back to home
kuchin / awesome-cto
A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers, with the emphasis on startups
34,305 stars
2,150 forks
0 issues
AI Architecture Analysis
This repository is indexed by RepoMind. By analyzing kuchin/awesome-cto in our AI interface, you can instantly generate complete architecture diagrams, visualize control flows, and perform automated security audits across the entire codebase.
Our Agentic Context Augmented Generation (Agentic CAG) engine loads full source files into context, avoiding the fragmentation of traditional RAG systems. Ask questions about the architecture, dependencies, or specific features to see it in action.
Embed this Badge
Showcase RepoMind's analysis directly in your repository's README.
[](https://repomind-ai.vercel.app/repo/kuchin/awesome-cto)
Preview:
Repository Summary (README)
PreviewAwesome CTO
— Hello, my name is Dima and I'm a CTO
— (chorus) Welcome, Dima
A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers and VP R&D, with the emphasis on startups and hyper-growth companies.
Contents
- CTO Position
- Hiring
- People management
- Career growth
- Project management
- Handbooks
- Development process
- Architecture
- Technologies
- Data
- Startups
- Due Diligence
- Money / Finance
- Related stuff
- Product
- Marketing
- Books
- More links
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)
- #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)
- 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
- Lessons from Keith Rabois: How to Become a Magnet for Talent
- GitLab Talent Acquisition Framework
- 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)
- 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
- Awesome Leading and Managing (Github)
- 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)
- 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
- Compensation Best Practices
- 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
- How Context Switching Sabotages Your Productivity
- 10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned
- 7 Ways to Set Up a New Hire for Success
- How to get promoted
- Individuals matter
- Mandate Levels
- 10 ideas for building great culture in a distributed (remote) team
- Adapting to Endure / Crisis management - Sequoia
- Mochary Method Curriculum - Matt Mochary
- 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)
- Reverse Interview
Project management
- Evidence Based Scheduling - Joel Spolsky (StackOverflow co-founder)
- How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum - Gergely Orosz
- 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
- Scrum / Agile
- CI / CD
- Git
- Comparing Git workflows
- A successful Git branching model
- Alternative: Trunk Based Development (focused on DevOps and CI/CD)
- Tech debt
- Crisis
- How to Write a Postmortem
- List of Post-mortems (GitHub)
- 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
- Testing in Production, the safe way
- Error handling
Architecture
- Twelve-Factor App
- Reactive Manifesto
- An introduction to distributed systems - Kyle Kingsbury (aphyr, author of Jepsen)
- Microservices – Please, don’t (also: HackerNews discussion)
- 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)
- Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API
- 10 Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes
- How I Write Tests
- Lambda Architecture
- Awesome Scalability (GitHub)
- The Single Most Important Internal Email in the History of Amazon
- Build Your Own X (GitHub)
- Accentuate the negative: making the non-perfect decision. Technical decision making
Technologies
- General
- Developer Roadmaps (GitHub)
- Coding Interview University (GitHub)
- Big-O explained in plain English
- Javascript
- Big scale
- Security
- Search
- Open Guide to Search Engineering (GitHub)
- Cloud
- Pricing
- Awesome Billing (GitHub)
- Awesome PriceOps (GitHub)
Data
- NoSQL Databases: a Survey and Decision Guidance
- 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
- DataOps
- Databases in 2022: A Year in Review
- Data Science
- Machine Learning
Startups
- What are the things startups have to get right? (Quora)
- 85 Things I learned being a CEO
- What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO?
- Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs
- What do VCs really look for when making investments? (Quora)
- As an employee of a startup, how do you know when to quit? (Quora)
- Pitch deck collection from VC funded startups
- YC’s Series A Diligence Checklist
- Startup Playbook - Sam Altman
- Y Combinator Startup Class
- Lean Canvas + Miro template
- Open Source Pitch Deck Templates for Figma
- List of startups that had successful pivots (GitHub)
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
- Startups
- IPOs and Beyond: A Guide to Exit Options for Companies
- What would a CTO equity be for a small startup? (Quora)
- Options vs Cash
- How To Invest In Startups - Sam Altman
- A Guide to Seed Fundraising
- Startup Economics equity calculator
- 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
- Big companies
Related stuff
- Knowledge-Sharing Architects As An Alternative to Coding Architects
- Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer (also: HackerNews discussion)
- Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued
- What are best practices of experienced programmers? (Quora)
- Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
- 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
- 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
- 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
- StellarPeers - Product Management Interviews
- Product vs. Feature Teams
- Most Startups Should Be Deer Hunters
- Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
- How to Write Your First Strategic Roadmap
- Execution at Facebook
- 8 Product Hurdles Every Founder Must Clear
- The Top 10 Deliverables of Product Managers
- Product Manager Career Ladders - Lenny Rachitsky
- Awesome Product Management (GitHub)
- Awesome Product Manager (GitHub)
Marketing
- Developer Marketing Guide
- Top Resources for Startup Marketing and PR
- SaaS Email Marketing Handbook
- How today's fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers
Books
More links
- Awesome Falsehood (GitHub)
- Engineering blogs (GitHub)
- Awesome Awesomeness (GitHub)
- Awesome.re (GitHub)
- Chief Technology Officer vs Coder Thinker Organizer (GitHub)
- Senior Software Engineer
- Socal CTO
- Curated list of CTO resources (GitHub)
- Awesome CTO Resources (GitHub)
- Free Tools for Developers
- NfX - The Founder Library
- foundr - Advices from founders
- The Leadership Library for Engineers
- Rands Leadership Slack
- Engineering Managers Slack
- CTO Framework
- CTO Insights Podcast
Other
- Awesome CEO (GitHub)
- Awesome TPM (GitHub)
License
