The Library.
Every book I've bought, reviewed and sorted by theme — with a straight verdict, who it's for, and a link to the article, essay or project where it actually paid off. These are working notes from my shelf: the verdicts are mine, the ratings are cross-checked against public reviews.
Software Architecture
System design, DDD, distributed systems, and the patterns behind the platform
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann
Clean Architecture
Robert C. Martin
Fundamentals of Software Architecture
Mark Richards & Neal Ford
Domain-Driven Design
Eric Evans
Building Microservices
Sam Newman
Implementing Domain-Driven Design
Vaughn Vernon
Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
Martin Fowler
Delta Lake: Up and Running
Bennie Haelen & Dan Davis
Data Mesh
Zhamak Dehghani
Learning Domain-Driven Design
Vlad Khononov
REST API Design Rulebook
Mark Massé
REST in Practice
Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis & Ian Robinson
Designing Distributed Systems
Brendan Burns
Building Event-Driven Microservices
Adam Bellemare
Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture
Thomas Erl
Cloud Computing Design Patterns
Thomas Erl
Programming Craft
Clean code, refactoring, testing, and the languages I build in
Test-Driven Development: By Example
Kent Beck
The Pragmatic Programmer
David Thomas & Andrew Hunt
Clean Code
Robert C. Martin
The Clean Coder
Robert C. Martin
The Go Programming Language
Alan A. A. Donovan & Brian W. Kernighan
Refactoring
Martin Fowler
C# 11 and .NET 7
Mark J. Price
Extreme Programming Explained
Kent Beck
Apps and Services with .NET 7
Mark J. Price
Mastering Object-Oriented Python
Steven F. Lott
Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming
Dusty Phillips
Effective Python
Brett Slatkin
Learning Python Design Patterns
Chetan Giridhar
SRE & DevOps
Reliability, observability, Kubernetes, and GitOps delivery
Site Reliability Engineering
Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff & Niall Richard Murphy
Observability Engineering
Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones & George Miranda
Accelerate
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble & Gene Kim
The Phoenix Project
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr & George Spafford
Kubernetes: Up and Running
Brendan Burns, Joe Beda & Kelsey Hightower
The Kubernetes Book
Nigel Poulton
Infrastructure as Code
Kief Morris
The Site Reliability Workbook
Betsy Beyer, Niall Richard Murphy, David K. Rensin, Kent Kawahara & Stephen Thorne
AI & Machine Learning
LLMs, retrieval, MLOps, and the science the agents run on
Hands-On Large Language Models
Jay Alammar & Maarten Grootendorst
Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras & TensorFlow
Aurélien Géron
Designing Machine Learning Systems
Chip Huyen
Generative Deep Learning
David Foster
Building LLMs for Production
Louis-François Bouchard & Louie Peters
Life 3.0
Max Tegmark
The Coming Wave
Mustafa Suleyman
Deep Learning
Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio & Aaron Courville
Army of None
Paul Scharre
Introducing MLOps
Mark Treveil & the Dataiku team
Security & Cyber
Cryptography, threat history, and the human element of security
The Cuckoo's Egg
Clifford Stoll
The Code Book
Simon Singh
Countdown to Zero Day
Kim Zetter
Sandworm
Andy Greenberg
Ghost in the Wires
Kevin Mitnick
The Lazarus Heist
Geoff White
The Art of Deception
Kevin D. Mitnick & William L. Simon
Social Engineering: The Science of Human Hacking
Christopher Hadnagy
Cryptography and Network Security
William Stallings
The Art of Intrusion
Kevin D. Mitnick & William L. Simon
The Art of Invisibility
Kevin D. Mitnick
Algorithms & Maths
Algorithms, linear algebra, causality, and the foundations underneath
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
Charles Petzold
Introduction to Linear Algebra
Gilbert Strang
Algorithms Illuminated (Part 3): Greedy Algorithms and Dynamic Programming
Tim Roughgarden
Linear Algebra Done Right
Sheldon Axler
Algorithms Illuminated (Part 1): The Basics
Tim Roughgarden
Algorithms Illuminated (Part 2): Graph Algorithms and Data Structures
Tim Roughgarden
Linear Algebra and Its Applications
Gilbert Strang
Secrets of Mental Math
Arthur Benjamin & Michael Shermer
Graph Algorithms: Practical Examples in Apache Spark & Neo4j
Mark Needham & Amy E. Hodler
Practical Electronics for Inventors
Paul Scherz & Simon Monk
Is God a Mathematician?
