Resources
A curated library I maintain for myself and anyone else who finds it useful. Heavy on AI, LLMs, crypto, security, and the places where software meets finance.
206 resources
Attention Is All You Need
Vaswani et al., 2017. The Transformer paper. Everything since builds on this.
★BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers
Devlin et al., 2018. Bidirectional pre-training; set the template for fine-tuning that lasted years.
★Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3)
Brown et al., 2020. Showed that scale alone gets you surprisingly far without fine-tuning.
★Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
Kaplan et al., 2020. Loss scales predictably with model size, data, and compute.
★Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models (Chinchilla)
Hoffmann et al., 2022. Most models were undertrained for their compute budget.
★Training Language Models to Follow Instructions (RLHF)
Ouyang et al., 2022. A 1.3B InstructGPT beat the 175B GPT-3 on human preference.
★Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback
Bai et al., 2022. Anthropic's approach to alignment using AI feedback guided by a written constitution.
Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning
Wei et al., 2022. Asking the model to show its work actually makes it better at hard problems.
★Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Lewis et al., 2020. The original RAG paper. Combines what the model knows with what it can look up.
GPT-4 Technical Report
OpenAI, 2023. Capabilities, safety evals, multimodal inputs.
LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models
Touvron et al., 2023. Meta's open-weight model that launched the open-source LLM wave.
Mixture of Experts (Switch Transformers)
Fedus et al., 2022. Sparse MoE scaling to trillion-parameter models.
LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
Hu et al., 2021. Efficient fine-tuning by injecting trainable rank-decomposition matrices.
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)
Rafailov et al., 2023. Simpler alternative to RLHF that skips the reward model.
Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling
Gu & Dao, 2023. State-space model that matches Transformer quality with linear scaling.
Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with LLMs
Yao et al., 2023. Extends chain-of-thought with branching and backtracking for complex reasoning.
Textbooks Are All You Need (Phi-1)
Gunasekar et al., 2023. High-quality data matters more than quantity for training small models.
DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report
DeepSeek, 2024. MoE model trained on 14.8T tokens with multi-token prediction.
The Llama 3 Herd of Models
Meta, 2024. Open-weight models up to 405B with multilingual and multimodal capabilities.
★Claude Code
Terminal-native agentic coding. Understands full codebases, runs commands, manages git.
Cursor
AI-first code editor forked from VS Code. 200K context window, codebase-aware completions.
Windsurf
Agentic IDE with auto-context discovery. Good for monorepos.
GitHub Copilot
AI pair programmer in VS Code, JetBrains, etc. Now includes autonomous agent mode.
★Hugging Face
Where open-source models live. Transformers library, model hub, LLM course.
Weights & Biases
Experiment tracking and model registry. The standard for fine-tuning and production ML.
Ollama
Run open-source LLMs locally. Simple CLI, supports GGUF models, GPU acceleration.
vLLM
High-throughput LLM inference engine. PagedAttention for efficient memory management.
LiteLLM
Unified API to call 100+ LLM providers. Drop-in OpenAI SDK replacement.
OpenRouter
Single API for all major LLM providers. Good for comparing models and managing costs.
Anthropic API
Official docs for Claude models. Tool use, streaming, vision, prompt caching.
OpenAI API Reference
GPT-4, DALL-E, Whisper, embeddings. The most widely integrated LLM API.
★Simon Willison's Blog
Covers practical LLM usage and AI tooling with more depth and honesty than anyone else.
★Lilian Weng's Blog
Long-form technical posts on architectures, agents, and RLHF from an OpenAI researcher.
Chip Huyen's Blog
ML systems design, AI engineering, MLOps. Author of 'AI Engineering' (O'Reilly, 2025).
The Batch — Andrew Ng
Weekly AI newsletter. Good signal-to-noise ratio on what matters.
★Andrej Karpathy — Zero to Hero
Builds neural networks from scratch, ending with a GPT. Nobody explains this stuff better.
Anthropic Research
Papers, model cards, and the Responsible Scaling Policy from the Claude team.
