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Awesome CTO

A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers, with the emphasis on startups

36k stars2,201 forks239 entriesLast push Mar 2, 2026 (7 months ago)License CC0-1.0

This page lists names, links and short descriptions. The original list on GitHub is the source and belongs to its authors.

General

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CTO Position

The Different CTO Roles

Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO)

Is it required to be a developer to become a CTO?

(Quora)

Three Golden Rules to Finding a CTO

Becoming a CTO

VP Engineering vs CTO

Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures)

What makes for a successful CEO and CTO relationship in a startup?

(Quora)

In 2 lists

#define CTO

Greg Brockman (Stripe CTO)

How my role as CTO has changed as we've grown to 100 engineers

Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering

Will Larson

How to spend your first 30 days in a new senior-level role

The difference between a CTO and a VP Engineering

Evolution of my role as a founder CTO

, Year 4 Update, Year 5 Update - Miguel Carranza

Hiring

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

Joel Spolsky (StackOverflow co-founder)

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

Joel Spolsky

Why Can't Programmers.. Program?

Jeff Atwood (StackOverflow co-founder)

We Hire the Best, Just Like Everyone Else

Jeff Atwood

Getting the Interview Phone Screen Right

Jeff Atwood

Engineering interview process at Stripe

(Quora)

Improving Our Engineering Interview Process

(Foursquare)

Hitting the High Notes

Joel Spolsky

Top 10 System Design Interview Questions

(HackerNoon)

In 2 lists

How To Hire World-Class Engineers

(angel.co)

Trouble hiring senior engineers? It's probably you

The Real 11 Reasons I Don't Hire You

Charity Majors

How to Interview at Amazon

Lessons from Keith Rabois: How to Interview an Executive

In 2 lists

Lessons from Keith Rabois: How to Become a Magnet for Talent

In 2 lists

GitLab Talent Acquisition Framework

In 2 lists

Visualizing Tech Company Layoffs in 2022

People Management

The mythical 10x programmer

Salvatore Sanfilippo (author of Redis)

The Engineer/Manager Pendulum

Charity Majors

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Paul Graham (Y Combinator)

In 3 lists

Software Engineering at Google

Google re:Work

44 Engineering Management Lessons

(correct link to non-violent communication for lesson 34)

The Secret To Discussing Pay With Employees

In 2 lists

Awesome Leading and Managing

(Github)

In 4 lists

A Review Process

Cap Watkins

12 manager readmes from top tech companies

Predictable Delivery

How people rise up to EVP level in big organizations

(Quora)

Should I Become a Manager?

Cap Watkins

How to fail as a new engineering manager

Design Patterns for Managing Up

A Tactical Guide to Managing Up

Engineering Management

(Github)

In 2 lists

On-boarding Software Engineers

Hold Your Team Accountable

The Manager FAQ

The Power of Performance Reviews

Performance reviews are coming up

Gergely Orosz

Principles of Engineering Management

Draw The Owl and Other Company Values You Didn’t Know You Should Have

A MANAGER’S BILL OF RESPONSIBILITIES (AND RIGHTS)

After Being A Manager, Can I Be Happy As A Cog?

Increment: Teams

Hacking team communications

How to build a startup engineering team

Hug your manager

Lessons from Keith Rabois: How to be an Effective Executive

Keith Rabois

In 2 lists

How Context Switching Sabotages Your Productivity

In 2 lists

10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned

In 2 lists

7 Ways to Set Up a New Hire for Success

In 2 lists

How to get promoted

Individuals matter

Dan Luu

In 2 lists

Mandate Levels

John Cutler

In 2 lists

10 ideas for building great culture in a distributed (remote) team

Nathan Barry

In 2 lists

Adapting to Endure / Crisis management

Sequoia

In 2 lists

Mochary Method Curriculum

Matt Mochary

In 2 lists

Meetings for an effective eng organization

Will Larson

The One Key to Dealing with Senior Executives: Answer the Question!

Step by step guide to building high performing teams

Cycle times

Andrew Bosworth

Career growth

Career Growth Frameworks in Software Engineering: A Review

Software Engineers Growth framework

Software Engineering Ladders

(GitHub)

Awesome Engineering Ladders

(GitHub)

In 2 lists

The Reverse Interview: How To Choose Your Next Company

Reverse Interviewing — How to interview a company as well as they interview you

Reverse Interview Questions

(GitHub)

In 4 lists

Project management

Evidence Based Scheduling

Joel Spolsky (StackOverflow co-founder)

In 2 lists

How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum

Gergely Orosz

In 2 lists

The Secret to a Great Planning Process — Lessons from Airbnb and Eventbrite

What TPMs Do and What Software Engineers Can Learn From Them

Gergely Orosz

How to Scope a New Feature

Measuring an engineering organization

Will Larson

Handbooks

The Atlassian Team Playbook

Valve Employee Handbook

Basecamp Employee Handbook

GitLab Team Handbook

How HashiCorp Works

Development process

Introduction to Scrum for Managers and Executives

Writing User Stories, Examples and Templates In Agile Methodologies

What are the fundamental principles of continuous integration?

