📚 Resources 18 — Go Deeper on Teams, Roles & Agile

All free. Pick based on how you like to learn — you don’t need all of them.

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🌐 Read

• Atlassian Agile Coach — the same friendly guide we recommended in Module 07, but now you’re ready for its deeper pages: standups, retrospectives, kanban vs. scrum, and how boards really get used. Written by the company behind Jira — the board software named (once, gently) in this lesson. Best for: anyone who wants the ritual-by-ritual details, especially managers and PMs-to-be.

• The Agile Manifesto — the original 2001 page: four values, twelve principles. Re-read it after this module and notice something striking: it never mentions standups, sprints, points, or boards. Those are all later inventions layered on top of a very human little document. Best for: everyone; two minutes, oddly moving.

• “Shape Up” by Basecamp — a complete, free online book from the company Basecamp about how they build software — deliberately different from sprint-based agile (six-week cycles, no daily standups, small teams with unusual freedom). Reading one respected team argue against the standard rituals is the best proof that “agile” is a philosophy, not a rulebook. Best for: readers who finished this module thinking “do all teams really work this way?” (Answer: no — and this book is the famous counterexample.)

• levels.fyi — the well-known site where tech workers share real salaries by role, company, and level. Useful here for a different reason than money: browse it to see how the roles from this lesson (engineer, EM, PM, designer, data scientist…) ladder up through levels at real companies — it makes the org chart concrete. Best for: career-changers and the curious; take individual numbers with a grain of salt, patterns matter more than any one data point.

🖼️ Browse

• Wizard Zines by Julia Evans — famous, friendly, hand-drawn mini-magazines (“zines”) explaining real tech topics with cartoons and plain words. Julia Evans is a working engineer beloved for making hard things approachable — very much this course’s spirit, drawn instead of written. Some zines cost money; her site also links to a large collection of free comics and her free weekly posts. Best for: visual learners, and anyone who wants proof that serious engineers value plain explanations as much as you do.

🔍 A note on searching for more

If you search “agile”, you will find an industry of certifications, frameworks with trademarked names, and consultants disagreeing loudly. Two filters that help: prefer material that describes what real teams do (like the resources above) over material that sells a certified method; and remember the lesson’s core — a wish-list, short cycles, a daily huddle, and blameless reflection. Anything much more complicated than that is decoration, and often expensive decoration.