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Reading List
Published by Mike Staszel on April 1, 2026

A running list of books and websites I recommend. Some books have short reviews linked — look for the “Microreview” posts on the blog.

Software Engineering & Programming

Engineering Management

  • 📖 The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier — An amazing book for engineers, tech leads, and all different levels of management. Every software engineer should read this even if they aren’t interested in becoming a manager.
  • 🌐 The Engineering Manager

Startups & Business

Featured Posts

  1. Saving Money on Spark Jobs With Karpenter

    A typical modern Spark stack nowadays most likely runs Spark jobs on a Kubernetes cluster, especially for heavy usage. Workloads are moving away from EMR on EC2 to either EMR on EKS or open-source Spark on EKS.

    When you’re running Spark on EKS, you probably want to scale your Kubernetes nodes up and down as you need them. You might only need to run a few jobs per day, or you might need to run hundreds of jobs, each with different resource requirements. Either way — you need to scale your EKS cluster up and down. You’re probably using the default Kubernetes cluster-autoscaler.

    aws development kubernetes

  2. Resetting the Blog

    Hi there, I’m Mike.

    • 🔭 I’m currently working on big data engineering with Spark on k8s on AWS at iSpot.tv.
    • 🌱 I’m focusing on mentoring and coaching my team to improve their skills and release awesome products.
    • 🌎 I occasionally write blog posts about software engineering and other topics.

    Management and Software Engineering

    I consider myself to be a software engineer at heart. Nowadays I’m trying to do less code-writing and more of everything else:

    development