Books
Confessions of an Unintentional CTO
A book of generalised, language-agnostic advice pertinent to hacker-y web developers working on live web applications which have real-life users and all too real problems. I would consider this an "advanced" book on web development, albeit not in the (unfortunate) usual sense of touring the latest hipster language's arcana or providing a cookbook of "solutions" no reasonable person would ever need. Confessions of an Unintentional CTO focuses on the issues I believe are most pertinent to the new CTO, such as ensuring data integrity, easing system maintenance, knowing what not to test, developing professional-grade accounting features for taxation reporting, sharpening an application’s ability to inform one of errors, and integrating SEO/analytics/online marketing right into the very foundations of a web application. This book is ideal for engineers in small companies who are not insulated by their team’s sheer size from the sundry practical issues and tradeoffs implicit in running a software business.
Entreprenerd: Marketing <for> Programmers
A modern web-marketing book that outlines a multi-modal system for growing a website with SEO, Google AdWords/Facebook Ads, Conversion Optimisation, Copywriting/Classic Persuasion/Behavioural Psychology, Google Analytics, Statistical Significance, Email Marketing, and Remarketing. When I launched my first web application it started off with zero traffic. This obviously was not satisfactory so I started a private Berlin-based marketing group with local marketing consultants and tech company owners. During these sessions, I was privy to tactics from marketers working with companies like Goldman Sachs, Amazon Audible, Delivery Hero, ResearchGate, etc. To balance things out, I also conferred with people active in the darker side of internet marketing, like guys running shady coupon sites or selling fitness ebooks. This book is the product of what I learned from these sessions and my own experiments.