery, governed knowledge, domain assets, and customer delivery.", "why": "Distinguish reusable method from domain evidence and customer-specific integration.", "practice": "Give every source a reviewer and version, then identify one adapter worth reusing.", "caveat": "A proposed architecture and business model; named infrastructure and ecosystem claims are not independently tested here.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official page read on 14 September 2026. This records the author’s educational method, not independent validation of its market forecasts or ecosystem performance." }, { "id": "agent-factory-redesign", "title": "Designing the Vertical System of Record", "author": "Panaversity", "publisher": "Panaversity", "url": "https://agentfactory.panaversity.org/docs/ecosystem/designing-the-vertical-sor", "type": "article", "topic": "discovery", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public web reading; optional tools, model calls, and hosted infrastructure may cost extra.", "summary": "A method for examining inherited work and rebuilding it around outcomes, evidence, and enduring obligations.", "why": "Avoid encoding an old workaround as a permanent requirement.", "practice": "Explain why one manual step can be changed while its underlying control remains intact.", "caveat": "Proposed redesign still needs operator validation; an agent is not assumed to follow every step reliably.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official page read on 14 September 2026. This records the author’s educational method, not independent validation of its market forecasts or ecosystem performance." }, { "id": "agent-factory-evaluation", "title": "Eval-Driven Development for AI Employees", "author": "Panaversity", "publisher": "Panaversity", "url": "https://agentfactory.panaversity.org/docs/eval-driven-development-crash-course", "type": "course", "topic": "ai", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public web reading; optional tools, model calls, and hosted infrastructure may cost extra.", "summary": "A multi-track curriculum connecting worker behavior with evaluation and release decisions.", "why": "Use it beside a working project and a domain reviewer.", "practice": "Record severe failures separately from average success, and use the same held-out cases to compare revisions.", "caveat": "A sample exercise is not production assurance. Validate graders and cover the consequences of your particular workflow.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official page read on 14 September 2026. This records the author’s educational method, not independent validation of its market forecasts or ecosystem performance." }, { "id": "core-python", "title": "CS50’s Introduction to Programming with Python", "author": "Harvard", "publisher": "Harvard", "url": "https://cs50.harvard.edu/python/", "type": "course", "topic": "foundations", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "OpenCourseWare is free. Optional verified credentials are a separate purchase.", "summary": "A structured introduction to Python with problem sets and a final project.", "why": "Build the coding, debugging, and testing foundation needed before deployment work.", "practice": "Turn a CSV of tickets into a validated report and test malformed rows.", "caveat": "Focuses on Python rather than a complete computer-science or FDE curriculum.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": true }, { "id": "missing-semester", "title": "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education (2026)", "author": "Missing Semester teaching team", "publisher": "MIT CSAIL", "url": "https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2026/", "type": "course", "topic": "foundations", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public lectures and exercises; self-study does not confer MIT credit.", "summary": "Learn the shell, development tools, version control, debugging, packaging, and modern coding workflows.", "why": "Useful when you must diagnose an unfamiliar customer environment and leave a reproducible setup behind.", "practice": "Build a one-command setup script, inspect a failed process, and recover a deliberately broken Git change.", "caveat": "Start with basic programming familiarity; this develops tool fluency rather than teaching your first programming language.", "publication": "2026", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the official course home and 2026 lecture index. The current course is the 2026 offering; older annual archives remain available.", "starter": true }, { "id": "core-discovery", "title": "Using in-depth interviews", "author": "Government Digital Service", "publisher": "Government Digital Service", "url": "https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-research/using-in-depth-interviews", "type": "docs", "topic": "discovery", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "The public service manual is freely accessible.", "summary": "Guidance for preparing and conducting interviews about users’ actual experience.", "why": "Replace assumptions about a customer workflow with observations and evidence.", "practice": "Interview a willing user about their last task, then separate observations from assumptions.", "caveat": "Public-service research context; adapt recruitment and consent to the organisation.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": true }, { "id": "core-sql", "title": "PostgreSQL tutorial", "author": "PostgreSQL", "publisher": "PostgreSQL", "url": "https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/tutorial.html", "type": "docs", "topic": "data", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Official tutorial and database software are free. Hosted database services may cost money.", "summary": "An introduction to relational concepts, SQL queries, joins, and transactions.", "why": "Inspect customer data, model entities, and avoid incorrect reports from joins.", "practice": "Model tickets and customers; demonstrate a join that does not double-count.", "caveat": "The current URL is versioned by PostgreSQL; match reference details to your installed release.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": true }, { "id": "anthropic-effective-agents", "title": "Building effective agents", "author": "Erik S. and Barry Zhang", "publisher": "Anthropic Engineering", "url": "https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents", "type": "article", "topic": "ai", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public article; reproducing API examples can incur usage charges.", "summary": "A concise pattern language for chaining, routing, parallel work, orchestration and autonomous tool use.", "why": "Helps choose the simplest architecture that satisfies a customer's workflow.", "practice": "Draw your workflow, implement a deterministic baseline, and justify each point where model autonomy is necessary.", "caveat": "Published December 2024; the page now explicitly warns that its tooling landscape has changed. Treat it as patterns, not a current SDK selection guide.", "publication": "2024-12-19", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the original article, workflow/agent distinction, pattern descriptions, tool appendix and current freshness note.", "starter": true }, { "id": "hamel-evals-faq", "title": "AI Evals: Everything You Need to Know", "author": "Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar", "publisher": "Hamel's Blog", "url": "https://hamel.dev/blog/posts/evals-faq/", "type": "article", "topic": "ai", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Full web guide and PDF are free; the linked live course is a separate paid offering.", "summary": "A detailed practical FAQ on product evaluations, error analysis, human labels, evaluators, RAG and production monitoring.", "why": "Connects deployment quality to actual customer tasks and shows how domain experts and engineers can improve a system together.", "practice": "Review a small batch of realistic traces with a domain expert, group failures, then implement one targeted check and test it on both passing and failing examples.", "caveat": "The authors label their guidance as contextual opinions; sample sizes and review schedules need to match your risks and data.", "publication": "2025-05-28; updated 2026-09-01", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": true, "sourceNote": "Full public FAQ read, including publication date, 1 Sep 2026 modification date, error analysis, judge validation and production sections." }, { "id": "sre-workbook", "title": "The Site Reliability Workbook", "author": "Betsy Beyer, Niall Richard Murphy, David K. Rensin, Kent Kawahara, and Stephen Thorne (editors)", "publisher": "Google / O’Reilly", "url": "https://sre.google/workbook/table-of-contents/", "type": "book", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Complete authorized online text is free; optional paid print or ebook editions.", "summary": "Worked examples for service objectives, alerting, incidents, pipelines, releases, and customer-facing reliability.", "why": "Provides concrete tools for agreeing what reliable means with a customer and transferring operational ownership.", "practice": "Define a user-facing SLI, propose an SLO, create a rollback drill, and write a sample incident communication.", "caveat": "Basic experience running a service helps. This is a 2018 foundation: validate current monitoring syntax and cloud implementation details separately.", "publication": "2018-07", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read Google's official book register and workbook contents plus O’Reilly metadata confirming July 2018. Select chapters 2, 5, 9, 13, 16, and 19 for an FDE-oriented route.", "links": [ { "title": "Chapter 19: Reaching Beyond Your Walls", "url": "https://sre.google/workbook/reaching-beyond/" } ], "starter": true }, { "id": "cursor-fde-interview", "title": "How Cursor deploys AI inside the enterprise", "author": "Richard MacManus with Pauline Brunet", "publisher": "Latent Space", "url": "https://www.latent.space/p/cursor-forward-deployed-engineers", "type": "article", "topic": "career", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public original interview with a linked conference talk.", "summary": "Cursor's FDE leader explains configurable deployments, production engineering experience, customer champions and feedback into the product roadmap.", "why": "A concrete current example of how customer work, engineering judgment and adoption fit together in an FDE team.", "practice": "Compare a target FDE job with this example: identify the customer, deployed artifact, internal champion, adoption signal and product feedback path.", "caveat": "One company's stated model and hiring preferences; its experience requirement and forecasts do not describe every FDE role.", "publication": "2026-07-01", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": true, "sourceNote": "Original interview read on publisher site; guest role, author and publication date verified. Company claims kept attributed rather than generalized." }, { "id": "chip-huyen-agents", "title": "Agents", "author": "Chip Huyen", "publisher": "Chip Huyen's Blog", "url": "https://huyenchip.com/2025/01/07/agents.html", "type": "article", "topic": "ai", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Free standalone article adapted from the paid AI Engineering book.", "summary": "A framework for reasoning about agent tools, planning, failure modes and evaluation rather than starting with a particular agent framework.", "why": "Useful for explaining architecture choices and failure handling to a customer before adding more autonomy.", "practice": "For one agent design, list its tools and write actions, identify planning and tool failures, and specify the checks and fallback for each.", "caveat": "Published in early 2025; use the conceptual structure and verify current APIs and model capabilities in maintained documentation.", "publication": "2025-01-07", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Original author article read, including date, table of contents, book-adaptation statement and experimental-framework caveat." }, { "id": "ai-engineering-book", "title": "AI Engineering", "author": "Chip Huyen", "publisher": "O’Reilly", "url": "https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/ai-engineering/9781098166298/", "type": "book", "topic": "ai", "level": "intermediate", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Book purchase or O’Reilly subscription access; free previews are not the complete book.", "summary": "A foundation-model application guide covering evaluation, adaptation, retrieval, agents, data, latency, and cost.", "why": "Helps justify model and application choices against customer requirements rather than choosing a stack from a demo.", "practice": "Compare a simple baseline and a retrieval-based solution on the same labeled cases, reporting quality, latency, and cost.", "caveat": "Comfort with application development helps. Model and framework details age quickly; pair concepts with current provider documentation. Complements Designing Machine Learning Systems.", "publication": "2024-12 (digital edition)", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the publisher overview, contents, and metadata. O’Reilly lists December 2024 for this digital title; this is the date recorded here. Paid full text was not accessed.", "starter": false }, { "id": "designing-ml-systems", "title": "Designing Machine Learning Systems", "author": "Chip Huyen", "publisher": "O’Reilly", "url": "https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-machine-learning/9781098107956/", "type": "book", "topic": "ai", "level": "advanced", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Book purchase or O’Reilly subscription access.", "summary": "An iterative approach to production ML spanning data, features, objectives, deployment, monitoring, and adaptation.", "why": "Useful for FDE roles deploying predictive ML or maintaining customer models and data pipelines beyond foundation-model APIs.", "practice": "Specify training/serving data checks, a monitoring plan, and a retraining trigger for one predictive use case.", "caveat": "Requires basic ML and software knowledge. Choose AI Engineering first for foundation-model applications; choose this when training and operating ML models are central.", "publication": "2022-05", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read O’Reilly's official title metadata and overview. The May 2022 scope is complementary to AI Engineering, not a replacement for its foundation-model focus. Description is based on public publisher/author material, not a full-text review.", "starter": false, "links": [ { "title": "Free chapter resources", "url": "https://github.com/chiphuyen/dmls-book" } ] }, { "id": "anthropic-context-engineering", "title": "Effective context engineering for AI agents", "author": "Prithvi Rajasekaran, Ethan Dixon, Carly Ryan and Jeremy Hadfield", "publisher": "Anthropic Engineering", "url": "https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/effective-context-engineering-for-ai-agents", "type": "article", "topic": "ai", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public article.", "summary": "Techniques for selecting, retrieving and maintaining useful context across extended agent tasks.", "why": "Helps control irrelevant context, token costs and failures in long customer workflows.", "practice": "Compare full-history, compacted-history and retrieved-context variants on the same tasks; record quality and token use.", "caveat": "Provider experience and design guidance, not proof that one context strategy wins universally or that indexed retrieval is obsolete.", "publication": "2025-09-29", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the original article, retrieval tradeoffs, long-horizon techniques and author acknowledgements.", "starter": false }, { "id": "hands-on-llms-book", "title": "Hands-On Large Language Models", "author": "Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst", "publisher": "O’Reilly", "url": "https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/hands-on-large-language/9781098150952/", "type": "book", "topic": "ai", "level": "beginner", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "The book is paid; the authors' official example notebooks are free on GitHub. Compute/API use may cost extra.", "summary": "An illustrated introduction to LLM internals, embeddings, semantic search, retrieval and fine-tuning.", "why": "Builds the intuition needed to diagnose retrieval and model behavior rather than treating an API as a black box.", "practice": "Run the semantic-search notebook on a small document set, inspect retrieval misses, and compare a reranker.", "caveat": "Published September 2024; beginner-to-intermediate content still expects code practice, and notebook dependencies or free GPU availability can change.", "publication": "2024-09", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the publisher metadata and the official https://github.com/HandsOnLLM/Hands-On-Large-Language-Models README/contents. Did not access paid full text or execute notebooks.", "links": [ { "title": "Free companion notebooks", "url": "https://github.com/HandsOnLLM/Hands-On-Large-Language-Models" } ], "starter": false }, { "id": "hugging-face-agents", "title": "Hugging Face Agents Course", "author": "Hugging Face education team", "publisher": "Hugging Face", "url": "https://huggingface.co/learn/agents-course/unit0/introduction", "type": "course", "topic": "ai", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Course and certification are free; hosted model use beyond included allowances may cost extra.", "summary": "Hands-on agent fundamentals, frameworks, agentic retrieval and an evaluated final project.", "why": "Provides a structured first build before you connect an agent to a customer's systems.", "practice": "Build one tool-using agent, record its traces, then add a timeout and a test for a failed tool call.", "caveat": "Requires basic Python and basic LLM knowledge; use current framework docs when examples differ.