Mario Livio
Causality
Judea Pearl
Leadership & Management
Teams, culture, org design, and the craft of leading engineering
An Elegant Puzzle
Will Larson
High Output Management
Andrew S. Grove
Turn the Ship Around!
L. David Marquet
Radical Candor
Kim Malone Scott
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Patrick Lencioni
The First 90 Days
Michael D. Watkins
The Manager's Path
Camille Fournier
The Culture Code
Daniel Coyle
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Stephen R. Covey
The Culture Map
Erin Meyer
Shoe Dog
Phil Knight
Extreme Ownership
Jocko Willink & Leif Babin
The Making of a Manager
Julie Zhuo
Measure What Matters
John Doerr
The Machine That Changed the World
James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones & Daniel Roos
Leadership Is Language
L. David Marquet
No Rules Rules
Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer
Who: The A Method for Hiring
Geoff Smart & Randy Street
How Google Works
Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg
Our Iceberg Is Melting
John Kotter & Holger Rathgeber
Unlocking Hypergrowth
David Cancel
Managing Up
Mary Abbajay
Business Adventures
John Brooks
Product & Startup
Product management, lean delivery, UX, and building things people want
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
Marty Cagan
Lean Analytics
Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz
Don't Make Me Think, Revisited
Steve Krug
Escaping the Build Trap
Melissa Perri
Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
Marty Cagan & Chris Jones
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries
Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey A. Moore
Sprint
Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky & Braden Kowitz
Start-Up Nation
Dan Senor & Saul Singer
The Lean Product Playbook
Dan Olsen
The Startup Way
Eric Ries
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Nir Eyal
UX for Lean Startups
Laura Klein
Strategy & Influence
Strategy, persuasion, systems thinking, and clearer decisions
Thinking in Systems
Donella H. Meadows
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Robert B. Cialdini
Mastery
Robert Greene
The Book of Five Rings
Miyamoto Musashi
The 33 Strategies of War
Robert Greene
The 48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene
The Art of Thinking Clearly
Rolf Dobelli
Thank You for Arguing
Jay Heinrichs
Talk Like TED
Carmine Gallo
Productivity & Mind
Habits, focus, and how the mind actually gets hard things done
Deep Work
Cal Newport
Atomic Habits
James Clear
Getting Things Done
David Allen
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying
Marie Kondo
What Every Body Is Saying
Joe Navarro
Make Your Bed
Admiral William H. McRaven
Anatomy of a Breakthrough
Adam Alter
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
John J. Ratey
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Mark Manson
Spark Joy
Marie Kondo
Joy at Work
Marie Kondo & Scott Sonenshein
Dopamine Detox
Thibaut Meurisse
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
Joseph Murphy
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud
Philosophy & Reflection
Stoicism, Taoism, and quality — the books I think with, not from
Fiction & Literature
Science fiction and novels — the off-duty shelf
Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
Recursion
Blake Crouch
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Dark Matter
Blake Crouch
Grass for His Pillow
Lian Hearn
H. P. Lovecraft Tales of Horror
H. P. Lovecraft
Artemis
Andy Weir
History & Society
Intelligence, conflict, capitalism, and the world the tech lives in
Boys in Zinc
Svetlana Alexievich
Shake Hands with the Devil
Roméo Dallaire
Cobalt Red
Siddharth Kara
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
Anne Case & Angus Deaton
Elon Musk
Ashlee Vance
Dove
Robin Lee Graham & Derek L. T. Gill
Black Ops
Ric Prado
Life Undercover
Amaryllis Fox
Breaking Cover
Michele Rigby Assad
The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5
Christopher Andrew
Soldaten
Sönke Neitzel & Harald Welzer
The End: Germany 1944-45
Ian Kershaw
Craft & Hobbies
Chess, photography, cars, and cooking — practice away from the keyboard
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
Samin Nosrat
How to Build a Car
Adrian Newey
The Photographer's Eye
Michael Freeman
Logical Chess: Move by Move
Irving Chernev
Understanding Exposure
Bryan Peterson
Chess Fundamentals
José Raúl Capablanca
How to Win at Chess
Levy Rozman
Liam Wong: TO:KY:OO
Liam Wong
Total Control: High Performance Street Riding Techniques
Lee Parks
Chess Openings for Beginners
Cory Klein
Joy of Cooking
Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker & Ethan Becker
The Classic Car Book
DK (Giles Chapman, ed.)