My reading list

Please avoid Amazon if you can.

2019

• read

  Brotopia by Emily Chang

  Feminism, tech industry. This was my first real insight into San Francisco's "bro culture", since I'm lucky enough to work with an engineering team that isn't awful.

• read

  Educated by Tara Westover

  Religion, survivalism, child abuse. This book was especially important to me as someone who was once on his way to being a religious fundamentalist.

• read

  Relationships by The School of Life

  Relationships. A book that breaks down the problems with modern romance and describes a more realistic approach to love.

• read

  Form Design Patterns by Adam Silver

  Accessibility, programming. This was my first foray into accessible design patterns. It's a really deep dive into designing and building accessible forms on the web. I highly recommend it.

• read

  Accessibility for Everyone by Laura Kalbag

  Accessibility, law, ethics. This book is more of an ethical and legal overview of web accessibility, with some technical specifics—great if you want to build a case with your employer. This book gave me a much broader view of inclusive product development.

• read

  Inclusive Components by Heydon Pickering

  Accessibility, programming. This book felt a lot like Form Design Patterns (and in fact, Heydon forewords Adam's book), but applied to more generic application and web design patterns. Heydon's writing is something special.

• read

  The Art of Piano Playing by Heinrich Neuhaus

  Music, history, teaching. Though a bit wordy and pretentious at times, this book helped me rethink my approach to the piano.

2020

• read

  Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction by Susan Blackmore

  Consciousness, pyschology, neurology. I wanted to learn more about consciousness this year, and this book gave me some solid-feeling footing on the topic.

• read

  Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore

  Fiction. This was a wonderful book about a man who lived 10,000 lives, seeking out the perfect life so that he could be with his lover, Death.

• read

  White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

  Racism, white privilege. I learned more about racism as a system rather than as a set of behaviors, which is how I've always perceived it.

• dropped

  Season of the Witch by David Talbot

  Nonfiction. San Francisco's rebirth in the '60s-'80s. I was reading this with Intercom's bookclub, but found a hard time feeling motivated to read it.

• dropped

  The Nordic Theory of Everything by Anu Partanen

  Nonfiction. A comparison of the differences between American and Nordic life.

• read

  Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

  Nonfiction. A book on designing applications design that are scalable, reliable, maintainable, etc.

• read

  Combinatorics: A Very Short Introduction by Robin Wilson

  Combinatorics is the branch of mathematics concerned with selecting, arranging, and listing or counting collections of objects.

• read

  The Growing Season by Sarah Frey

  A book I read with fellow Aha! employees for our December 2021 offsite. It's a self-righteous autobiography of a woman who inherited and saved a failing farm.

2021

• read

  Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles Marohn

  A traffic engineer talks about the harm being caused by North American transportation policies.

• read

  Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

  Building thriving cities by encouraging walkability.

• reading

  Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett

  A couple moves to the Netherlands and discovers the advantages of removing cars from cities.

• reading

  Better Buses, Better Cities by Steven Higashide

  The value of investing in bus service in car-dependent cities.

2022

• next

  The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

  The value of investing in bus service in car-dependent cities.

• next

  Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott

  History. A coworker recommended this to me after some discussion about Turkey's political climate as a way of seeing history as a series of (failed) attempts to improve human lives.