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the official introduction, syllabus, prerequisites and certification terms. It describes a living course and requires a free Hugging Face account for Hub/Spaces activities.", "starter": false }, { "id": "full-stack-llm-bootcamp", "title": "LLM Bootcamp", "author": "The Full Stack instructors", "publisher": "The Full Stack", "url": "https://fullstackdeeplearning.com/llm-bootcamp/spring-2023/", "type": "course", "topic": "ai", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Recorded lectures are free; recreating hosted demos can incur provider charges.", "summary": "A product-oriented course covering LLM application architecture, deployment, evaluation and user experience.", "why": "Connects model work with the application lifecycle an FDE actually owns.", "practice": "Use the LLMOps and UX lectures to write a launch plan with failure states, instrumentation and customer acceptance checks.", "caveat": "Spring 2023 material: use its lifecycle and UX lessons, then check current APIs, models and framework docs.", "publication": "2023", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the official syllabus, lecture descriptions and explicit free-access statement; did not watch every lecture or run the historical demo.", "starter": false }, { "id": "mcp-specification", "title": "Model Context Protocol specification — 2026-07-28", "author": "Model Context Protocol maintainers", "publisher": "Model Context Protocol", "url": "https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2026-07-28", "type": "docs", "topic": "ai", "level": "advanced", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Open specification and public documentation; connected services may have their own charges.", "summary": "The authoritative contract for connecting AI applications with external context and tools.", "why": "Useful when designing interoperable customer integrations and understanding capability and trust boundaries.", "practice": "Expose one read-only customer-style tool, document its authorization boundary, and test unsupported protocol versions and errors.", "caveat": "Implementation requires API/JSON-RPC familiarity. Pin the protocol and SDK versions; older clients and optional extensions have different support.", "publication": "2026-07-28", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the versioned specification overview, base protocol, features, extensions and security principles; checked official July release information. This entry does not claim every SDK implements every extension.", "starter": false }, { "id": "lenny-evals-podcast", "title": "Why AI evals are the hottest new skill for product builders", "author": "Lenny Rachitsky with Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar", "publisher": "Lenny's Podcast", "url": "https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-ai-evals-are-the-hottest-new-skill", "type": "podcast", "topic": "ai", "level": "beginner", "access": "mixed", "accessNote": "Episode links to public YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts; the newsletter page marks its transcript/access as paid.", "summary": "A worked conversation about analyzing real traces, grouping errors, choosing evaluators and validating a judge against human decisions.", "why": "Provides an accessible shared starting point for an FDE and a customer domain expert who must agree what acceptable quality means.", "practice": "Watch the trace-review walkthrough, then have an engineer and domain expert independently annotate the same ten outputs and discuss disagreements.", "caveat": "The title's ranking language is promotional; this selection is based on the concrete walkthrough, not claims about course popularity.", "publication": "2025-09-25", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Original episode page, public description and timestamped chapters read; official outbound YouTube link verified. Paid transcript was not accessed." }, { "id": "linkedin-becoming-fde", "title": "Becoming a Forward Deployed Engineer: Bridging AI Products and Customer Outcomes", "author": "Vinoo Ganesh", "publisher": "LinkedIn Learning", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/learning/becoming-a-forward-deployed-engineer-bridging-ai-products-and-customer-outcomes", "type": "course", "topic": "career", "level": "intermediate", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Subscription access with a public preview; trial eligibility and employer or library access vary.", "summary": "A 51-minute course on FDE responsibilities, discovery, communication, deployment feedback and getting started in the role.", "why": "Offers a compact FDE-specific orientation before tackling a substantial technical portfolio project.", "practice": "Turn the published syllabus into an engagement brief covering the customer outcome, communication plan, first deployment and feedback route to product engineering.", "caveat": "An orientation course, not a complete engineering qualification or hiring guarantee; locked lessons were not reviewed.", "publication": "2026-08-10", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official course landing page and full public syllabus read; instructor, intermediate level, 51-minute duration, release date and locked lessons verified." }, { "id": "core-policy", "title": "Candidate AI guidance", "author": "Anthropic", "publisher": "Anthropic", "url": "https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance", "type": "docs", "topic": "career", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "The candidate guidance is public.", "summary": "Anthropic’s policy on AI assistance during applications and assessments.", "why": "Distinguish learning with AI from the rules that apply during an interview.", "practice": "Before a mock assessment, state the permitted tools and work within that constraint.", "caveat": "Employer-specific policy; the actual invitation may contain additional instructions.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": false }, { "id": "core-interviews", "title": "OpenAI interview guide", "author": "OpenAI", "publisher": "OpenAI", "url": "https://openai.com/interview-guide/", "type": "docs", "topic": "career", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "The employer’s public interview guide is free.", "summary": "General guidance on OpenAI’s recruiting assessments and interview process.", "why": "Prepare examples and confirm the tool rules for the actual assessment.", "practice": "Practise explaining a debugging decision without relying on a fixed question bank.", "caveat": "A general employer guide, not a guaranteed FDE interview loop.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": false }, { "id": "staff-engineer", "title": "Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track", "author": "Will Larson", "publisher": "Will Larson / StaffEng", "url": "https://staffeng.com/book/", "type": "book", "topic": "career", "level": "advanced", "access": "mixed", "accessNote": "Most guides and interviews are free on StaffEng; the assembled book, foreword and ending are paid.", "summary": "Guides and practitioner interviews about technical leadership, choosing useful work and influencing an organization as an individual contributor.", "why": "Senior FDEs frequently lead across customer and product teams without controlling either team's priorities.", "practice": "Read Work on what matters, then write a one-page proposal identifying the outcome, decision owner, affected teams and work you will deliberately defer.", "caveat": "Staff engineering and FDE are different roles; the author also notes a US and Silicon Valley bias in the examples.", "publication": "2021", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official book page read, including free-content FAQ, guide links, interview basis and contextual limitation; prices intentionally omitted." }, { "id": "core-sierra", "title": "The AI-native interview", "author": "Sierra", "publisher": "Sierra", "url": "https://sierra.ai/blog/the-ai-native-interview", "type": "article", "topic": "career", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "The engineering article is freely accessible.", "summary": "Sierra’s description of its AI-native engineering interview design.", "why": "Practise scoping, implementing, and reviewing a solution with explicit tool rules.", "practice": "Run a mock plan/build/review exercise and explain one deliberate scope cut.", "caveat": "Describes Sierra’s engineering process; other employers may prohibit the same tools.", "publication": "2026-04-22", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": false }, { "id": "pragmatic-engineer", "title": "The Pragmatic Engineer", "author": "Gergely Orosz", "publisher": "The Pragmatic Engineer", "url": "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/about", "type": "blog", "topic": "career", "level": "intermediate", "access": "mixed", "accessNote": "Free article previews and podcast issues; subscription for full deep dives, The Pulse and subscriber resources.", "summary": "An engineering publication combining company interviews, real-world delivery problems, organizational practices and career context.", "why": "Helps FDEs understand how engineering teams operate and compare customer practices with documented examples.", "practice": "Choose one relevant deep dive, extract a practice and its context, and write a small experiment to test whether it improves your current engagement.", "caveat": "Use specific articles to solve a problem; the publication is not an FDE curriculum and industry commentary is not a universal benchmark.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Current official about page read: author, editorial scope, free versus paid access, schedule and subscription conditions verified." }, { "id": "azure-adapter", "title": "Anti-Corruption Layer pattern", "author": "Microsoft Azure Architecture Center", "publisher": "Microsoft Learn", "url": "https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/anti-corruption-layer", "type": "article", "topic": "data", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public engineering reference; implementation infrastructure may incur costs.", "summary": "Places a translation boundary between systems with different domain models.", "why": "Keep a customer-specific schema from spreading through the reusable application.", "practice": "Map two customer APIs into one internal model and test what happens when a field changes.", "caveat": "The adapter introduces operational and maintenance overhead; preserve errors and ownership across the boundary.