I read 36 books this year. I kinda felt like this number would be higher, but I guess I spend a lot of time reading articles online too.
Favs
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone - This was genuinely entertaining as a narrative, but it also shared a helpful view of what it is like to actually participate in therapy.
Kill it with Fire - about running software modernization projects, this book focuses a lot on the organizational and structural aspects of legacy code. I found this perspective to be really thought provoking. As engineers, we should spend a lot more time thinking about the incentives and relationships of the people building software.
A Desolation Called Peace - Really cool take on a first contact story, but also an interesting perspective from character whose home is being assimilated by a large empire.
- The sequel A Memory Called Empire is also a good time.
Winners Take All - I found this really enlightening. This book talks about how the globalization of the Democratic party has led a generation of idealists to found Silicon Valley startups instead of going into the public sector. In a variety of ways, the current crop of wealthy people are similar to the robber barons of yore. They exploit as much as they can, skirt ahead of legislation. Deciding to give back afterward isn’t charity and shouldn’t be decided by a small group of people. It’s hard to condense it all into a short summary here, but there’s a lot of other thought provoking topics too.
Code - Code is a tour through all of these layers of computing from electron to JavaScript. I wrote a review of the book on my blog.
Greats
Jade City, Jade War, and Jade Legacy - good, fun, easy reading. It feels good to blaze through a bunch of compelling fantasy tomes. A sort of Hong Kong analogue where the protagonists are part of a magical crime family.
The Empress of Salt and Fortune - great novella - its a good short read, and it has a cool structure. Definitely give it a chance, I burned through it a couple hours.
A Deadly Education - this was a fun easy reader too. Dark magic school YA vibes.
Five Ways to Forgiveness - I’m a big Ursula K Leguin fan. This was my favorite read of her work this year. It’s a collection of five short stories that all take place through the history of a couple words in her Hainish Cycle. The way these stories are unique and build on each other was really cool.
Ancillary Justice - Very cool premise and characters. It is cool to experience the interiority of someone with multiple bodies.
Fake Work - this is about the author’s work as a consultant on a Y2K preparedness project. They’ve gone on a bit of a Marxist journey since, so that’s definitely the bent of the book. I’ve become a bit jaded about the nature of white collar work. It is really interesting to see consulting portrayed from the inside. The pettiness and pointlessness of it all.
Tidy First? - Huge props to this book for being short and informative. Most of this was stuff that I’ve kind of figured out already over my career. It was really cool to see it all spelled out. I love the philosophy of tidying as you work on your code though. It’s how I’ve been working for a while now, but never really had a name for it. I feel “seen” now that I can use this to describe my working philosophy.
Memorable articles:
I’ve been reading a whole lot of articles lately. This year I really hit a bunch of tech and computing related topics. I’m finding that I read a lot more “philosophical” (for lack of a better word, I’m not sure the right words here) articles
I want to hear from interesting authors about their perspectives on the world, my work, my industry. I think the tech industry is pretty miserable right now, and I want to find the good parts of software and computing. I think there’s a lot of good out there.
Right now, I feel like a lot of what we’re doing wrong is scale. I don’t want to know what everyone on the planet is up to. I want to know about my friends are up to. I occasionally want to meet cool new people.
I’ve been thinking about IndieWeb (Alternative web ideas) and smaller community stuff. These articles are on that topic.
On the current state of the tech industry and our larger society and economy:
On using AI tooling as a software developer:
On making software: