Early in my career, I read everything I could find trying to become a better programmer. Over time I realized the most helpful material didn’t deal with a specific language or trendy workflow, but instead dealt with the psychology and philosophy of software development. Eventually I collected the ones that made the biggest impact on me and offered them to new team members as recommended reading. They reflect my problem solving and management philosophy pretty well.

The Old Testament – Joel Spolsky

• Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
• Can Your Programming Language Do This?
• Craftsmanship
• Fire and Motion
• Hard-assed Bug Fixin’
• Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
• Rub a dub dub
• Set Your Priorities
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
• The Duct Tape Programmer
• Things You Should Never Do, Part I
• The Law of Leaky Abstractions

The New Testament – Jeff Atwood

• It Came From Planet Architecture
• Sucking Less Every Year
• The First Rule of Programming: It’s Always Your Fault
• We Make Shitty Software.. With Bugs!
• Why I’m The Best Programmer In The World*

Apocrypha – Ted Dziuba

• I Can’t Wait for NoSQL to Die
• I’m Going To Scale My Foot Up Your Ass
• Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier
• Taco Bell Programming
• Who Needs Process?