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Primary engineering article read; canonical AWS PDF used where the newer landing page did not expose the article text.", "starter": false }, { "id": "cmu-database-systems-2026", "title": "CMU 15-445/645: Intro to Database Systems (Spring 2026)", "author": "Andy Pavlo and Jignesh Patel", "publisher": "Carnegie Mellon University", "url": "https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2026/schedule.html", "type": "course", "topic": "data", "level": "advanced", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public archived notes, slides, assignments, and video links; university enrollment and credit are separate.", "summary": "An implementation-focused study of SQL, indexes, query execution, concurrency, recovery, and distributed databases.", "why": "Deepens diagnosis of slow queries, transaction anomalies, and storage behavior in data-heavy customer deployments.", "practice": "Study the query-optimization and concurrency units, then explain a slow query and a transaction anomaly in your own small database example.", "caveat": "Advanced systems and C++17 skills are prerequisites for BusTub projects. Keep course solutions private; external learners do not receive the full grading infrastructure.", "publication": "2026", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read Spring 2026 home, complete schedule (updated April 27), and syllabus. Chosen over the in-progress Fall 2026 offering; video destinations are linked but playback was not verified.", "starter": false }, { "id": "data-engineering-zoomcamp", "title": "Data Engineering Zoomcamp", "author": "Alexey Grigorev and DataTalks.Club instructors", "publisher": "DataTalks.Club", "url": "https://github.com/DataTalksClub/data-engineering-zoomcamp", "type": "course", "topic": "data", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Free videos, materials, and homework; cloud services used in exercises can create separate costs.", "summary": "A project-based data-pipeline course covering containers, infrastructure, orchestration, warehouses, modeling, batch, and streaming.", "why": "Builds hands-on integration skills that transfer to ingesting and validating customer data under real operational constraints.", "practice": "Deliver an original pipeline with incremental loading, data-quality checks, recovery instructions, and a clear cost boundary.", "caveat": "Basic coding and SQL are required. Self-paced study is available now without a certificate; cohort certificates require the provider's project and peer-review process.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the maintainers' current repository README, prerequisites, access table, and syllabus. It advertises January 2027 as the next cohort; live cohort means coordinated deadlines, not live lectures.", "starter": false }, { "id": "microsoft-rag-design", "title": "Design and develop a RAG solution", "author": "Microsoft Azure Architecture Center contributors", "publisher": "Microsoft Learn", "url": "https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/ai-ml/guide/rag/rag-solution-design-and-evaluation-guide", "type": "docs", "topic": "data", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public architecture guidance; Azure resources used to implement it are separately billed.", "summary": "A design-and-evaluation framework for RAG ingestion, chunking, enrichment, embeddings and retrieval.", "why": "Helps turn a customer document demo into a traceable series of engineering decisions.", "practice": "Keep an experiment log that changes one retrieval variable at a time and records both component and end-user results.", "caveat": "Azure examples are vendor-specific; transfer the evaluation method without assuming every named service is required.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the primary architecture introduction, design phases, evaluation recommendations and update date of 30 Jun 2026. Did not read every linked phase article.", "starter": false }, { "id": "ddia-second-edition", "title": "Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition", "author": "Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini", "publisher": "O’Reilly", "url": "https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781098119058/", "type": "book", "topic": "data", "level": "advanced", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Published book and subscription access; the second edition is released, not an early-access recommendation.", "summary": "Develop judgment about storage, data models, transactions, replication, distributed failures, batch, and streaming trade-offs.", "why": "Use it when a customer's consistency, tenancy, recovery, or scale requirements make a simple architecture choice consequential.", "practice": "Write a design decision for your project comparing one database with a distributed alternative, including partial-failure behavior.", "caveat": "Best after building a backend with a database. Read relevant chapters alongside a project instead of treating all 672 pages as an entry requirement.", "publication": "2026-02", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the publisher's second-edition page and contents: February 2026, Kleppmann and Riccomini. The older dataintensive.net marketing page still describes the earlier author/version. Description is based on public publisher/author material, not a full-text review.", "starter": false }, { "id": "fundamentals-data-engineering", "title": "Fundamentals of Data Engineering", "author": "Joe Reis and Matt Housley", "publisher": "O’Reilly", "url": "https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-data/9781098108298/", "type": "book", "topic": "data", "level": "beginner", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Buy the book or use O’Reilly access through a personal, employer, or library subscription where available.", "summary": "An end-to-end framework for ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, governance, and serving data.", "why": "Helps translate a customer's messy data estate into a coherent delivery plan before selecting products.", "practice": "Map one customer's data lifecycle, identify its source of truth, and write a failure-and-ownership table for every handoff.", "caveat": "Basic programming and database concepts help. The 2022 concepts remain useful, but verify contemporary tool behavior in current documentation.", "publication": "2022-06", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the publisher overview and title page, which list June 2022 and the two authors. No claim that this is a newly updated edition. Description is based on public publisher/author material, not a full-text review.", "starter": false }, { "id": "aws-idempotency", "title": "Making retries safe with idempotent APIs", "author": "Malcolm Featonby", "publisher": "Amazon Builders’ Library", "url": "https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/making-retries-safe-with-idempotent-APIs/", "type": "article", "topic": "data", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public engineering reference; implementation infrastructure may incur costs.", "summary": "Explores request identity, duplicate calls, and the semantics of retry-safe APIs.", "why": "Avoid duplicate invoices, tickets, or provisioning when a response is lost.", "practice": "Repeat one write with the same request ID, then reuse that ID with different input and verify rejection.", "caveat": "Idempotency needs a defined lifetime, scope, and consistency contract; it is not the same as assuming exactly-once delivery.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Primary engineering article read; canonical AWS PDF used where the newer landing page did not expose the article text.", "starter": false }, { "id": "strangler-fig", "title": "Strangler Fig", "author": "Martin Fowler", "publisher": "Martin Fowler", "url": "https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html", "type": "article", "topic": "data", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public engineering reference; implementation infrastructure may incur costs.", "summary": "Describes incremental replacement of a legacy system through a growing replacement.", "why": "Deliver a narrow useful slice without requiring a full customer-system rewrite.", "practice": "Move one read workflow behind a routing boundary and document a reversible cutover.", "caveat": "Temporary coexistence creates complexity; establish how the old path will eventually be retired.", "publication": "2024-08-22 (updated article)", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Primary engineering article read; canonical AWS PDF used where the newer landing page did not expose the article text.", "starter": false }, { "id": "continuous-discovery-habits", "title": "Continuous Discovery Habits", "author": "Teresa Torres", "publisher": "Product Talk", "url": "https://www.producttalk.org/continuous-discovery-habits/", "type": "book", "topic": "discovery", "level": "intermediate", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Paid