Bookshelf
By Aaron Yodaiken. Initially published . Last updated . Continuously updated. Suggestions welcome at [email protected].
Building good software
I’m a programming autodidact. Here are some of the books and articles that have shaped my thinking about building good software:
- Designing Data Intensive Applications (Martin Kelppmann)
- Release It! Second Edition (Michael Nygard)
- The SRE Book (Google)
- Algorithms (Sedgwick)
Papers and articles:
- Bounded Contexts (Martin Fowler)
- Martin Fowler has a lot of other great content, including this cool piece about using ring buffers in production. His “Further Reading” sections are also great.
- The Bitter Lesson (Rich Sutton)
- End-to-end Arguments in System Design (Saltzer et al.)
- Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence (Bubeck et al.)
- Prompt injection: What’s the worst that can happen? (Simon Willison)
There is some great open source software documentation that is worth reading:
- Postgres
- Overview of PostgreSQL Internals is particularly interesting
- Phoenix
- Thinking in GraphQL and Thinking in Relay
- You probably don’t use GraphQL. You almost certainly don’t use Relay (and probably shouldn’t either.) These are still some deeply thoughtful discussions about how to fetch data for clients that will inform how you think about API design and client behavior.
Building good businesses
Business books are often terrible. Reading one is rarely more useful than talking to customers or building prototypes. But I still read them, and some have influenced how I think. Here are a few that have left a mark:
- High Output Management and Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove)
- The Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton Christensen)
- Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
- Principles (Ray Dalio)
- To Sell Is Human (Daniel H. Pink)
- Shareholder Letters (Jeff Bezos), especially the ones from the late 90s and early 2000s.
Life
I studied English and like reading. Here are some of my favorites:
- Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
- Outline and the rest of the trilogy (Rachel Cusk)
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
- To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
- Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie)
- The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Isaiah Berlin)
- The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer)
- American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
- The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Lincoln In The Bardo (George Saunders)