Reading
A short shelf.
The books and papers I'd hand you if you asked where to start on the things I work on — small models, systems, and trusting what software produces. Plus a little of my own writing. The specifics shift; the questions don't.
Worth your time
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Attention Is All You Need
Vaswani et al., 2017The paper the whole current wave of models grew out of. Worth reading properly once, not just citing.
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Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin KleppmannThe one I point people to for building systems that don't quietly fall over.
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Site Reliability Engineering
GoogleWhere a lot of the "reliability is a feature" habit comes from. Free to read online.
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The Pragmatic Programmer
Hunt & ThomasOld, still right — the craft underneath whichever framework is fashionable this year.
From me
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Pull the high-res cover for any track — no API key, no account. A one-liner for one, a small loop for a whole folder, and the option to bake it into a preview.
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Turn a column of Spotify links into a clean spreadsheet — name, artists, preview — with the standard csv module and no OAuth. Or dump the whole record to JSON.
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Type a query, get typed results — tracks, artists, albums — straight from the anonymous tier the web player uses. No client ID, no OAuth, no app to register.
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The official Spotify Web API returns 429s when you push too hard. Here's how to back off correctly — and how to avoid the limit entirely for public data.
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Lyrics are the one part that needs a login. Here's how to read time-synced lyrics for any track in Python — authenticating as yourself, with nothing leaving your machine.
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One needs an app, a client secret, OAuth, and lives inside rate limits. The other reads public pages with no account. An honest comparison, and how to choose.
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No app registration, no client ID, no OAuth. How to pull tracks, albums, and playlists — and download a 30-second preview or cover art — straight from Spotify's public web player.
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In the agent era, everyone can fetch a page. Almost nobody checks that the data they pulled out of it is actually true.
This shelf is short on purpose, and it's a living list — if you've read something on small models, agents, or verification that earned its place, tell me.