book; the author's public articles offer a free introduction to the methods.", "summary": "A structured approach to outcomes, customer interviews, opportunity mapping and testing assumptions before committing to solutions.", "why": "Provides a repeatable way to connect customer needs, engineering choices and measurable value throughout an engagement.", "practice": "Draw one opportunity solution tree for your deployment: one outcome, three observed customer needs, two candidate solutions and the riskiest assumption to test.", "caveat": "Written for ongoing product teams; adapt its cadence and ownership model for short customer engagements.", "publication": "2021-05-19", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Author's dated book launch page and current Product Talk course/book navigation read; book scope and purchase access verified. Paid book text was not reviewed." }, { "id": "latent-space-box", "title": "Every Agent Needs a Box — Aaron Levie, Box", "author": "swyx and Jeff Huber with Aaron Levie", "publisher": "Latent Space", "url": "https://www.latent.space/p/box", "type": "podcast", "topic": "discovery", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public episode, video and transcript on the publisher's site.", "summary": "An enterprise software conversation about agent identity, permissions, context, evaluation and workflows that read and write company information.", "why": "Helps frame customer discovery around the systems and operational boundaries that determine whether an agent can be deployed.", "practice": "After the governance and identity segment, draw separate access boundaries for the employee, agent and administrator in your proposed workflow.", "caveat": "A vendor executive's viewpoint, with product promotion and forecasts; it is not an implementation guide or independent security assessment.", "publication": "2026-03-05", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official episode page, chapter list and transcript sections on identity, permissions and enterprise data read; publication date and public access verified." }, { "id": "getting-started-discovery", "title": "Everyone Can Do Continuous Discovery—Even You! Here's How", "author": "Teresa Torres", "publisher": "Product Talk", "url": "https://www.producttalk.org/getting-started-with-discovery/", "type": "article", "topic": "discovery", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Free article and conference talk; the related book and training are optional paid products.", "summary": "How to begin customer discovery in organizations that lack an established discovery cadence or resist changing their process.", "why": "An FDE needs a practical first step even when access to users or influence over the customer's roadmap is limited.", "practice": "Choose one discovery habit you can introduce this week; specify who participates, the question it should answer and the smallest useful evidence to collect.", "caveat": "Organizational examples are contextual and predate current AI tooling; the customer-learning methods remain distinct from technical implementation advice.", "publication": "2023-08-02", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Original author article and edited conference transcript read; publication date, topic and free video/text access verified." }, { "id": "google-technical-writing", "title": "Technical Writing Courses for Engineers", "author": "Google technical-writing educators", "publisher": "Google for Developers", "url": "https://developers.google.com/tech-writing", "type": "course", "topic": "discovery", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Free self-study lessons and facilitator materials; occasional public facilitated sessions have separate availability.", "summary": "Practice planning clear technical documents, editing prose, improving accessibility, and writing helpful errors.", "why": "Useful for customer setup instructions, operational runbooks, design decisions, and unambiguous handoffs.", "practice": "Rewrite a setup guide for a named audience, then ask someone unfamiliar with the project to use it and report friction.", "caveat": "Some English-writing proficiency and basic coding familiarity help. These courses focus on technical documentation rather than general business English.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read Google's course home, audience requirements, and delivery-format guidance. Self-study lessons remain valuable without a facilitated session; no scheduled class or certification is promised.", "starter": false }, { "id": "mom-test", "title": "The Mom Test", "author": "Rob Fitzpatrick", "publisher": "Rob Fitzpatrick", "url": "https://www.momtestbook.com/", "type": "book", "topic": "discovery", "level": "beginner", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Paid print, ebook, PDF and audiobook editions; the official page explains the approach before purchase.", "summary": "A compact guide to customer conversations that produce useful evidence instead of flattering, biased feedback.", "why": "FDEs need to uncover an expensive workflow problem before agreeing to a requested feature or agent demo.", "practice": "Rewrite five leading discovery questions, then interview a user about the last time they performed the workflow; record evidence separately from assumptions.", "caveat": "Customer interviewing is one part of enterprise discovery; add security, procurement, stakeholder and deployment constraints.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official author/book page read: scope, author, formats and purchase links verified; no publication date displayed and no price quoted. Practice is an editorial exercise. Description is based on public publisher/author material, not a full-text review." }, { "id": "workshop-survival-guide", "title": "The Workshop Survival Guide", "author": "Rob Fitzpatrick and Devin Hunt", "publisher": "Rob Fitzpatrick and Devin Hunt", "url": "https://www.workshopsurvival.com/", "type": "book", "topic": "discovery", "level": "intermediate", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Paid book; a detailed table of contents is public on the official site.", "summary": "Practical workshop design and facilitation guidance covering exercises, teaching formats, difficult questions and time management.", "why": "Useful when an FDE must run customer onboarding, train operators or bring several stakeholders into a working session.", "practice": "Design a 45-minute customer enablement session with one observable learning outcome, a hands-on task, a recovery plan and a short feedback check.", "caveat": "Focuses on educational workshops, so adapt the format for discovery meetings rather than treating every meeting as a class.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official book page, authors section, complete table of contents and purchase link read; publication date not displayed. Full book not reviewed." }, { "id": "agentic-engineering-patterns", "title": "Agentic Engineering Patterns", "author": "Simon Willison", "publisher": "Simon Willison's Weblog", "url": "https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/", "type": "blog", "topic": "foundations", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Free, evolving online guide; using the coding tools discussed can incur separate costs.", "summary": "A living collection of coding-agent practices covering testing, Git, code review, subagents and understanding generated code.", "why": "FDEs can prototype integrations quickly while retaining responsibility for the code they deliver and hand over.", "practice": "Use an agent on a small integration change, establish a test baseline, inspect the diff, and produce a walkthrough another engineer can use to maintain it.", "caveat": "A practitioner guide in progress, not a formal standard; tool behavior and individual chapters can change.", "publication": "2026-02-23", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Official guide index, introductory chapter and dated launch post read; current index includes testing, review and code-understanding patterns." }, { "id": "cosmic-python", "title": "Architecture Patterns with Python", "author": "Harry Percival and Bob Gregory", "publisher": "O’Reilly / Cosmic Python", "url": "https://www.cosmicpython.com/book/preface.html", "type": "book", "topic": "foundations", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Complete authorized online book is free; paid print, ebook, and O’Reilly options also exist.", "summary": "Concrete Python examples of domain models, adapters, repositories, transactions, service layers, and events.", "why": "Helps separate changing customer integrations from stable business logic and make those boundaries testable.", "practice": "Wrap an external API in an adapter, test business behavior with a fake, then integration-test the real boundary.", "caveat": "Requires Python and basic testing familiarity. The 2020 examples may need dependency updates; introduce only the architectural layers your project needs.", "publication": "2020-03", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the authors' Cosmic Python home and preface plus O’Reilly metadata. Authors explicitly offer free authorized reading; publisher confirms March 2020.", "starter": false }, { "id": "core-api", "title": "FastAPI tutorial", "author": "FastAPI", "publisher": "FastAPI", "url": "https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/", "type": "docs", "topic": "foundations", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Documentation is free; hosting the resulting service can incur costs.", "summary": "An incremental Python API tutorial with validation, security, and testing references.", "why": "Connect a workflow to an explicit request/response contract and identity boundary.", "practice": "Add an endpoint and tests that deny a user access to another user’s record.", "caveat": "Requires Python fluency; tutorial authentication examples still need deployment-specific review.