Yesterday, a friend messaged me:
“Do you have any books, courses, blog posts, anything you’d recommend to help me grow technically?”
He’s a freelance web developer, hungry to step into deeper waters: infrastructure, security, scaling, maybe even leadership. He’s serious. Curious. Not just tinkering, but building a path forward.
I figured I’d just send over a quick list of resources.
But when I sat down to write it… something else happened.
I started thinking not just about what I know, but how I came to know it.Not just what I can do, but how my thinking has changed over time.
And I realized, the list wasn’t just a bunch of links.It was a reflection of something deeper.A mindset.A quiet philosophy I’ve built through years of tinkering, failing, fixing, scaling, and watching things break.
So I kept writing.
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From Execution to Impact
In the beginning, all I wanted was to get good.To be the person who could fix the bug, write the clean code, ship the feature.
Like most people who are self-taught, or hustling to make freelance life work, I was in execution mode. You focus on what’s right in front of you, because that’s how you survive.
But at some point, your questions start to shift.
You stop asking “How do I build this?”And you start asking “Why does this system behave like this?”“Who is this for?”“What happens when I’m not around?”
You begin to notice friction. Patterns. Failure modes.You start seeing beyond the code, into the systems, the incentives, the humans behind the logs.
That shift is invisible. No one hands you a badge when it happens.But it’s real. And once you cross that line, you can’t go back.
You’re no longer just executing.You’re shaping how things get built.And how people move around them.
That’s the moment I found myself reflecting on.Not how much I’ve read.But how much I’ve changed.
The Books Are Just the Beginning
Let’s talk about that list.
Yes, I wrote down the classics:
* Site Reliability Engineering by Google’s SRE team
* Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
* The Pragmatic Programmer
* Infrastructure as Code
* Security Engineering by Ross Anderson
Each of these helped me name something I had already sensed: that building systems is about trade-offs. That infrastructure is culture. That reliability is a conversation.
But more than any specific book, what I really wanted to share was this:
Start with fundamentals. Think in systems. Learn to see the human side of the machine.
Because there is no one book that makes you a better engineer.It’s how you read, what you question, and how you connect domains that builds depth.
That’s why I also added books that aren’t strictly technical:
* Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
* The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier
* The Staff Engineer’s Path by Tanya Reilly
* Being Glue, a short essay every engineer should read
These books aren’t about syntax. They’re about systems, responsibility, influence without authority.They helped me see the “invisible work”, the decisions, diplomacy, culture, and maintenance that hold everything together.
Because at a certain level, the hardest questions aren’t “Can I solve this?”But “Should we solve this at all?”“How will this decision feel 6 months from now?”
That’s senior thinking. That’s leadership. That’s engineering too.
Learning Through Intuition, Not Just Information
I love fundamentals. But I don’t believe in theory alone.
I think intuition matters just as much. And you can’t learn intuition from a PDF.
So when I made that list, I didn’t just give my friend books.I gave him labs.Exercises.Projects where he could break things and rebuild them.
I told him:
* Run a home lab
* Host your own services
* Build a CI/CD pipeline
* Use TryHackMe or HackTheBox to learn security by doing
* Set up a Nextcloud server. Break it. Fix it. Watch the logs.
* Deploy an update that knocks it offline. Figure out why.
These aren’t just side projects. They’re training for your gut.
Because reading about high availability is one thing.Watching your own system crash during an update, and diagnosing it under pressure?That’s a whole other level of understanding.
Psychologists call this tacit knowledge, the kind you feel in your body after enough reps, but can’t always explain in words.
And that’s what separates the intermediate from the experienced.It’s also what most people never teach, because they don’t realize they even have it.
But we can change that.
Turning Quiet Knowing into Shared Wisdom
That’s when a bigger idea came up.
What if we didn’t keep this knowledge hidden?What if we made it visible, the paths, the pivots, the quiet intuitions?
That thought came from my friend Nicklas.He reminded me of Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss, a book built from a simple structure: ask the same set of questions to dozens of thinkers, athletes, builders.
The magic isn’t in any one answer.It’s in the contrast. The patterns. The shape of the thinking.
So what if we did that, for engineers, founders, operators like us?
What if we asked:
* What book changed how you think?
* What failure taught you the most?
* What do you wish someone told you earlier?
* How do you know when you’ve leveled up?
Not as clickbait. Not as advice.
But as a map, a gift, for others figuring this out on their own.
And not just from people with titles and blue checkmarks.
But from the quiet builders:The Viet Kieu tech leads.The second-gen startup operators.The solopreneurs who figured out failover at 3AM.
What if you’re one of them?What if your path matters?
The Edge You Don’t See
After writing that list, I stepped back and realized how much I had grown.How much I had seen.How much I had forgotten to appreciate.
All that knowledge. All those patterns. All those hours staring at logs, debugging production, shipping weird fixes at midnight.
And I thought: Damn.This is actually an edge.
Not because I’m special.But because I’ve been lucky.Mentored. Encouraged. Given time and space to learn.
So I’m sharing this now because maybe you’ve also moved fast for so long, you haven’t paused to notice what you’ve built, not in code, but in wisdom.
And maybe it’s time to pass that on.
We don’t need to teach perfectly.We just need to show our thinking.We don’t need to lead loudly.We just need to be visible.
So let me ask you:
What have you quietly mastered?Who might benefit from hearing it?What’s the smallest way you could pass it on today?
Want the List?
If this sparked something in you, reply.If you want the full list I sent my friend, books, blogs, hands-on projects, drop a comment or message. I’ll send it over, no gatekeeping.
And if you’ve got your own go-tos, the things that changed how you think, share them. Let’s build this knowledge map together.
If you're working on something of your own, tech, team, company, I share more stories like this in my newsletter for founders and doers navigating identity, ambition and impact.
Keep it simple, keep it fresh, smile and let it go.
Yours truly, Trung
PS: I know not everyone gets the time, safety, or mentorship to reflect like this. If you're still grinding, just trying to make it work, I see you. This piece is my way of making the path a little more visible. A little more human.
If you want to check out Nick—the freelancer who inspired me to put this list together—you can find him at https://n1cklas.com.
