| I've been maintaining a list of books I've read over the past years at https://explog.in/books/list.html; some that come to mind – 1. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett (this might actually be more than 10 years ago, but I'll still list it) I really like this one because it emphasizes the value of caring about the _core_ of anything instead of the _trappings_ that will spring up around it. Keeping this book in mind reminds me to focus on the thing instead of the appearance of the thing. 2. On Writing Well, William Zinsser I'm a programmer, and I've often found that improving my ability to write clearly translates directly to programming well: On Writing Well is the best – and warmest – book I've read on writing nonfiction. 3. Incerto, NN Taleb This series forced me to revisit several assumptions. Something that still resonates is valuing anything – particularly books – that has aged well across several years, because it's clearly valuable; and to discount the new shiny. 4. The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt & David Thomas I started an open source project in my 3rd year at college – as part of Google Summer of Code; inevitably every release would break something and I started hungering for skills that would let me create new releases _without_ breaking the world every time. I stumbled across the pragmatic programmer in my 4th year, and immediately started applying it on my project. This carried through to work and helped me a lot early in my career. 5. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming There are so many gems in this book: from the emphasis on fermi numbers for quick approximations, to a simple demonstration of the distance covered by a random walk as opposed to the distance covered by choosing a direction, to asking the question: "Am I working on the most important thing I could be? If not, why not?". He also predicted that great programmers will have one thing in common with great writers – clarity of thought. There are some books I'm reading right now that I suspect will end up on this list: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (available at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...) – for making better decisions with limited data; and The Power of Choice – to allow me to pay attention to the non-technical parts of doing valuable work. |