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": false }, { "id": "full-stack-open", "title": "Full Stack Open", "author": "Matti Luukkainen and contributing instructors", "publisher": "University of Helsinki", "url": "https://fullstackopen.com/en/", "type": "course", "topic": "foundations", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Free materials and certificate; university credit follows the provider's registration and completion requirements.", "summary": "Build web applications through connected exercises covering React, Node, APIs, testing, TypeScript, delivery, and databases.", "why": "Develops the breadth needed to ship a usable customer workflow across frontend, backend, and deployment boundaries.", "practice": "Complete the core application, then add one original customer workflow with permissions, tests, and a handoff document.", "caveat": "Requires fluent programming plus basic web, database, and Git knowledge; it is not an introduction to programming.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the official home and https://fullstackopen.com/en/part0/general_info/. The course now updates continuously rather than using yearly editions; prerequisites and free access are explicit.", "starter": false }, { "id": "core-web", "title": "Learn web development", "author": "MDN", "publisher": "MDN", "url": "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development", "type": "docs", "topic": "foundations", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Learning articles are freely accessible.", "summary": "Guided web fundamentals covering the browser, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.", "why": "Build a usable interface for a workflow rather than stopping at a script.", "practice": "Implement loading, empty, success, and error states for an API-backed screen.", "caveat": "A web-development pathway; backend operations and customer discovery need other resources.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": false }, { "id": "google-ml-crash-course", "title": "Machine Learning Crash Course", "author": "Google", "publisher": "Google for Developers", "url": "https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/crash-course", "type": "course", "topic": "foundations", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public lessons and browser exercises; a Google account may be needed for Colab.", "summary": "A practical grounding in models, data, classification metrics, embeddings and production ML.", "why": "Helps explain false positives, data leakage and model limitations to a customer.", "practice": "Train a small classifier, vary its threshold, and explain the business cost of each error type.", "caveat": "No prior ML is required, but programming, algebra and basic statistics are expected; Python, NumPy and pandas prework is provided.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read Google's course modules and prerequisites page; prerequisite page updated 25 Aug 2025. The course is a concept foundation, not deep API training.", "starter": false }, { "id": "core-git", "title": "Pro Git", "author": "Scott Chacon & Ben Straub", "publisher": "Scott Chacon & Ben Straub", "url": "https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2", "type": "book", "topic": "foundations", "level": "beginner", "access": "free", "accessNote": "The full authorised web edition is free; print editions are sold separately.", "summary": "A practical reference for version control, branching, and collaboration.", "why": "Make your customer work reviewable and recoverable in a shared repository.", "practice": "Create a branch, resolve a merge conflict, and safely revert a faulty change.", "caveat": "Use chapters selectively; advanced internals are not a prerequisite for a first project.", "publication": "2014 (2nd edition)", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": false }, { "id": "software-engineering-google", "title": "Software Engineering at Google", "author": "Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright", "publisher": "O’Reilly / Google Abseil", "url": "https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book", "type": "book", "topic": "foundations", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Complete authorized HTML edition is free; optional print purchase.", "summary": "A practical account of maintaining software through testing, documentation, code review, collaboration, and change.", "why": "Helps turn a customer-specific prototype into code another engineer can review, operate, and extend.", "practice": "Add a concise design document, review checklist, and handoff guide to a project; ask a peer to follow the guide unaided.", "caveat": "Read after some coding experience. Adapt Google's scale-specific practices to the team; the book explicitly omits detailed API design and security hardening.", "publication": "2020-03", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read Google's Abseil landing page and book preface. Google confirms March 2020 publication and authorized free HTML availability.", "starter": false }, { "id": "design-web-apis-second", "title": "The Design of Web APIs, Second Edition", "author": "Arnaud Lauret", "publisher": "Manning", "url": "https://www.manning.com/books/the-design-of-web-apis-second-edition", "type": "book", "topic": "foundations", "level": "intermediate", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Paid ebook, print, or Manning subscription; excerpts and example source are available separately.", "summary": "Consumer-centered API design, from requirements and capabilities through HTTP contracts, documentation, security, and compatible change.", "why": "Useful for turning an integration request into an API contract that customers and product engineers can both maintain.", "practice": "Design and review an OpenAPI contract for a long-running customer import, including permissions, errors, and version evolution.", "caveat": "The provider expects experience building or consuming APIs. The 2025 edition is current book guidance; verify later OpenAPI specifications and tooling separately.", "publication": "2025-06", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read Manning's second-edition page, June 2025 metadata, reader prerequisites, chapter description, and linked code/exercise resources. Chosen over an older API-pattern catalog for its requirements-to-contract coverage. Description is based on public publisher/author material, not a full-text review.", "starter": false }, { "id": "maven-ai-evals", "title": "AI Evals For Engineers & PMs", "author": "Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar", "publisher": "Maven / Parlance Labs", "url": "https://maven.com/parlance-labs/evals", "type": "course", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "paid", "accessNote": "Paid live cohort. Read the free companion FAQ first; check the current cohort, schedule and fee before purchasing.", "summary": "A coached course on evaluation workflows, annotation tools, targeted tests and stakeholder alignment.", "why": "Most useful when you have a live AI project and want feedback on its evaluation process.", "practice": "Bring a scoped project and anonymized examples; finish with a rubric, validated checks and a review workflow.", "caveat": "Familiarity with AI applications and LLMs is helpful; a substantial cohort purchase is optional, not a prerequisite for becoming an FDE.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the official public course syllabus and FAQ, which describe office hours, exercises, projects and lifetime material access. Full teaching content not accessed; no outcome guarantee or fixed fee asserted.", "starter": false }, { "id": "azure-circuit", "title": "Circuit Breaker pattern", "author": "Microsoft Azure Architecture Center", "publisher": "Microsoft Learn", "url": "https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/circuit-breaker", "type": "article", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public engineering reference; implementation infrastructure may incur costs.", "summary": "A pattern for temporarily stopping calls to a failing dependency.", "why": "Bound cascading failure and allow an overloaded integration time to recover.", "practice": "Simulate an outage, open the circuit after a threshold, and exercise a recovery probe.", "caveat": "Adds state and tuning; it may be unnecessary for a simple workflow with existing queue-based recovery.