Jay Alammar's Blog
Visual explanations of Transformers, BERT, GPT. The Illustrated Transformer is a classic.
Sebastian Raschka's Blog
Deep dives on LLM training, fine-tuning, and evaluation. Author of 'Build an LLM from Scratch'.
fast.ai Course
Practical deep learning for coders. Top-down teaching approach that gets you building fast.
Stanford CS229 — Machine Learning
Andrew Ng's foundational ML course. Lectures, notes, and problem sets freely available.
Stanford CS224N — NLP with Deep Learning
Chris Manning's NLP course. Covers attention, transformers, pretraining, and modern NLP.
★LangChain
The most widely used agent framework. Composable chains, tools, and retrieval.
LangGraph
Graph-based approach for stateful, multi-step agent workflows.
CrewAI
Multi-agent orchestration where agents have defined roles and collaborate.
Microsoft AutoGen
Conversation-based multi-agent framework from Microsoft Research.
OpenAI Agents SDK
Lightweight Python framework for tool use, handoffs, and guardrails.
★LlamaIndex
Best for document ingestion, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows over your own data.
★Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Anthropic's open standard for connecting LLMs to external tools and data sources.
DSPy
Stanford's framework for programming—not prompting—language models. Optimizes pipelines automatically.
Letta (formerly MemGPT)
Stateful agents with self-editing persistent memory. Research project turned production framework.
Qdrant
Open-source vector database. Fast, good filtering, free tier.
Pinecone
Managed vector database. Minimal ops if you don't want to run your own.
Weaviate
Open-source with built-in hybrid search (vector + BM25).
Milvus
Built for billion-scale vector search. Production-grade.
Chroma
Embedded-first vector DB. Good for local prototyping and small RAG pipelines.
Semantic Kernel
Microsoft's SDK for integrating LLMs into apps. Supports .NET, Python, Java.
Haystack
End-to-end NLP framework for building RAG and search pipelines.
AutoGPT
Autonomous AI agent that chains LLM calls. Early pioneer in the agent space.
Instructor
Structured output extraction from LLMs using Pydantic models. Works with any provider.
★LLM Powered Autonomous Agents — Lilian Weng
Canonical reference post on agent architectures, planning, memory, and tool use.
Voyager: LLM-Powered Lifelong Learning Agent
Wang et al., 2023. GPT-4 agent that explores Minecraft, writes code, and learns skills.
Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools
Schick et al., 2023. Models learn when and how to call external APIs during generation.
★ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting
Yao et al., 2022. Interleaving reasoning traces with actions for grounded problem-solving.
★From Deep Learning to LLMs: AI in Quantitative Investment
March 2025 survey covering the full pipeline from predictive modeling to agent-based automation.
FinGPT: Open-Source Financial LLMs
Lightweight, open alternative to BloombergGPT for financial NLP.
FinRL: Deep RL for Automated Stock Trading
The paper behind the FinRL framework. DQN, DDPG, PPO, SAC across multiple markets.
ACM ICAIF Proceedings
The main academic venue for AI in finance. LLM market regime forecasting, adversarial RL.
★FinRL Framework
Deep RL framework for stock trading. Supports PPO, DDPG, SAC, and others.
FinGPT
Open-source financial LLMs. Sentiment analysis, news summarization, return forecasting.
QuantConnect / LEAN
Open-source algo trading engine. Python and C#, cloud or local.
Backtrader
Event-driven backtesting in Python. Supports live trading through IB and Oanda.
Freqtrade
Crypto trading bot with backtesting and ML strategy optimization.
Zipline
Backtesting library that powered Quantopian. Still widely used for strategy research.
QuantLib
Standard C++ library for derivatives pricing and risk management. Python bindings available.
Awesome Quant
Curated list of quant finance libraries across Python, R, Julia, and more.
Alpha Vantage
Free tier (25 calls/day), extensive indicators, NASDAQ vendor. Good for research.