The Product Managers’ Guide to Continuous Delivery and DevOps

Comparing Git workflows

In 3 lists

A successful Git branching model

the most well-known Git workflow model

In 2 lists

Why You Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Technical Debt

It’s Time to Rethink Technical Debt Management

How to Write a Postmortem

List of Post-mortems

(GitHub)

In 3 lists

Startup Lessons Learned - Five Whys

Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup)

On Call Rotations: How Best to Wake Devs Up in the Middle of the Night

In 2 lists

Testing in Production, the safe way

When life gives you lemons, write better error messages

Architecture

Twelve-Factor App

The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps.

In 5 listsDetails

Reactive Manifesto

An introduction to distributed systems

Kyle Kingsbury (aphyr, author of Jepsen)

In 2 lists

Microservices – Please, don’t

(also: HackerNews discussion)

In 2 lists

GitHub CTO – Biggest architectural mistake was going full microservice

(also: HackerNews discussion)

The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018

Shrinking microservices to functions

Design patterns for microservices

Serverless architecture

(Quora)

Serverless framework

Toolkit for deploying and operating serverless architectures.

In 4 lists

Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API

In 2 lists

10 Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes

In 2 lists

How I Write Tests

Lambda Architecture

Awesome Scalability

(GitHub)

In 5 listsDetails

The Single Most Important Internal Email in the History of Amazon

Build Your Own X

(GitHub)

In 5 listsDetails

Accentuate the negative: making the non-perfect decision. Technical decision making

Technologies

Developer Roadmaps

(GitHub)

In 5 listsDetails

Coding Interview University

(GitHub)

In 7 listsDetails

Big-O explained in plain English

JS: The Right Way

An easy-to-read, quick reference for JS best practices, accepted coding standards, and links around the Web.

In 3 lists

Frontend developer handbook 2019

What is CAP Theorem?

(Quora)

CAP Theorem: Revisited

Awesome Security

(GitHub)

In 8 listsDetails

SaaS CTO Security Checklist

Open Guide to Search Engineering

(GitHub)

Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

(GitHub)

In 5 listsDetails

Amazon AWS in Plain English

Entertaining and educational, a community contribution.

In 2 lists

Microsoft Azure in Plain English

Google Cloud Services for the AWS expert

Awesome Billing

(GitHub)

In 3 listsDetails

Awesome PriceOps

(GitHub)

Data

NoSQL Databases: a Survey and Decision Guidance

"This NoSQL Toolbox allows us to derive a simple decision tree to help practitioners and researchers filter potential system candidates based on central application requirements".

In 3 lists

Evolutionary Database Design

(Martin Fowler)

Database Migrations Done Right

A reference guide for fintech & small-data engineering

Building a data team at a mid-stage startup: a short story

Story of a manager trying to distill the concepts of a data-driven company while growing a tiny team of 3 people. Each step covers the evolution of the technical pipeline and interactions with existing stakeholders.

In 2 lists

DataOps

Databases in 2022: A Year in Review

Building a data science team

Managing Data Science Teams

How to Structure a Data Science Team

Awesome Machine Learning

(GitHub)

In 15 listsDetails

Best resources of everyday ML learning

(Quora)

Machine Learning Crash Course: with TensorFlow APIs

(Google)

In 7 listsDetails

Deep Learning For Coders

Practical Deep Learning for Coders 2022 is a free course offering hands-on experience in building, training, and deploying deep learning models across various domains using tools like PyTorch and fastai, suitable for those with coding knowledge and without the need for advanced math.

In 8 listsDetails

Awesome Production Machine Learning

(GitHub)

In 5 listsDetails

Weapons of Math Destruction

a practical critique of how algorithmic transparency is dealt with in our society. It explains how blind faith in data analysis is dangerous and how unfairness is reproduced through algorithms, that without transparency become a tool to reinforce the status quo.

In 2 lists

Startups

What are the things startups have to get right?

(Quora)

In 2 lists

85 Things I learned being a CEO

In 2 lists

What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO?

Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs

In 2 lists

What do VCs really look for when making investments?

(Quora)

In 2 lists

As an employee of a startup, how do you know when to quit?

(Quora)

In 2 lists

Pitch deck collection from VC funded startups

In 2 lists

YC’s Series A Diligence Checklist

Y Combinator

In 2 lists

Startup Playbook

Sam Altman

In 2 lists

Y Combinator Startup Class

Sam Altman

In 2 lists

Lean Canvas

+ Miro template

In 2 lists

Open Source Pitch Deck Templates for Figma

In 2 lists

List of startups that had successful pivots

(GitHub)

In 2 lists

Due Diligence

Technology Due Diligence Checklist

Technical Due Diligence Questions

(GitHub)

IT Department Tech Due Diligence Checklist

A Guide to Surviving Tech Due Diligence

Money / Finance

IPOs and Beyond: A Guide to Exit Options for Companies

a16z

In 2 lists

What would a CTO equity be for a small startup?

