An engineering reading guide
How to choose a few useful technical posts each week and connect them to your work.
Use up to two hours a week for technical reading, as listed in the week template. Choose a few short, relevant items and connect each one to a project or interview topic.
Reading interview experiences is separate. That stays capped at one a week under the operating rules.
What to read
Choose one canonical article tied to your current work, then add another only if it answers a question you have. A video is optional. Scrolling a feed without choosing an item is not a study task.
Three kinds of source
No single list can fill 230 slots, so the week mixes three source types.
| Type | What it means | Share of the week |
|---|---|---|
| Canonical | One specific linked post tied to the current topic | Main reading choice |
| Rotating | A blog you follow; choose a relevant recent post | Optional second choice |
| Collection | An aggregator or reading list for discovery | Use when you need another source |
The level ladder
Read at the level you are actually working at. The ladder runs basics to advanced.
The level gate
Do not read a level you are not living. L5 (Jepsen, consensus) only makes sense once Logsmith has made you fight real concurrency. Otherwise it is entertainment, and reading is not practice.
Plan a weekly reading session
Choose a topic. Pick the current project's design question or a fundamentals topic.
Take a short note. Record the main idea, a useful caveat, and how it relates to your project.
Stop when the question is answered. Save deeper links for later instead of building a backlog.
Review when useful. Add a source to your project note only if it informed a decision.
Where the lists live
| Page | Covers | Weeks |
|---|---|---|
| Foundations | How the web works, debugging, Go and style basics, LLD orientation | 1 to 6 |
| Languages | Go, C++, TypeScript and Python sources | always |
| Payments and correctness | Idempotency, ledgers, PSPs (P1 context) | 2 to 13 |
| Queues, databases and scale | Kafka docs, indexes, p99, scale stories (P2 context) | 8 to 19 |
| Observability, SRE and chaos | Postmortems, metrics, chaos engineering (P3 and P4 context) | 14 to 25 |
| Distributed systems depth | Jepsen, Kleppmann, replication, consistency | 20 to 27 |
| India product engineering | PhonePe, Flipkart, Groww, Zerodha, Swiggy | 24 to 34, and open all year |
| Career and interview field intel | Mock platforms, salary data, the AI-intervened interview era | 24 to 34 |
| Collections and feeds | Awesome lists, aggregators, one-click daily source | any day |
The languages page splits into Go, C++, TypeScript and Python.
Each page lists canonical posts, then rotating blogs, then collections. Every entry has one line saying why it matters and when to read it. The plan overview reading column tells you which page to pull from each week.