Twelve Data
Real-time WebSocket ticks, multi-asset. Clean APIs.
Polygon.io
Low-latency production data. Preferred for execution systems.
yfinance
Python wrapper for Yahoo Finance. Free historical data. Research only, not production.
Financial Modeling Prep
Fundamentals, DCF, earnings calendars. Generous free tier.
FRED — Federal Reserve Economic Data
Macro and economic time series from the St. Louis Fed.
★Advances in Financial Machine Learning
Marcos Lopez de Prado. The practitioner textbook for ML in finance.
Machine Learning for Asset Managers
Lopez de Prado. Clustering, feature importance, and portfolio construction.
Python for Algorithmic Trading
Yves Hilpisch. End-to-end strategy development, backtesting, and deployment.
Lopez de Prado's Lecture Notes
Free slides from his Cornell course. Good alternative to the books.
Quantocracy
Aggregator of the best quant trading blog posts. Fastest way to see what the community reads.
QuantStart
Educational articles on algo trading, ML, and backtesting in Python.
AI4Finance Foundation
The org behind FinRL and FinGPT. Worth watching on GitHub.
Ernie Chan's Blog
Practitioner blog from the author of 'Algorithmic Trading.' AI and corrective ML for forex.
Algorithmic Trading — Ernie Chan
Practical mean reversion and momentum strategies. Accessible even without heavy math.
Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives
John Hull. The standard derivatives textbook used globally.
★Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann. The best single book on distributed systems, storage, and data processing.
System Design Interview — Alex Xu
Practical system design with diagrams. Good for interviews and real architecture.
★The Pragmatic Programmer
Hunt & Thomas. Timeless advice on craft, from DRY to tracer bullets.
Clean Code — Robert C. Martin
Principles for writing readable, maintainable code. Opinionated but influential.
Go by Example
Annotated example programs in Go. The fastest way to learn Go syntax.
Go Language Spec
The official Go specification. Concise and readable.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
Opinionated guide to Python best practices, project structure, and tooling.
Stack Overflow Blog
Engineering culture pieces and developer surveys.
Coding Horror — Jeff Atwood
Software engineering, culture, and the human side of building things.
★Martin Fowler's Blog
Patterns, refactoring, agile, and architecture. Decades of influential writing.
The Architecture of Open Source Applications
Free book. How real projects (nginx, Git, LLVM) are architected by their creators.
Refactoring — Martin Fowler
Systematic approach to improving code structure without changing behavior.
A Philosophy of Software Design
John Ousterhout. Short, opinionated take on complexity and module design.
The Twelve-Factor App
Methodology for building modern, portable, scalable SaaS applications.
Rust Book
The official Rust programming language book. Free, comprehensive, well-written.
Learn You a Haskell
Fun, illustrated introduction to Haskell and functional programming concepts.
★Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Abelson & Sussman. The MIT classic on computation and abstraction. Free online.
★Kubernetes Documentation
Official k8s docs. Concepts, tutorials, and API reference.
Docker Documentation
Official Docker guides. From getting started to multi-stage builds and Compose.
Terraform Documentation
Infrastructure as code. Provider docs, modules, state management.
Prometheus
Open-source monitoring and alerting. Pull-based metrics, PromQL queries.
Grafana
Visualization and dashboarding for metrics, logs, and traces.
★The Site Reliability Workbook
Google's practical companion to the SRE book. Free online.
Site Reliability Engineering — Google
The original Google SRE book. Free online. Defines the discipline.
ArgoCD
Declarative GitOps continuous delivery for Kubernetes.
Ansible Documentation
Agentless automation. Playbooks, roles, and collections for configuration management.
Nginx Documentation
Web server, reverse proxy, load balancer. Configuration reference and guides.
GitHub Actions Documentation
CI/CD workflows. Marketplace actions, reusable workflows, matrix builds.
★Kelsey Hightower — Kubernetes the Hard Way
Bootstrap k8s from scratch. The best way to understand what's actually happening.
The Phoenix Project
Novel about DevOps transformation. Makes the case for flow, feedback, and learning.