(Quora)

In 2 lists

Options vs Cash

Dan Luu

In 2 lists

How To Invest In Startups

Sam Altman

In 2 lists

A Guide to Seed Fundraising

Startup Economics equity calculator

In 2 lists

Option grants at seed

Joining the new startup, with a handsome stock option allocation

Gergely Orosz

Equity 101 for Software Engineers at Big Tech and Startups

Gergely Orosz

Financial Planning & Analysis @ GitLab

GitLab

In 2 lists

Framework for balancing and budgeting engineering resourcing

In 2 lists

Negotiate the right deal with suppliers

In 2 lists

Strategic Procurements 10 Commandments for Managing the Buying Process

In 2 lists

Knowledge-Sharing Architects As An Alternative to Coding Architects

Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer

(also: HackerNews discussion)

In 2 lists

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

“Your salary negotiation — which routinely takes less than 5 minutes to conclude — has an outsized influence on what your compensation is.”

In 2 lists

What are best practices of experienced programmers?

(Quora)

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

The article that started it all.

In 2 lists

2016 European Software Development Salary Survey

(O'Reilly)

DevOps: Bringing development and operations together

(Atlassian)

How to Prepare a Talk

Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well

Gergely Orosz

The Pyramid Principle

The gold standard for executive communication.

In 2 lists

Senior Engineer’s Checklist

How to Use OpenAPI and Swagger for Documentation

Product

What Makes a Great Product Manager

If You Don’t Think You Need a VP of Product...

Red Oceans: How to Find Profitable Startup Ideas

In 2 lists

Product North Star Metric

What distinguishes the Top 1% of product managers from the Top 10%?

(Quora)

How to Hire a Product Manager

The Secrets Of Creative Thinking

In 2 lists

StellarPeers - Product Management Interviews

Product vs. Feature Teams

Most Startups Should Be Deer Hunters

Mark Suster

In 2 lists

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters

By Ryan Singer.

In 2 lists

How to Write Your First Strategic Roadmap

Execution at Facebook

8 Product Hurdles Every Founder Must Clear

First Round Capital

In 2 lists

The Top 10 Deliverables of Product Managers

By Sachin Rekhi.

In 2 lists

Product Manager Career Ladders

Lenny Rachitsky

Awesome Product Management

(GitHub)

In 3 listsDetails

Awesome Product Manager

(GitHub)

In 2 lists

Marketing

Developer Marketing Guide

In 2 lists

Top Resources for Startup Marketing and PR

In 2 lists

SaaS Email Marketing Handbook

In 2 lists

How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers

Lenny Rachitsky

In 2 lists

Books

Epic CTO Reading List

The Mythical Man-Month

Startup CTO's Handbook

Awesome Falsehood

(GitHub)

In 5 listsDetails

Engineering blogs

(GitHub)

In 4 listsDetails

Awesome Awesomeness

(GitHub)

In 7 listsDetails

Awesome.re

(GitHub)

In 23 listsDetails

Chief Technology Officer vs Coder Thinker Organizer

(GitHub)

In 2 lists

Senior Software Engineer

Once you've reached the Senior Software Engineer level, you're at the crossroad. Either you pursue engineering management or continue down the path of technical excellence to become a Staff Engineer. This isa collection of guides about the later position.

In 2 lists

Socal CTO

Awesome CTO Resources

(GitHub)

In 2 lists

Free Tools for Developers

一个专门为开发者收集整理免费在线工具资源的网站

In 5 listsDetails

NfX - The Founder Library

NfX

In 2 lists

foundr - Advices from founders

foundr

In 2 lists

The Leadership Library for Engineers

Rands Leadership Slack

Engineering Managers Slack

CTO Framework

CTO Insights Podcast

See category
94

Awesome OpenClaw Skills

VoltAgent/awesome-openclaw-skills

The awesome collection of OpenClaw skills. 5,400+ skills filtered and categorized from the official OpenClaw Skills Registry.🦞

Fresh★ 53k830 entriesPushed today
92

Awesome DeepSeek Harness (DSH) Plugin

awesome-dsh-plugin/awesome-dsh-plugin

A curated list of plugins for DeepSeek Harness (dsh) · DeepSeek Harness 插件精选列表

Fresh★ 17k1654 entriesPushed today
91

Awesome Guidelines

Kristories/awesome-guidelines

Programming style, best practices, and coding conventions.

Fresh★ 11k166 entriesPushed 2 days ago
90

Awesome

sindresorhus/awesome

😎 Awesome lists about all kinds of interesting topics [NOTE: Pull requests are temporarily disabled until I have a chance to catch up with the existing ones]

Fresh★ 513k51 entriesPushed 28 days ago
90

Awesome Prompts

ai-boost/awesome-prompts

Curated list of chatgpt prompts from the top-rated GPTs in the GPTs Store. Prompt Engineering, prompt attack & prompt protect. Advanced Prompt Engineering papers.

Fresh★ 9k288 entriesPushed yesterday
90

Awesome README

matiassingers/awesome-readme

A curated list of awesome READMEs

Fresh★ 22k143 entriesPushed yesterday