A great deal happened in 2023, and my reading correspondingly decreased compared to previous years. Apart from philosophy, most of the other books I picked up were not finished cover to cover — though that is no reflection on their worth.

Social Sciences and Philosophy

As in previous years, whenever I find myself with a free moment I almost inevitably reach for something philosophical. Early in the year, my doctoral supervisor and I had a brief discussion around the question “who am I?”, and during that conversation he mentioned this book:

• Who Am I?: And If So, How Many?

It addresses three classic questions with admirable clarity: What can I know? What should I do? And what may I hope for? Coming off last year’s encounter with nihilism, my own answers after finishing it were: I am the sum of my experiences — unique and irreplaceable — and I should seek out more things I have never experienced before, things that genuinely excite me, and then embrace those experiences wholeheartedly. As I dug further into questions of identity, consciousness, reductionism, and holism, my book purchases also came to include:

• The Mind’s I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul

Though I never quite found the time to finish it. I also read Heidegger’s Being and Time — extraordinarily demanding, and likewise left unfinished:

• Being and Time: A Revised Edition of the Stambaugh Translation

Eventually I decided to take a step back and bought a history of philosophy, to build a more comprehensive understanding of how philosophical thought has developed over the centuries:

• The history of philosophy.

Beyond philosophy, the nature of my research led me to explore social choice theory, which grew out of sociology and economics:

• The Handbook of Rational and Social Choice

Management

Last year I started working at a German company, and one topic that came up frequently in conversations with my manager was how to manage people well. He recommended several books, all of which I bought and read:

• The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
• The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power
• A Philosophy of Software Design, 2nd Edition

Team Topologies deserves a few words of its own. I had actually come across Conway’s Law years ago through microservice architecture discussions, but at the time I only held onto the surface-level observation that “software architecture tends to mirror the organizational structure that produced it,” without going any deeper. Thinking about it in reverse, though, raises an interesting question: if senior management is not directly involved in writing software, how can they influence its architecture? One practical answer is to deliberately design the structure of teams — splitting a single team into several smaller, focused units, each with a distinct remit — and in doing so shape the architecture of the software those teams ultimately build. Team Topologies explores this from a practical standpoint in considerable depth, and I found it well worth reading.

Humanities

The humanities category includes:

• The Unicorn Project: A Novel About Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data
• Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones)
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World

Of these, The Undoing Project was my favourite. It tells the story of two Nobel laureates — Kahneman and Tversky — and stands as the definitive narrative account of the intellectual partnership behind the discovery of cognitive biases.

Engineering

Engineering books hold very little appeal for me at this point in my life. Most of these were bought purely as reference works, and I only consulted specific chapters as needed (though they are all good books):

• Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice
• PostgreSQL Query Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Building Efficient Queries
• Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach.
• Causal Inference in Python: Applying Causal Inference in the Tech Industry
• Database Internals: A Deep Dive into How Distributed Data Systems Work