@bookcairn
The house shelf. Read by the people who built the site, argued about in the pull request.
- Read
- 6
- In 2026
- 6
- Pages
- 2,788
- Shelf runs
- 4.5 average
Reader type
The Wide Reader
No two books on your shelf are from the same conversation.
Reliability · 2Career growth · 1Clean code · 1Compilers · 1Computing history · 1
Rating spread
Most read: Steven Levy · Betsy Beyer · Camille Fournier · Robert Nystrom
Read
6 books
HackersSteven Levy★★★★★Finished Aug 2026“Everything the industry still believes about itself starts here.”
Levy got to them early enough that nobody was performing yet.
Site Reliability EngineeringBetsy Beyer★★★★★Finished Jul 2026“Google on-call notes. Yours will never look like this, and that is fine.”
Take the error budget idea and leave the org chart.
Site reliability engineeringIncident responseMonitoringReliability
The Manager's PathCamille Fournier★★★★★Finished Jun 2026“Read it the week before the promotion, not the week after.”
Honest about how much of the job is scheduling and how little is code.
Crafting InterpretersRobert Nystrom★★★★★Finished May 2026“A compilers course that never once loses you.”
Two full implementations, both readable. The tree-walker in Java, then the bytecode VM in C, and by the end neither feels like magic.
A Philosophy of Software DesignJohn Ousterhout★★★★★Finished Apr 2026“Two hundred pages on one idea, and the idea is correct.”
Deep modules. That is the whole book, and it reorganised how I review code.
Designing Data-Intensive ApplicationsMartin Kleppmann★★★★★Finished Mar 2026“The only book that made me redraw a system I had already shipped.”
Every chapter ends with you opening a doc you wrote two years ago and wincing. The replication chapter alone is worth the cover price.
Distributed systemsDatabasesData modellingScalabilityReliability
Keep a shelf like this one.