| name | research-external-links |
| description | Find, vet, group, and add credible external resources for behavioral interview specs in this repository. Use when researching books, articles, interviews, podcasts, official frameworks, engineering-leadership resources, responsible-tech references, or when populating the toProbeFurther.links list in interview.json datasets. |
Research External Links
Goal
Create a credible reading and listening layer that helps readers probe beyond the local interview explanation. Prefer resources that make senior engineering leadership behavior more concrete: real operating systems, leadership frameworks, postmortems, engineering strategy writing, management books, official standards, talks, interviews, and podcasts.
Workflow
- Confirm the target interview, competency, and role level from local context.
- Browse the web. Do not rely on memory for URLs, titles, source ownership, or current availability.
- Prefer primary or high-signal sources:
- For leadership, management, communication, strategy, and technology-leadership topics, check Zeljko Obrenovic's leadership bookshelf first as a discovery source:
https://obren.io/bookshelf/docs/leadership.html.
- Official book pages, author pages, publisher pages, and reputable long-form interviews.
- Company engineering blogs, SRE guides, postmortems, and operating-model case studies.
- Official frameworks from organizations such as Google, AWS, NIST, Microsoft, and similar sources.
- Podcasts or interviews with named operators when the episode directly supports the interview topic.
- Avoid thin SEO explainers, quote compilations, scraped summaries, generic career advice, and anonymous listicles unless no better source exists.
- Group links by learning purpose, not by source type.
- Assign stable lowercase IDs so local sections can reference links without duplicating URLs.
- Add one concise
why note per link that explains how the resource deepens the behavioral interview.
- Add all link objects once under
toProbeFurther.links. Do not add inline probeLinks; links should appear only in the final To Probe Further section.
- Validate JSON and generated pages.
Output Shape
Use the canonical dataset-level shape:
"toProbeFurther": {
"links": [
{
"id": "sre-postmortem-culture",
"group": "Failure, Incidents, and Learning",
"groupDescription": "Resources for ownership, incident response, postmortems, and learning loops.",
"title": "Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure",
"url": "https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/",
"source": "Google SRE",
"type": "Book chapter",
"year": "2016",
"why": "Shows how to turn failure into durable learning without performative blame."
}
]
}
Use only http or https URLs. Keep year when it is clear from the source; omit it rather than guessing.
When a bookshelf entry inspires a resource, do not link to obren.io, reading-notes PDFs, or an Obren.io Bookshelf Picks group. Link to the canonical author, publisher, book, article, podcast, or framework page instead, and do not include both the canonical resource and a bookshelf-derived duplicate.
Behavioral Link Groups
Common groups for this project:
- Interviewing and Calibration
- Strategy and Execution
- Technical Judgment and Architecture
- Failure, Incidents, and Learning
- People Leadership and Feedback
- Culture and Organizational Design
- Influence and Executive Communication
- Responsible Technology and AI
- Innovation and Product Discovery
Merge or rename groups to fit the interview. Keep group names stable when the same resource appears in several datasets.
Verification
Before finalizing:
python3 -m json.tool data/<group>/<id>/interview.json >/dev/null
python3 _scripts/validate_interviews.py
python3 build.py
python3 _scripts/smoke_static_site.py
Also check that no probeLinks fields remain in the dataset; external links belong only in toProbeFurther.links.