★PostgreSQL Documentation
The best database documentation. Comprehensive, accurate, well-organized.
Redis Documentation
In-memory data store. Data structures, caching patterns, pub/sub.
★DuckDB
Embedded analytical database. Fast OLAP queries, zero dependencies, great for local analysis.
★Use The Index, Luke
SQL indexing and tuning explained clearly. Database-agnostic, free online.
CMU Database Course (Andy Pavlo)
The best database systems course. Lectures, projects, and notes freely available.
SQLite Documentation
The most deployed database engine. Architecture docs are a masterclass in simplicity.
MongoDB University
Free courses on MongoDB. Aggregation, indexing, data modeling.
ClickHouse
Column-oriented OLAP database. Blazing fast for analytical queries at scale.
CockroachDB Architecture
Distributed SQL database. Good architecture docs for understanding consensus and transactions.
Supabase
Open-source Firebase alternative built on Postgres. Auth, storage, realtime, edge functions.
Database Internals — Alex Petrov
How databases work under the hood. B-trees, LSM-trees, consensus, distributed storage.
★React Documentation
Official React docs. Hooks, Server Components, and the new mental model.
TypeScript Handbook
Official TypeScript docs. From basics to advanced type manipulation.
Next.js Documentation
Full-stack React framework. App Router, Server Actions, ISR.
★MDN Web Docs
The definitive web platform reference. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Web APIs.
CSS-Tricks
Practical CSS guides and techniques. Flexbox and Grid guides are canonical.
web.dev — Chrome DevRel
Performance, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, and modern web patterns from Google.
Patterns.dev
Design patterns and component patterns for modern web apps. Free online book.
Tailwind CSS
Utility-first CSS framework. The docs are also a great CSS reference.
Svelte Documentation
Compile-time framework. Less boilerplate, great DX, small bundles.
★Josh Comeau's Blog
Interactive CSS and React tutorials. Best-in-class visual explanations.
Kent C. Dodds' Blog
Testing, React patterns, and web development best practices.
Frontend Masters
Premium video courses from industry experts. TypeScript, React, performance, Node.
★OWASP Top Ten 2025
The baseline web application security risk list.
★OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025
AI-specific attack surfaces: prompt injection, training data poisoning, and more.
★PortSwigger Web Security Academy
Free, hands-on web security training with interactive labs.
PortSwigger Research Blog
Where new vulnerability classes get published first. HTTP smuggling, cache poisoning.
Hack The Box
Competitive hacking platform. Active machines, CTFs, career-path labs.
TryHackMe
Structured, beginner-friendly security training with guided paths.
CTFtime
Directory for CTF competitions worldwide. Past challenges, upcoming events, writeups.
Schneier on Security
Bruce Schneier on security, privacy, and policy. Decades of trusted writing.
Krebs on Security
Brian Krebs. Investigative journalism on cybercrime and breaches.
Daniel Miessler
Security, technology, and AI. Creator of the Fabric AI framework.
★Cryptography I — Dan Boneh (Stanford)
Stream ciphers, block ciphers, MACs, public-key, digital signatures. The best intro.
A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography
Boneh and Shoup. Free textbook. Graduate-level with formal proofs.
★New Directions in Cryptography
Diffie and Hellman, 1976. The paper that started public-key cryptography.
NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards
ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA standards finalized August 2024.
The Illustrated TLS 1.3
Interactive byte-level walkthrough of a TLS 1.3 handshake.
Cypherpunk Manifesto
Eric Hughes, 1993. Why privacy matters and code is speech.
Cyphernomicon — Timothy C. May
FAQ and manifesto from the cypherpunks mailing list.
Cypherpunk Research — Tom Busby
Collection of primary source cypherpunk documents and papers.
Trail of Bits Blog
Top security auditors. Smart contract exploits, fuzzing, program analysis.
CyberChef
GCHQ's web-based tool for encoding, decoding, encryption, and data analysis.
