Bookshelf

By Aaron Yodaiken. Initially published Sep 29, 2024. Last updated Sep 29, 2024. Continuously updated. Suggestions welcome at ay@aryod.com.

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:

• The SRE Book (Google)
• Designing Data Intensive Applications (Martin Kelppmann)
• Release It! Second Edition (Michael Nygard)
• Algorithms (Sedgwick)

Papers and articles:

• Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence (Bubeck et al.)
• 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.
• End-to-end Arguments in System Design (Saltzer et al.)
• The Bitter Lesson (Rich Sutton)
• 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:

• Shareholder Letters (Jeff Bezos), especially the ones from the late 90s and early 2000s.
• The Innovator’s Dilemma (Clayton Christensen)
• Principles (Ray Dalio)
• High Output Management and Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove)
• To Sell Is Human (Daniel H. Pink)
• The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
• Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

Life

I studied English and like reading. Here are some of my favorite novels:

• Outline and the rest of the trilogy (Rachel Cusk)
• The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
• The Topeka School (Ben Lerner)
• American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
• Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie)
• Lincoln In The Bardo (George Saunders)
• Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
• To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)

and some biographies:

• The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (Zachary D. Carter)
• Grant (Ron Chernow)
• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow)
• Mark Twain: A Life (Ron Chernow)
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynman)
• The Man Who Knew Infinity (Robert Kanigel)
• Sontag: Her Life and Work (Benjamin Moser)

and some discussions:

• The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Isaiah Berlin)
• Letters from a Stoic (Seneca)
• Discourses (Epictetus)
• The Therapy of Desire (Martha Nussbaum)
• Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)