Books & docs
What I'm reading and where I actually am in it — an SRE book, a security guide and a wiki. Moved out of the blog, because a reading list is never finished.
This started as a blog post in January 2025, which was the wrong shape for it: a post is finished the day you publish it, and a reading list never is. So it lives here now, and I edit it instead of writing a new one.
Reading now
Site Reliability Engineering — the Google SRE book
Status: chapter 17 · Why: it came out of work at Numeo , and stayed because everything in it keeps showing up in the backend I work on now.
The foundational text on SRE’s philosophy and practices — eliminating toil, SLOs, monitoring, incident response. The part that actually changed how I work isn’t a technique, it’s the framing: reliability is a product feature with a budget, not a vibe.
| Chapter | Topic |
|---|---|
| 15 | Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure |
| 16 | Tracking Outages |
| 17 | Testing for Reliability |
| 18 | Software Engineering in SRE |
| 19 | Load Balancing at the Frontend |
Free online: sre.google/sre-book .
CyberYozh — cybersecurity guide
Status: reading, summarising as I go · Why: recommended by a friend (shakhzod.me ).
A wide sweep of security, from the basics up. I’m keeping summaries rather than highlights — if I can’t write a topic down in my own words, I didn’t read it.
Link: book.cyberyozh.com .
Arch Wiki — Security
Status: reference, dipped into whenever I touch a server · Why: also a friend’s recommendation, and the Arch Wiki is still the best Linux documentation anyone has written.
Hardening, encryption, access control. This one isn’t read front to back — it’s what I open when I’m setting something up, and the tips get applied to the machine I actually run and to my own NixOS config.
Link: wiki.archlinux.org/title/Security .
Why these three
- Operational excellence — how reliable systems are built and kept alive at scale.
- A security mindset — learning to think like the attacker so the defence isn’t guesswork.
- Practical skills — things I can apply to a server the same week I read them.
Stub. The queue — what’s next, and the ones I abandoned and why — goes here. Abandoned books belong in a reading list; that’s half of what makes it honest.
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