★The Manager's Path — Camille Fournier
Tech lead to CTO. The definitive guide for engineering management growth.
★An Elegant Puzzle — Will Larson
Systems thinking for engineering management. Org design, hiring, technical strategy.
Staff Engineer — Will Larson
What staff+ engineers actually do. Archetypes, operating at scale, getting promoted.
StaffEng.com
Stories and guides from staff+ engineers at various companies.
Irrational Exuberance — Will Larson
Blog on engineering leadership, strategy, and organizational design.
The CTO Craft Blog
Community and resources for CTOs and VP Engineering.
Charity Majors' Blog
Observability, engineering culture, and management from the Honeycomb co-founder.
★High Output Management — Andy Grove
Intel CEO on leverage, meetings, and OKRs. Still the best management book.
The Engineering Executive's Primer
Will Larson on the VP/CTO role. Strategy, managing managers, working with execs.
Rands in Repose
Michael Lopp on engineering management, leadership, and organizational dynamics.
LeadDev
Articles, talks, and events for engineering leaders at every level.
Accelerate — Forsgren, Humble, Kim
DORA metrics research on what makes high-performing tech organizations.
★Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
System 1 vs System 2 thinking. Changed how we understand decision-making.
Sapiens — Yuval Noah Harari
Brief history of humankind. Cognitive revolution, agriculture, empire, science.
★The Black Swan — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
On rare events, uncertainty, and why we're bad at predicting the future.
Zero to One — Peter Thiel
Contrarian thinking about startups, monopolies, and building the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
Long-form conversations with researchers, engineers, and thinkers in AI and beyond.
★Acquired Podcast
Deep-dive company histories. NVIDIA, Costco, Berkshire episodes are standouts.
The Changelog
Conversations about open source, software development, and the developer ecosystem.
★Latent Space Podcast
AI engineering podcast. Technical depth on agents, RAG, and LLM infrastructure.
★3Blue1Brown
Grant Sanderson's math visualizations. Neural networks, linear algebra, calculus series.
Computerphile
University of Nottingham CS videos. Accessible explanations of hard topics.
Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Things that gain from disorder. Applies to systems, careers, and investing.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Wealth creation and happiness from Naval's tweets and podcasts. Free online.
Hardcore History — Dan Carlin
Epic multi-hour history episodes. Blueprint for Armageddon on WWI is essential.
Two Minute Papers
Quick visual summaries of AI research papers. Good for staying current.
★Bitcoin Whitepaper
Satoshi Nakamoto's 9 pages. Still the clearest explanation of how and why.
★Ethereum Whitepaper
Buterin's 2014 vision for a programmable blockchain, with annotations on what changed.
★Mastering Bitcoin
Antonopoulos. 3rd edition (2023) free under Creative Commons. The technical deep-dive.
Mastering Ethereum
Antonopoulos and Wood. Free, comprehensive, still the best single-volume reference.
Ethereum Developer Docs
Official reference for EVM, gas, accounts, consensus, and smart contract standards.
DeFi Specialization — Duke University
Campbell Harvey's Coursera specialization. The most rigorous DeFi education available.
Uniswap Protocol Docs
Primary source for understanding how AMMs and DeFi liquidity actually work.
The Complete Satoshi
All of Satoshi Nakamoto's known writings, emails, and forum posts.
★Jameson Lopp's Bitcoin Resources
Comprehensive and regularly updated collection of Bitcoin resources.
Solidity Documentation
Official Solidity language docs. The standard for Ethereum smart contracts.
Foundry
Blazing fast Ethereum development toolkit. Forge, Cast, Anvil, Chisel.
CryptoZombies
Interactive Solidity tutorial. Build a zombie game while learning smart contracts.
Chainlink Documentation
Decentralized oracle network. Price feeds, VRF, automation for smart contracts.
DeFi Llama
DeFi analytics dashboard. TVL, yields, protocol comparisons across all chains.
Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs)
Standards and proposals shaping Ethereum. ERC-20, ERC-721, EIP-4844, and more.