Hysen Labsawesome-cto
A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers, with the emphasis on startups
Awesome CTO collects reading for engineering leaders
A curated, opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers and VP R&D, weighted toward startups and hyper growth companies, with sections on hiring, management, architecture, and money.
What kind of list this is
Awesome CTO presents itself as a curated and opinionated list for Chief Technology Officers and VP R&D, with an emphasis on startups and hyper growth companies. The project is released under CC0-1.0. Rather than a course or a guide, it is an index of links grouped by topic, and the opinionated label is honest: the selection reflects one person's taste in what leaders should read.
From hiring to architecture
The CTO position section pulls in pieces like Werner Vogels on the different CTO roles, a Quora thread on whether you must be a developer to become a CTO, Fred Wilson on VP Engineering versus CTO, and Will Larson on your first 90 days. Hiring covers Joel Spolsky's guerrilla guide to interviewing and the Joel Test, Jeff Atwood's posts, and a top ten list of system design interview questions. People management includes the mythical 10x programmer by Salvatore Sanfilippo, Charity Majors on the engineer and manager pendulum, and Paul Graham's maker's and manager's schedules. Further down sit project management, development process, architecture, technologies, data, startups, and money and finance sections.
Who wrote the entries
Most entries carry a named author and often the company they worked at, like Sam Altman's startup playbook, Eric Ries on the five whys, and Gergely Orosz on engineering organizations. Others are Quora answers, Hacker News discussions, or links to other GitHub lists such as awesome scalability and coding interview university. It reads as a personally gathered bookshelf for CTOs, not an exhaustive directory.
Editorial conclusion
The value sits in the catalog itself: a shelf of essays by people like Joel Spolsky, Fred Wilson, and Paul Graham, aimed mostly at founders and early engineering leaders. Nothing here is evaluated beyond the titles.
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