Books I’ve read.

A useful framework for thinking about a rich life beyond money: time, relationships, mental and physical health alongside financial wealth.

Practical advice on working asynchronously in remote teams: writing things down, reducing meetings and giving people long stretches of focused time.

A practical checklist for when things go wrong on a website. Good error messages, help and forms make a bigger difference than most features.

A practical introduction to the whole development process: gathering requirements, iterating, estimating, testing and shipping as a team.

A hands-on walk from requirements to working object-oriented design, with a focus on building software that’s easy to change.

The friendliest introduction to design patterns I’ve come across. The visual, conversational style makes the ideas stick far better than a reference book.

A brilliant reframing: people don’t want your product to be awesome, they want to be awesome at what they use it for. Design for that.

Made the case for remote work years before it became normal, and covered the practical side of trust, communication and working across time zones.

A practical guide to designing workshops that actually teach, built around the activities people do rather than the slides you show.

The most useful book I know on customer conversations: ask about their lives and past behaviour, not your idea, because people will lie to be nice.

It made a calm, sane workplace feel like a deliberate choice rather than a lucky accident, and gave me the language to argue that long hours and constant urgency aren’t the price of doing good work.

A blunt, practical guide to building offers that make price less of an issue by stacking value and removing risk for the buyer.

The architecture book that inspired software design patterns. Its 253 patterns, from whole towns down to a window seat, show how good design comes from small, reusable solutions that fit together.

A fun, curious look at the unknown people behind humanity’s firsts, like the first person to cook, sew or ride a horse, pieced together from archaeology and a lot of imagination.

A short, practical companion on running Jobs-to-be-Done interviews and turning the stories customers tell into real insight.

Flipped how I think about selling: instead of pushing a product, understand the progress a customer is trying to make and help them get there.

An early, still-relevant case for building less: start small, launch sooner, ignore the edge cases until they matter and let real use guide what comes next.

Basecamp’s way of shaping work into fixed six-week cycles with a clear appetite. It changed how I think about planning, scope and saying no.

A candid portrait of a complicated person, and a close look at how relentless focus on the product and on taste shaped Apple.

A clear explanation of the principles behind persuasion, like reciprocity, scarcity and social proof, and how to spot when they’re being used on you.

The classic guide to clear writing. “Omit needless words” is advice I still try to follow in documents, emails and code comments.

Changed how I think about history, especially the idea that shared stories like money, nations and companies are what let humans cooperate at scale.

Science told as a series of great stories. Bryson made the history of how we figured out the universe genuinely funny and easy to follow.

A thoughtful tour of the big questions of the present, from AI and work to truth and meaning, and how hard it is to make sense of a world changing this fast.

A practical system for small, consistent changes. The idea of focusing on who you want to become rather than on goals has stuck with me ever since.

Made me take sleep seriously. The research on what even a little lost sleep does to memory, mood and health is hard to forget once you’ve read it.

Short, opinionated essays on running a business without the usual baggage: no meetings for the sake of it, no fake urgency, and no need to grow just because you can.

A blunt argument that you shouldn’t trust advice or decisions from people who don’t bear the consequences, and a good lens for thinking about ownership and accountability at work.

Gave me a word for systems that get stronger under stress, and made me rethink how I design software and organisations: less optimising for stability, more room for small failures that teach you something.

A short book of sharp aphorisms about how we force a messy world to fit our neat models. Easy to dip into, and a few lines have stuck with me for years.

It changed how I think about forecasting and risk: the rare events nobody plans for are the ones that shape everything, so it pays to build for surprises rather than pretend to predict them.

A humbling reminder of how much of what we call skill is really luck, and how easily we build tidy stories around outcomes that were mostly noise.

A practical playbook for building products on your own, from idea to launch to revenue, without funding. It made shipping small things quickly and in public feel like the obvious way to start.

Scrum boiled down to an hour’s read. The quickest way I know to get someone up to speed before their first sprint.

A clear, practical walkthrough of Scrum’s roles, rituals and artifacts, and the agile values behind them. Useful for getting a whole team speaking the same language.

A fun look at everyday decisions through the lens of computer science, from when to stop searching to how to manage a cluttered schedule, showing that good-enough answers are often the smart ones.

A deeply human history of autism, told through the families, doctors and advocates who changed how it’s understood, and a reminder of how much our ideas of “normal” shape the way people are treated.

Made me question the carrot-and-stick thinking behind bonuses, grades and even praise, and how often rewards end up crowding out the curiosity and care that make people do good work in the first place.

Took me from core Java to the web: servlets, JSP and the container model, written in the same Head First style and aimed at the web component developer exam.

My companion for the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam. Thorough and exam-focused, it pushed me into the corners of the language I’d otherwise have skipped.

The book that made Java click for me. Its playful, visual style made objects, inheritance and the rest of the fundamentals genuinely fun to learn.