Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak at the Auckland JuniorDev meetup where I presented 10 Things I wished I knew about architecture earlier in my career (slides). I’m a bit rubbish with speaker notes (e.g. I don’t do them) so the slide deck is lacking a bunch of context, I’m planning to remedy that in a follow up post.

I had a lot of awesome discussion afterwards with the attendees regarding career growth and getting more involved in architecture with lots of asks for book recommendations so here are my recommendations on books to start you down that path:

• The Phoenix Project & The Unicorn Project - Must reads for any technologist.
• Staff Engineer - A great overview/guide to leadership outside of the management path.
• Domain Driven Design Distilled - A really useful overview of DDD which has underpinned a lot of my thinking.
• Fundamentals of Software Architecture - A good general purpose guide to software architecture.

I appreciate all of these books enough that I own physical copies of all of them. There are plenty of other books that I also think are great or I have on my reading list but these would be my starting point.

Note: this was adapted from a post I orginally put on linkedIn, I believe in also owning my own content on my own domain so I’ve also posted it here.