1. Ruby on Rails Tutorial, 6th Edition: Ruby on Rails 6 – Michael Hartl – a decent “outsider” introduction to the RoR and Ruby ecosystem, Michael uses specific pinned versions to ensure that the the reader’s experience is as consistent as possible with the book. However, he does use a few dated idioms within RoR. My favorite thing from his book is unrelated to RoR or even maybe software engineering in general: the concept of “technical sophistication”, in which you develop the meta knowledge and intuition to stretch your knowledge beyond its current boundaries. – 7/10
2. I Hate You – Don’t Leave Me: Third Edition: Understanding the Borderline Personality – Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., Hal Straus – about as non-judgmental a take on class of mental disorder that often frustrates clinicians. Goes on a long soapbox about modern society that I’m not sure helps anyone stuck with the realities of modern society. – 9/10
3. (CURRENTLY READING) Go Crazy: A Fun Projects-based Approach to Golang Programming – Nicolas Modrzyk
4. Dune: Messiah – Frank Herbert – Audible Audiobook Narrated by Scott Brick, Katherin Kellgren, Euan Morton, Simon Vance – not sure I appreciate this universe, but at least I feel vindicated in my feelings about the characters from the first book. There was a little bit of redemption for me at the end, but barely. – 5/10
5. Chef Cookbook – Matthias Marschall – chef-dk (superseded by Chef Workstation), foodcritic (Cookstyle), etc. mentions make this somewhat dated guide to the Chef ecosystem, but I’m going through the most recent books written for context. – 6/10
6. Forward the Foundation – Isaac Asimov – curiously timely about the concept of crumbling infrastructure and nominally high taxation but with lots of loopholes that reduce the overall effective rate. Then again, it was published in 1993. Ultimately, I enjoyed this about as much as the Foundation trilogy books, especially as a prequel to Foundation itself. – 8/10
7. 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life: Identifying and Dealing with Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other High-Conflict Personalities – Bill Eddy – (borderline, narcissistic, paranoid, antisocial, or histrionic) – 8/10
8. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI – Yuval Noah Harari – less accidentally topical with regard to excess of information, populism, conspiracy theories, antivax, and elites vs. common people. – 10/10
9. Terraform: Up and Running: Writing Infrastructure as Code – Yevgeniy Brikman – Solid overview of the features and patterns in Terraform along with deployment and testing strategies. – 8/10
10. Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. – Brené Brown – wife and I listened to this during a road trip and had slightly different reactions to the book. It’s still high quality, but if you have a certain amount of trauma from corporate speak, you might be a little more put off by some of the framing and language choices. – 7/10
11. The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant – Tae Kim – Good insight into both the luck of the draw and the hard work that went into making Nvidia wildly successful as of 2025. – 10/10
12. On War – Carl von Clausewitz – Started reading this after Yuval Noah Harari mentioned it several times in Nexus, especially von Clausewitz’s aphorism “War is the continuation of policy with other means.” Interesting to hear thoughts on war after the Napoleonic wars and nearly a century before the world wars. – 6/10
13. Ready Player One: A Novel – Ernest Cline – Admittedly decided that I had to read it due to Vivian Wilson’s commentary about Elon Musk wanting to be IOI’s CEO Nolan Sorrento. It’s a decent YA-ish novel + Gen X nostalgia trip. – 7/10
14. The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future – Mustafa Suleyman – interesting to hear AI examples given that notably have been somewhat exposed as having human supervisors and/or being fully staffed by humans behind the scenes. Missed in the title is our nascent ability to “print” genetic sequences and molecules, which can democratize chemical and bioengineering that has previously required gigantic state-sponsored budgets. – 8/10
15. Prompt Engineering for Generative AI – James Phoenix and Mike Taylor – I learned about some toolkits and some general concepts, especially if you want to programmatically interface with generative AI, but the most interesting section for me was around generative AI image generation, and that feels the most ethically dubious as well. – 6/10
16. (Currently Reading) The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man – David M. Maurer – according to the wikipedia article, one of the writers for the Mission: Impossible TV series was a fan of this book and many episodes are similar to cons described in the book.
17. Don’t Start a Side Hustle: Do This Instead (Work Less, Earn More and Live Free) – Brian Page – Well, if you Google this book before buying it, you’ll eventually stumble across “BNB Formula” (a $$$$ course to become financially independent on AirBnB). Started with a lot of call to urgency, transitioned the standard cost-cutting advice. Not sure that ~sub-letting a rental as an AirBnB is without ethical concerns. – 3/10
18. Turing’s Cathedral: Origins of the Digital Universe – George Dyson – This is my second attempt at finishing this book and going at a slow pace, it’s hard to tie the relationships together. Overall, it’s a compelling story telling of near and actual tragedies. This is a diagram of relationships from Mermaid generated by ChatGPT 4.1:
    
    

19. The Woman in Me – Britney Spears – I knew her own story was one of abusive relationships, but I didn’t realize how many people in her circle beyond the family members involved had contributed. Somewhat heartbreaking, and mind-boggling that a conservatorship was allowed to be abused in this way.

20. (Currently reading) Prince Lestat: The Vampire Chronicles – Anne Rice – picked this up at a thrift store