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Primary engineering article read; canonical AWS PDF used where the newer landing page did not expose the article text.", "starter": false }, { "id": "anthropic-agent-evals", "title": "Demystifying evals for AI agents", "author": "Anthropic Engineering", "publisher": "Anthropic", "url": "https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/demystifying-evals-for-ai-agents", "type": "article", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public article; running model-based graders has usage costs.", "summary": "A practical guide to agent tasks, trials, graders, traces and observable outcomes.", "why": "Provides language for agreeing with a customer on what successful deployment actually means.", "practice": "Create outcome checks for a tool-using agent, run repeated trials, and inspect both the trace and final system state.", "caveat": "Examples come from particular agent types; adapt criteria to your domain and calibrate model graders with people.", "publication": "2026-01-09", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the primary engineering article, evaluation terminology, grader discussion and development/monitoring recommendations.", "starter": false }, { "id": "openai-eval-practices", "title": "Evaluation best practices", "author": "OpenAI", "publisher": "OpenAI API documentation", "url": "https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/evaluation-best-practices", "type": "docs", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public conceptual guidance. Model calls and hosted services have separate usage fees.", "summary": "Task-specific evaluation design, dataset construction, grader choices and failure cases for AI applications.", "why": "A second provider perspective for reviewing your acceptance tests and human calibration process.", "practice": "Map each uncertain step in your application to a failure case, an evaluation method and a human owner.", "caveat": "The page announces Evals-platform read-only access on 31 Oct 2026 and shutdown on 30 Nov 2026. Use the concepts; do not start a new dependency on that retiring platform.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the current public guide body, including its explicit Evals deprecation notice, design process, architecture examples and grader caveats. Not a recommendation to adopt the retiring API.", "starter": false }, { "id": "core-owasp", "title": "Excessive Agency", "author": "OWASP GenAI Security Project", "publisher": "OWASP", "url": "https://genai.owasp.org/llmrisk/llm062025-excessive-agency/", "type": "docs", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public security guidance; no certification or paid product is required to read it.", "summary": "A threat-model reference for excessive functionality, permissions, and autonomy in AI systems.", "why": "Design customer tool access so a model cannot exceed the intended operation or user authority.", "practice": "Remove unnecessary tools, deny a cross-user operation, and require approval before a consequential write.", "caveat": "A risk framework, not a complete security audit; enforce restrictions in the application and downstream systems.", "publication": "2025 risk edition", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official OWASP risk description and mitigations read; practice is an editorial exercise.", "starter": false }, { "id": "core-docker", "title": "Get started with Docker", "author": "Docker", "publisher": "Docker", "url": "https://docs.docker.com/get-started/", "type": "docs", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Documentation is free. Check Docker product licensing and hosting costs for your context.", "summary": "An introduction to containers and reproducible application environments.", "why": "Help another engineer run the integration without relying on your laptop.", "practice": "Package a service, document configuration, and run it from a fresh checkout.", "caveat": "Containers are one deployment tool, not a substitute for permissions, monitoring, or rollback.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": false }, { "id": "incident-review-practices", "title": "Incident Review and Postmortem Best Practices", "author": "Gergely Orosz", "publisher": "The Pragmatic Engineer", "url": "https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/incident-review-best-practices", "type": "article", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "mixed", "accessNote": "The article is a free edition; linked subscriber-only templates require payment.", "summary": "An original survey and discussion of incident handling, review, follow-up actions and learning practices across engineering teams.", "why": "Gives an FDE vocabulary for communicating an incident and leaving the customer with useful follow-up work instead of only a technical fix.", "practice": "For a simulated outage, write the customer impact, timeline, contributing conditions and two follow-up actions with owners and verification criteria.", "caveat": "Published in 2021 and explicitly affected by survey selection bias; treat its survey numbers and vendor examples as historical.", "publication": "2021-10-19", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Original free article read, including date, author, survey limitations, incident sequence and distinction between free content and paid templates." }, { "id": "made-with-ml", "title": "Made With ML", "author": "Goku Mohandas", "publisher": "Made With ML / Anyscale", "url": "https://madewithml.com/", "type": "course", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public written lessons and code; local CPU setup is documented. Optional cloud infrastructure costs extra.", "summary": "An end-to-end production ML curriculum spanning data, training, testing, serving, CI/CD and monitoring.", "why": "Shows how to turn a notebook into a maintainable customer deployment.", "practice": "Package a model behind an API, add data and model tests, and demonstrate a reproducible deployment.", "caveat": "Python familiarity helps. Setup examples reference older Python/Ray versions, so review dependency compatibility before reuse.", "publication": "2023", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Read the official course overview and setup lesson, including local no-GPU instructions and the 2023 citation. Did not validate every dependency or cloud workflow.", "starter": false }, { "id": "core-otel", "title": "Observability signals", "author": "OpenTelemetry", "publisher": "OpenTelemetry", "url": "https://opentelemetry.io/docs/concepts/signals/", "type": "docs", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "The specification and documentation are open; telemetry backends may charge.", "summary": "A conceptual guide to traces, metrics, logs, and their role in observability.", "why": "Connect a customer-visible failure to the services and requests involved.", "practice": "Trace one failed workflow and correlate its request ID with an actionable log.", "caveat": "Start with useful signals; collecting everything can raise cost and expose sensitive data.", "publication": null, "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Official course, documentation, author, or employer page read on the check date.", "starter": false }, { "id": "se-radio-observability-migration", "title": "SE Radio 706: Observability Tool Migration Techniques", "author": "Brijesh Ammanath with Yechezkel Rabinovich", "publisher": "Software Engineering Radio / IEEE", "url": "https://se-radio.net/2026/02/se-radio-706-yechezkel-chez-rabinovich-on-observability-tool-migration-techniques/", "type": "podcast", "topic": "reliability", "level": "advanced", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public audio, show notes and automatically generated transcript.", "summary": "A discussion of migrating dashboards, monitors, pipelines and integrations while validating that production signals still work.", "why": "FDE deployments often enter legacy environments where preserving existing operational behavior matters as much as adding a new feature.", "practice": "Write a migration checklist with an inventory, old/new signal comparison, owner for each alert, acceptance criteria and rollback conditions.", "caveat": "The guest co-founded an observability vendor; separate migration techniques from product claims and account for transcript errors.", "publication": "2026-02-04", "checked": "2026-09-14", "starter": false, "sourceNote": "Original IEEE episode page, show notes and transcript read; episode number, guest, host, date and OpenTelemetry/migration scope verified." }, { "id": "aws-timeouts", "title": "Timeouts, retries, and backoff with jitter", "author": "Marc Brooker", "publisher": "Amazon Builders’ Library", "url": "https://d1.awsstatic.com/builderslibrary/pdfs/timeouts-retries-and-backoff-with-jitter.pdf", "type": "article", "topic": "reliability", "level": "intermediate", "access": "free", "accessNote": "Public engineering reference; implementation infrastructure may incur costs.", "summary": "Explains why retry behaviour needs deadlines, limits, and randomisation.", "why": "Keep a failing customer dependency from consuming the whole service.", "practice": "Inject a timeout, cap retry attempts, and compare synchronised retries with jitter.", "caveat": "A retry is safe only when the operation and its side effects allow it. Start with SDK behaviour before adding another retry layer.", "publication": "2019", "checked": "2026-09-14", "sourceNote": "Primary engineering article read; canonical AWS PDF used where the newer landing page did not expose the article text.", "starter": false } ], "patterns": [ { "title": "Discover a measurable vertical slice", "trigger": "A customer asks for a broad “AI transformation” without a clear first outcome.", "action": "Observe