Books
Not everything I've read — the ones I can say something specific about. If I can't write what a book changed, it isn't on the shelf.
the takeaway is the price of admissionShaped how I build
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann
Replication, partitioning, and consistency stopped being settings I inherited and became trade-offs I have to pick. Most of the indexing and query work I do now traces back to it.
AI Engineering
Chip Huyen
Pushed me toward evaluation being the actual work rather than the afterthought — which is why my macOS agent has a judge panel and a regression gate at all.
Java: A Beginner's Guide
Herbert Schildt
Where types and objects finally clicked. The habits I picked up here are still underneath the Spring Boot code I write.
Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
Al Sweigart
Where I started. It framed programming as something you point at an annoying task, which is still how I decide what's worth building.