Influences
Books that shaped my career.
A personal, unranked collection of books that changed how I build software, lead people, and design organizations.
Influences
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The Manager’s Path
One of the first books I read when I began leading people. It gave me a map for the transition from engineer to leader: how the role changes as its scope grows, and how trust, feedback, delegation, and thoughtful 1:1s help people develop. I still recommend it to engineers considering the leadership path.
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The Coaching Habit
It reshaped how I approach 1:1s: stay curious longer, make room for silence, and ask questions that help people find their own way forward instead of reaching too quickly for advice.
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Drive
It changed how I think about motivation. People do their best work when they have autonomy, room to grow, and a clear sense of purpose. It taught me to help people connect their work to what matters to them.
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Release It!
It taught me that moving fast works when production is part of the design: put software in front of people early, observe how it behaves in the real world, and build systems that contain failures and recover from them.
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The Infinite Game
It shifted my attention from winning isolated contests to sustaining meaningful work over time. I try to lead toward durable objectives, using short-term progress in service of a cause that outlasts any single milestone.
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Code Simplicity
This book made simplicity central to how I think about software. Systems inevitably grow and change, so I try to keep their individual parts understandable, reduce maintenance effort, and favor designs that make future change easier even when I cannot know exactly what that future holds.
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A Philosophy of Software Design
It taught me that complexity rarely arrives all at once. It accumulates through small decisions, so good design needs continuous attention: decide what matters, keep each decision inside clear boundaries, and revise the structure as the system evolves.
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Essentialism
It brought the same commitment to simplicity into how I work: decide what matters most, learn when to say no, and focus my time and energy on doing fewer things better.
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Meltdown
The aviation stories stayed with me, especially how checklists and other safeguards can catch small errors before they cascade. It taught me to reduce unnecessary complexity, make systems easier to understand and operate, and build explicit checks into critical work.