an existing workflow, identify one costly handoff, and agree on a narrow acceptance condition with its owner. Record assumptions and exclusions.", "exercise": "Write a one-page brief with the baseline, first user, input, output, and a failure that would invalidate the proposed solution.", "tradeoff": "A narrow first delivery reduces uncertainty, but only if it tests a meaningful part of the real workflow.", "resources": [ "core-discovery", "mom-test" ] }, { "title": "Put an adapter at the customer boundary", "trigger": "Each customer names and structures the same domain differently.", "action": "Translate external schemas into an explicit internal model and keep customer-specific mapping out of the business logic.", "exercise": "Support two synthetic customer APIs using the same workflow code; change a field in one API and show which tests fail.", "tradeoff": "Another boundary has a maintenance cost. Introduce it where schema or ownership differences are real.", "resources": [ "azure-adapter", "cosmic-python" ] }, { "title": "Bound retries and make writes safe to repeat", "trigger": "A dependency times out and you cannot tell whether the write happened.", "action": "Set a deadline and retry budget, randomise retries, and use an explicit idempotency contract for side effects.", "exercise": "Drop a successful response, repeat the request, and verify one resulting record. Then test an outage without unbounded retries.", "tradeoff": "Retries increase load. Circuit breakers add recovery state; choose them only when they address an observed failure mode.", "resources": [ "aws-timeouts", "aws-idempotency", "azure-circuit" ] }, { "title": "Use an evaluation gate before increasing autonomy", "trigger": "A promising demo fails unpredictably on real customer tasks.", "action": "Collect representative tasks, inspect failures with a domain expert, and use calibrated checks to compare changes. Validate the resulting system state.", "exercise": "Compare a rule-based baseline and a model workflow on held-out cases. Record a regression and decide whether the proposed change should ship.", "tradeoff": "An automated score can hide a flawed rubric or unrepresentative sample. Keep human review tied to consequential errors.", "resources": [ "hamel-evals-faq", "anthropic-agent-evals" ] }, { "title": "Separate model intent from permission to act", "trigger": "An AI workflow can read sensitive records or call write-capable tools.", "action": "Restrict tools and resources to the user’s authority, validate arguments, and require an explicit approval step for consequential actions where appropriate.", "exercise": "Insert a malicious instruction into retrieved text, attempt cross-user access, and show the downstream system rejecting the operation.", "tradeoff": "Approval only helps when the reviewer understands the actual operation; a generic confirmation can become a rubber stamp.", "resources": [ "core-owasp", "mcp-specification" ] }, { "title": "Replace a legacy workflow incrementally", "trigger": "A full rewrite would postpone customer value or make cutover too risky.", "action": "Find a replaceable boundary, deliver a small working path, and expand only after learning from its operation. Plan how coexistence ends.", "exercise": "Move one read path to the new service, preserve a rollback, and record the criteria for retiring the old path.", "tradeoff": "Running two paths introduces temporary complexity and possibly duplicated data. Assign ownership for removing it.", "resources": [ "strangler-fig" ] }, { "title": "Hand over an operating system, not just a demo", "trigger": "The customer needs the workflow to remain useful after the engineer leaves.", "action": "Define a user-visible service measure, a response owner, a recovery procedure, and an agreed handoff.", "exercise": "Ask a peer to diagnose a simulated failure with the logs and runbook, then revise the instructions based on where they struggle.", "tradeoff": "Monitoring without an owner creates noise. Scale reliability objectives to the consequence and usage of the workflow.", "resources": [ "sre-workbook", "core-otel", "incident-review-practices" ] }, { "title": "Review agent-written code as owned code", "trigger": "AI accelerates implementation faster than you can understand or validate it.", "action": "Keep changes inspectable, exercise behaviour with tests, and explain the resulting code and risks before accepting the change.", "exercise": "Let an assistant propose a small integration, then identify an untested assumption and reproduce the failure yourself.", "tradeoff": "Fast generation can shift work into review and maintenance; measure the end-to-end effort instead of lines produced.", "resources": [ "agentic-engineering-patterns", "software-engineering-google" ] }, { "title": "Validate assumptions before they become specifications", "trigger": "A polished brief contains claims nobody can trace to an operator or system.", "action": "Record the source and owner of each critical claim. Resolve disagreements before committing to a scope, or make the dependency explicit.", "exercise": "Take three claims from a synthetic brief and define the observation that would falsify each one.", "tradeoff": "Discovery should reduce the decisions that matter; an exhaustive document without evidence can create the same debt.", "resources": [ "benmore-forward-deployed", "agent-factory-spec" ] }, { "title": "Keep authority separate from retrieval", "trigger": "Search returns a plausible policy without a current owner or approved version.", "action": "Track versions, approval, access, and review dates. Require complete procedures for governed actions and escalate when authoritative evidence is missing.", "exercise": "Supersede a policy and revoke a test reader. Verify citation freshness and denied access.", "tradeoff": "Governance needs maintenance. Semantic relevance cannot establish authority.", "resources": [ "agent-factory-sor", "agent-factory-redesign" ] }, { "title": "Close prototype gaps before transferring ownership", "trigger": "The demo works, but the receiver does not know which integrations or checks are still mocked.", "action": "Link each release-critical gap to a requirement and proof. Hand over a runbook, system overview, and current specifications, then witness a recovery and change.", "exercise": "Ask another person to fix a seeded bug and roll back without coaching; revise the pack where they get stuck.", "tradeoff": "The receiver needs time and access to practise. A document count is not evidence of competence.", "resources": [ "benmore-forward-deployed", "sre-workbook" ] } ], "paths": [ { "title": "From discovery to an owned AI workflow", "note": "Pair Benmore’s supplied practitioner book with Agent Factory’s free online chapters. Apply them to one synthetic customer; keep claims and measured evidence separate.", "resources": [ "benmore-forward-deployed", "agent-factory-book", "agent-factory-spec", "agent-factory-sor", "agent-factory-evaluation" ], "result": "An evidence-backed specification, bounded worker, evaluation report, and witnessed handoff." }, { "title": "Build your engineering foundation", "note": "A free route for someone who needs confidence writing and connecting software. Take the programming course at a realistic pace.", "resources": [ "core-python", "missing-semester", "core-sql", "core-api" ], "result": "A tested API over a small dataset, with setup instructions another person can follow." }, { "title": "Move from software into applied AI", "note": "Start with the free pattern and evaluation references. Use the paid book for a broader, coherent treatment if that is the gap you want to close.", "resources": [ "anthropic-effective-agents", "hamel-evals-faq", "microsoft-rag-design", "ai-engineering-book" ], "result": "A bounded AI feature compared with a deterministic baseline, including failure and cost evidence." }, { "title": "Improve discovery and customer judgement", "note": "Practise the conversation alongside the reading. The free service manual and interview give an entry point; the book adds structured guidance.", "resources": [ "core-discovery", "mom-test", "google-technical-writing", "cursor-fde-interview" ], "result": "A customer brief, a short decision record, and a weekly update with a specific decision request." }, { "title": "Make your integration dependable", "note": "A free reference route to use while building. Read the parts that correspond to an actual failure in your project.", "resources": [ "aws-idempotency", "aws-timeouts", "sre-workbook", "core-otel" ], "result": "A repeatable write, bounded retries, a useful operational signal, and a recovery drill." }, { "title": "Deepen data-system design", "note": "Choose one main paid book: Fundamentals for lifecycle breadth, or DDIA for deeper systems trade-offs. Add the free adapter pattern while implementing.", "resources": [ "fundamentals-data-engineering", "ddia-second-edition", "azure-adapter" ], "result": "An architecture note explaining data ownership, consistency, failure recovery, and migration constraints." }, { "title": "Keep a small practitioner reading habit", "note": "Use one concrete episode or article to generate a question or experiment. Paid newsletter access is optional.", "resources": [ "agentic-engineering-patterns", "se-radio-observability-migration", "pragmatic-engineer", "latent-space-box" ], "result": "One changed engineering practice each month, with evidence that it helped your work." } ] }